Ever since Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, the language of eighteenth-century poetry has been under suspicion. Quayle examines it closely: the theory of poetic diction in the age of reason, its stock phrases, Latinisms, archaisms and compound epithets such as Gray’s many-twinkling, and its fondness for personification and abstraction.
A careful study for students of Pope, Gray, Thomson and the poetry Wordsworth reacted against. Download the free EPUB.