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Tuesday, April 11, 2006
The Vocabulary of the Poets
It’s said that Browning used over 38,000 words, perhaps the most of any well-known poet. Many are like “minish” and “baracan.” The amount of different words used is proportional to the total output, of course, but what poet uses the most obscure vocabulary per poem? I guess we should restrict this to those of moderate fame and above. Eliot comes to mind. I remember “maculate” well. Auden uses “steatopygous,” but Pynchon’s the only place I can remember “callipygian.”
Comments
Hugh MacDiarmid.
Huxley, it seems, used “callipygous” far more than necessary.
Getting back to poets, Stevens might also a candidate.
Paul Muldoon: in the space of twenty or so pages in the poem “Yarrow,” we get salascient, clouricane, drachm, barege, knobkerrieknout, and the coinage semioticonoclast, not to mention all the Gaelic and proper names. Elsewhere boreen, vernix, widgeon, shagreen, galloon-lined galligaskins.
On casual inspection, at least, he easily bests the potential competitors that leapt to mind: Hart Crane, James Merrill, Ashbery.
Ashbery’s vocabulary is not that exotic, actually. His difficulty is primarily conceptual (elliptical).
I’ve read very little Muldoon, sadly.
I think Neal Stephenson has a “callipygian” in _The Diamond Age_, but that’s probably under the sign of Pynchon, as it were.
In one poem, “Under Sirius”—which, by the way, made Randall Jarrell say, “Well, back to my greeting cards”—Auden uses the following words:
baltering
soodling
sossing
peccant
insurrected
eagre
megalopods
qualming
I think he had been spending a little too much time browsing the OED. But it is indeed a great poem all the same.
The Pearl- (or Gawain-)poet uses some of the most difficult vocabulary I’ve ever read.
Here’s where we could use the computational tools of corpus linguistics to get a handle on things.
Prynne?
Brautigan’s the last word in mayonnaise.
I think “callipygous” also makes appearances in Anthony Burgess and John Fowles (and I just read something recently about it appearing in a recent YA novel called “King Dork").
In Robert Graves’s “Goodbye to All That,” there’s a great passage about him visiting the very elderly Thomas Hardy sometime in the mid-1920s and Hardy telling him a story about writing dialect poems in old age & not being able to remember the language of his boyhood & wondering whether he’s making up a word or whether it was real, and looking it up in the OED, and first thinking, “Aha! It’s there,” and then realizing that his own early verse is the only citation in support…
You know, I’m teaching The Magus right now, and it was really quite priggish of him to leave the epigraphs untranslated (esp. the second). Prudish, too.
Hardy said ‘stillicide’; Nabokov eavesdropped in on it:
Line 35 of the poem [Pale Fire], “Stilettos of a frozen stillicide,” receives this comment from Kinbote: “My dictionary defines [stillicide] as “a succession of drops falling from the eaves, eavesdrop, cavesdrop. I remember having encountered it for the first time in a poem by Thomas Hardy.” Boyd refers us to Webster’s for a definition, pointing out that Kinbote does not recall the exact poem, and that Nabokov offers the reader no help. In a footnote Boyd acknowledges that Michael Long (Marvell, Nabokov: Childhood and Arcadia [Oxford: Clarendon; London; New York: Oxford UP], 1984) “was the first to note the source” in Hardy’s “Friends Beyond”: “In the muted, measured note/ Of a ripple under archways, or a lone cave’s stillicide.”
One need not have waited till 1984. If, puzzled by the word ‘stillicide,’ one had looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, one would have found the word described as “now rare” – and Hardy’s poem (from 1898) cited as the only example since the seventeenth century. This lends a certain uncanny focus to Robert Graves’s not entirely reliable account of a conversation with Hardy in August 1920, in which the latter protested against the critics who complained about Hardy’s use of extraordinary words not to be found in any dictionary: “Hardy then laughed a little. Once or twice recently he had looked up a word in the dictionary for fear of being again accused of coining, and found it there right enough - only to read on and discover that the sole authority quoted was himself....!” (Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, 1929), ch. 28; the “st-” fascicle of the OED had been published in 1919.)
More following anent ‘ament’ in the Chas Lock piece whence this extract.
[Let’s try that again] Having brought “Pale Fire” into it, I’ll go further with Shade’s citing Eliot’s grimpen, chtonic [sic], and sempiternal, though only by way of flagging jacketmag’s update on Ern Malley (more ontopic than it may at first appear).
callapygian also appears as a central word in a novel with “moon” in the title (two word title, not moon palace, and also a movie) from the 90s.
sorry, it was white palace with extensive use of callapygian. i see it is classified as adult fiction. it really was not very good.