Taming the Chaos: English Poetic Diction Theory Since the Renaissance by Emerson R. Marks (review)

Emerson R. Marks. Taming the Chaos: English Poetic Diction Theory Since the Renaissance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. 4l6p. Martin Buceo Colorado State University Judging litetary criticism to be "the most humane of intellectual putsuits" (21), Emerson R. Marks (with stunning critical intelligence, historical knowledge, and discutsive chatm) describes, ttanslates, and appraises in Taming the Chaos some four centuries of potent commentaty on pethaps the wickedest thorn in the brambles ofEnglish litetary theory: what is poetic language? The roots ofMarks' surpassing inquiry into opinion on poetic diction (and ineluctably on much mote) lie in his eatliet books on English poetics: Rehtivist and Absolutist (1955), The Poetics ofReason (1968), and Coleridge on the Language ofVerse (1971). Like these exceptional wotks, Taming the Chaos—its title inspired by Coleridge's vision of poets as "Gods of Love who tame the Chaos"—is a discriminating and dtamatic intetplay ofhistory, theory, and criticism. Copious notes and a proper index back the unobttusive citations in this magnum opusby Matks, professor emeritus at the Univetsity ofMassachusetts, Boston, and fotmet editot ofthe distinguished journal Criticism. Between Introduction and Epilogue, fifteen packed chaptets on the periods and leading poeticians tun chronologically In addition to unifying his intellectual narrative with deft anticipations and recapitulations, Matks compares petdutable motifs and enriches the whole movement from the Renaissance to Postmodernism with cogent allusions to classical and modem Western theory. In prose piquantly concise he elucidates the merits and shortcomings of the various stances. His measure ofNeoclassical Formalism, Romantic Organicism, and Modernist NeoColeridgeanism moves him to devote two chaptets each to Neoclassicism, Coleridge, and Eliot, with Coleridge as the ctucial pivot. Alive to the intersubjectivity of the critical entetptise—with all its attendant confusions and conttadictions—Marks tactfully suffers no pronouncements (old ot new, authoritative ot provisional, ttaditional of subversive) to tampef with the evidence ofthe poetry and the poetics undet the disinterested investigation of his own litetary sensibility and critical acumen. Taming the Chaos would evade simple summary in a long critique, let alone in a short review. Still, one is moved to note that Tudor notions of poetic diction rose out ofafguments about the stability ofEnglish as a poetic medium. Elizabethan adulation fof the rediscovered ancients both helped and hindered the progress ofpoetics. As a result ofClassics-into-English and English-into-Mastetpieces, most poet-critics ptaised the medium as fit—insofat as any vemaculat is amenable to 90 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * FALL 1998 Book Reviews litetary creation. Indeed, questions on poetic diction (as well as on metet, rhyme, rhythm, and the poetry-prose distinction) followed. Unlike the Greeks and Romans , die Elizabethans felt verse to be mote valuable than prose. At various times wotds in poems were likened to gems ... colots ... attire ... flesh. Before Coleridge, Samuel Daniel saw thyme as salutary for mastering the "unformed chaos" of the imagination. Viewed as a batbatic device after the fall ofRome, thyme nevertheless triumphed ovet English quantitative vetse—thanks less to philosophical inducement than to teadet enjoyment. Proponents ofNeoclassical clarity, intensity, propriety, and elegance eschewed the vagaries ofactual talk. Still, tationalism and empiricism blurred the life-art distinction. The source ofa reader's pleasure, stylistic Dryden insisted, is vetbal artistry, particulatly wotd choice and metet. In Pope's wotld ofnon-otganic unity some ideas simply were too trivial to communicate and some wotds too "low" fot poetry. Nicely illuminating the extent of Romantic dictional upheaval, Matks compares passages from Thompson and Wotdswotth. Bringing eighteenth-century "aesthetic pastotalism" into his flawed theory, Wordsworth advocated a poetic uttetance plain and passionate, the idiom of fustics ovet die consciously litetary diction of Neoclassical cosmopolites. Unlike his predecessors, Wordsworth (a bettet poet than poetician) insisted on the substantial identity ofpoetic and nonpoetic language. Matks tightly atgues that language by its very nature is stereotyped , especially the "plain" and "easy." Futthetmote, revision or the second phase ofcomposition is not ofitselfunnatutal, insincere, or artificial, fot Matks points out that in creating high art the mutual exclusivity of"natural" and "artificial" is highly problematic. At Wotdswotth's "refusal to allow metet a place among the emotive data ttanquilly recollected during die creative process" (120), Marks confesses puzzlement. Though highly fotmalized metet may well be a lattet-day "superaddition...