Microsoft Word Revised Syllabus Ver doc

Language and Poetic Creation 
Since the idiom of much contemporary writing (especially in poetry) is special and 
alien, readers tend to assume over hastily that it expresses nothing at all. If is to barricade 
comprehension effectively. A more fruitful attitude is to assume that something is actually 
being said. The comprehension of it may require several types of effort, including a fresh 
approach to language. In the end one may decide that the effort was not worth making. The 
content may not, justify the technical difficulties put in the way. But if it does, the effort of 
collaboration with the author will have intensified the appreciation. The discovery must at 
least precede the judgment. Remembering the basic handicap of language as a medium, one 
of the most urgent demands put upon is the obligation to look at words afresh. 
Semantic Rejuvenation 
Some off the most abstract terms in the language are really faded metaphors. On 
examination, it turns out that an earlier meaning, now forgotten, is often lively in the extreme. 
Hence an obvious means of invigorating our rejune vocabulary is to fall back on those lively 
older meanings. True enough, the average speaker does not know that they ever existed. He is 
not reminded that “express” once meant, literally and physically, “to press out.” But he can 
learn it instantaneously from a context. It may be that only the archaic literal sense is 
intended, or it may be that both the physical and the metaphorical are to be grasped 
simultaneously. In any event, the impact of the divergent use on an attentive reader forces 
him to a new experience of the word, without sacrificing comprehension. 
Etymology 
Sophisticated writers still impose the etymological task upon their readers as part of 
the aesthetic experience. It may be said, in fact, that etymology is one of the deuces by which 
readers are now called upon to share in the creative act. The enormous influence of English 
metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century on modern writers-notably the influence of 
Donne-has accentuated this etymological awareness. 
James Joyce, for instance, has evinced etymological preoccupations throughout his 
entire work. When he says that one pugilist’s fist is “proposed” under the chin of another, he 
intends the word as Latin proponere, “to place under”; and he is capable of using “supplant” 
as “to plant under” in describing the Gracehoper (i.e., Grasshopper) of Finnegans Wake: “he 
had a partner pair of findlestilts to supplant him.” 
C.D.Lewis makes use of both the literal and figurative senses of “direlict mills” in 
“you that love England.” He means lonely and abandoned mills, of course, but also mills that 
have simply and unmetaphorically been “left behind” (de-linqui) by those two formely 
worked in them, and W.H.Auden, speaking in Sir, no Man’s meaning of “twist, physical 
bending from the norm” under the abstract “distortion.” When he uses the expression “trains 
that fume in station” he evokes the literal visual image “to smoke” as well as the later 
extended meaning “to be impatient.” 

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