Koestler
Bacon
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In literary usage, archaism
is the use of "an archaic or old-fashioned word or expression, like o'er,
ere, shoon, or darkling" in order to "suggest a mythic
and glamorous past" (HHL 46). As a key sign of original
participation, a prime creator of strangeness
in the poetic, and a contributor to the felt
change of consciousness central to the experience of poetry,
archaism plays an important role in Barfield's theory of poetic
diction. It is a kind of "stepping back to leap" (Koestler)
which fuels the evolution of consciousness.
"The poet," according
to this theory, "while creating anew, is likely to be in a sense restoring
something old. And if the most ancient rhythms of verse are but the sound,
dying away, of just those 'footsteps of Nature' whose visible print we
[observe], with
Bacon, in the present
possibility of true metaphor, we shall hardly
be surprised to hear in the music which such a poet creates, albeit spontaneously,
something like an echo of just those rhythms" (PD 158)
Barfield is careful
to distinguish true and false archaism. Archaism in its inauthentic form
has nothing to do with the evolution
of consciousness.
The mere
confining of oneself to a choice of words, a grammar or a set of mannerisms
which has been for some time and is still in general literary use, is not
archaism, though archaism may seem in the long run (and especially in the
case of grammar) to involve that. That should merely be called conservatism,
or even--not to put too fine a point on it--dullness. And its cause lies,
not in the nature of language, but in the nature of man, and especially
of literary man. (PD 158)
The real thing, authentic
archaism implies "not a standing still, but a return to something older,
and if we examine it more closely, we shall find that it generally means
a movement towards language at an earlier stage of its own development"
(PD 163). In the history of literature it tends to reappear in
great movements
. . . which are at the same time returns to Nature . . . , inaugurated,
as we would expect, by the greater poets. They are led by poets with something
to say, in other words, with something to give. It is these who break away
from the old "poetic diction" in its futile sense, and it is not their
fault that what they create eventually becomes a new one. (PD 166)
See in particular
Poetic
Diction, Chap. XXX. |
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