A writer’s first responsibility is to write well, an obvious point but one lost on most readers and many writers. Good writers know this intuitively, or otherwise they would have chosen computer science or truck farming as an occupation. Here are three contemporary writers on the artful use of language:
Clive James, in the chapter on Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Cultural Amnesia:
“A good writer of prose always writes to poetic standards. (One of the marks of poetry in modern times is that the advent of free verse opened the way for poets who could not write to prose standards, but that’s another issue.) The good prose-writer’s standards, however, should include the realization that he is not writing a poem.”
Irving Feldman, from “Fragment,” Collected Poems: 1954-2004:
“The language isn’t saved by style
but by a tale worth telling.
Not, then, to purify the old words
but to bring new speech into
the lexicon of the tribe…”
Theodore Dalrymple, from “A Taste for Danger,” Our Culture, What’s Left of It:
“It is not surprising that emotion untutored by thought results in nearly contentless blather, in which – ironically enough –genuine emotion itself cannot be adequately expressed.”
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2 comments:
T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets echos the sentiments from today's essay:
a raid on the inarticulate
"So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres-
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling."
Interesting quote from T.S. Eliot (one of the few poets that I recognize as such).
I like the last sentence the best.
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