ABSTRACT
Any discussion of literature enjoys one advantage over discussions of the other arts, of the natural sciences, or of the more conceptual disciplines; for when people are dealing with objects composed of words, whether they are talking or writing about them, they can always exhibit them by quoting. The penalty has been not only frequently misreading but even occasional failure to appreciate the full esthetic significance of a passage. Philology, on its side, has been more strictly concerned with norms of usage than with idiosyncrasies of style. But stylistics, as we hopefully call the analytic study of literary expression, must know the normative in order to recognize the idiosyncratic. The two worlds could not be set farther apart than they are by the opposing vocables of these two successive and parallel lines, the second metrically no longer than the first, but vocally and typographically prolonged by the weight of its individual syllables.
