‘All Things are Words of Some Strange Tongue’: Dictionary Definition Form in Contemporary American Poetry

Through close analysis of dictionary definition form in the poetry of Robert Pinsky, Mary Kinzie, and Solmaz Sharif, and with reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination (1975), this chapter explores the ways in which the dictionary definition poem celebrates and also questions the dictionary’s authority through the dialogic juxtaposition of different forms, registers, and discourses. The analyses problematise binary distinctions between poem as sound-focused, subjective, and individually constructed, and dictionary definition as textual, objective, and communally constructed. Both the dictionary definition and the poem share an association with word as artefact, with cultural memory and history, preservation and loss. This chapter demonstrates how, by encouraging the reader to ‘dwell in possibility’, the dictionary definition poem offers a fertile space for the discussion and reconfiguration of cultural meaning.

Etymology and Elegy: Paul Muldoon’s ‘Yarrow’ and ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’

From the subtle and often ominous resonance of names in his earliest poems to the forensic investigations of Maggot (2010), Muldoon never allows etymology to be unequivocally relevant, or indeed irrelevant, to synchronic usage. This ambiguity is especially striking in his elegies, as it chimes with the classic dilemma of representing a loss for poetic gain. Through close readings of ‘Hedge School’, ‘Yarrow’, and ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’, this chapter examines the use of obsoleteness in Muldoon’s elegiac diction; words no longer current, but preserved in dictionaries, provide the poet with roundabout routes to a mitigated poetic grief. Whether evasive, provocative, and digressive, or, as in his elegy for Heaney, profoundly grounding, etymologies are an essential part of these poems’ struggle for closure.

Poetry in the Oxford English Dictionary: A Quantitative Profile

This chapter analyses the background data of various editions of the Oxford English Dictionary in order to give a quantitative profile of the contribution of English poetry to the composition of the OED. In so doing, I attempt to disentangle as best as possible the three forces that shaped this relationship: the development of the English language, English textual production and its culture(s), and the practice of Oxford’s lexicographers.

Jamieson, Jargons, Jangles, and Jokes: Hugh MacDiarmid and Dictionaries

Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) used dictionaries in the composition of his ‘synthetic Scots’ and ‘synthetic English’ poetry in volumes such as Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926), and Stony Limits and Other Poems (1934). The essay considers his attitudes to artificial languages and to dictionaries in relation to modernity, and his reading of dictionaries and word books against the grain of academicism. It particularly considers John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language. It goes on to consider how, in his poetry, MacDiarmid places words and phrases that have been gleaned from dictionaries: his placing them in similes, and his leaving some of them unglossed and obscure. It concludes by considering the framing effects of alliteration, and the interplay of artifice and authenticity in MacDiarmid’s poetry.

not even invented

William Empson was ambivalent about etymology; ‘we would often like an influence from past uses to survive in a word’, he wrote in 1977, ‘when it plainly doesn’t’. But he had always been preoccupied with ‘how a structure of meaning comes to be built up in a word’; this is part of what Kitty Hauser identifies as an ‘archaeological imagination’, an important strand of thought about origins and histories running through English modernism, by means of which what people would like to survive could be mysteriously animated. Empson’s poems of 1936 cast alterations and retentions of verbal meaning – which arise out of human behaviour but seem also to possess a power of their own – as figures for other forces detected but not fathomed. Considering contemporary events and public speculations over their causes and consequences, they were written while Empson, researching The Structure of Complex Words (1951), was thinking closely about what and how dictionary entries can convey. Shaped by reading the OED at a particular point in its own history, and through a particular historical moment, they also read that moment through the dictionary, and are set in motion by his wary investigation of what you could call an etymological imagination.

‘When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary’: Poets and Dictionaries, Dictionaries and Poets

Many poets choose to use unusual as well as usual words, exploiting their different possible senses, registers, and sounds, together with their varying cultural, geographical, historical, and etymological associations. In consequence, both poets and other writers have regularly turned to dictionaries to provide raw material for their writing, not least to dictionaries with quotations from other writers. Dictionaries have returned the compliment: from Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) onwards, many monolingual dictionaries of English – and its constituent geographical varieties – have drawn upon the language of well-known writers to support their definitions of usage. This chapter discusses the mutual attraction between poets and dictionaries, and explores the linguistic issues that this relationship raises, particularly for the OED, with reference to writers and critics such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Hugh MacDiarmid, Seamus Heaney, and others.

Proper Names, the Dictionary, and the Poetry of Experiment

This essay focuses upon proper names: words that are not usually found in modern dictionaries – and that posed James Murray a number of problems in the early stages of his editing of the Oxford English Dictionary. After briefly considering the power of proper names in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, the essay sketches an overview of their changing relations with the dictionary, from the seventeenth century to the present day. It then discusses some of the ways in which J. H. Prynne, John Wilkinson, and Keston Sutherland have used proper names throughout their work, with its many challenges to meaning, in order to clarify as well as to complicate questions of reference.

A Collected Unconscious: James Merrill’s Dictionaries

In The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), James Merrill sketches a tableau of his study, singling out his hardbound set of the Oxford English Dictionary. Indeed, dictionaries were never far from his desk, and their presence is felt in much of his poetry, from interpolated definitions to pastiche etymologies and puns whose effectiveness depends upon a deep and lasting knowledge of the OED and American Heritage Dictionary. This essay takes as its starting point Merrill’s belief that dictionaries constitute a ‘collective unconscious’, discussing how the spirits of the dead are invoked not just by way of Merrill’s poetic experiments with Ouija boards, but through his ongoing fascination with the buried histories of words themselves. In close readings of Sandover, as well as some of Merrill’s later lyrics, it charts the poet’s lifelong preoccupation with acts of definition, and suggests that his poetry ultimately takes more delight in the ramifications of words than their roots.

Introduction

This opening chapter provides an overview of the volume as a whole, while establishing the theme of poetry and the dictionary. It begins with an expansive consideration of questions of definition, then explores some of the ways in which the practice of lexicography has adapted to the internet age, before outlining the development of dictionaries of English (in both Great Britain and the USA) and touching upon a number of suggestive points of contact with poetry. After a discussion of the work of Les Murray and Vahni Capildeo – the former having been a contributor to the Maquarie Dictionary, the latter a lexicographer on the OED – the chapter concludes by introducing the essays that follow.

Briefer Mentions and Lyrical Lexicons: Marianne Moore’s Responses to Dictionaries in The Dial and Observations

1925 was an important year for the poet and editor Marianne Moore. First, she began assuming editorial responsibility for the American literary magazine The Dial, taking over from her predecessor Scofield Thayer. Second, she saw her collection Observations published, with the first edition selling out within a month. Moore’s interest in dictionaries at this time displays some intriguing overlaps between her critical and creative lives, still an underexplored area within Moore studies. Therefore, this chapter discusses Moore’s early reviews of a range of reference works, before turning its attention to Moore’s poems ‘Injudicious Gardening’ and ‘Marriage’, to demonstrate how Moore’s preoccupation with questions of definition becomes altogether more subversive, and revealing of her capricious attitude towards the notion of ‘definition’ itself.