On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 by Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
page 72 of 236 (30%)
page 72 of 236 (30%)
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Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean-spoil
In ocean-smelling osier-- (_i.e._ in a fish-basket) --and his face Rough-reddened with a thousand winter gales, Not only to the market town were known, But in the leafy lanes beyond the down Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp And peacock yewtree of the lonely Hall Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering, why, then we feel that the vehicle is altogether too pompous for its load, and those who make speech too pompous for its content commit, albeit in varying degrees, the error of Defoe's religious lady who, seeing a bottle of over-ripe beer explode and cork and froth fly up to the ceiling, cried out, 'O, the wonders of Omnipotent Power!' The poet who commends fresh fish to us as 'ocean-spoil' can cast no stone at his brother who writes of them as 'the finny denizens of the deep,' or even at his cousin the journalist, who exalts the oyster into a 'succulent bivalve'-- The feathered tribes on pinions cleave the air; Not so the mackerel, and, still less, the bear! I believe this difficulty, which verse, by nature and origin emotional, encounters in dealing with ordinary unemotional narrative, to lie as a technical reason at the bottom of Horace's advice to the writer of Epic to plunge _in medias res_, thus avoiding flat preparative and catching at |
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