'A Word Can Open Like a Tomb to Reveal Its Past'

The poet William Wenthe opens his essay “The Glamour of Words” with a provocative memory. It was the anniversary of Charles Dickens’ death and he was in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, where Dickens is interred and his sister is speaking to mark the occasion. Wenthe looks down and realizes "with a shiver" that he is standing on Dr. Johnson’s grave. The sensation he experiences is “something wonderful and frightening at once”: 

“The name carved in the stone grave marker, the knowing whom and what it signified, thrilled me in a way that did not happen when, a few minutes later, I was introduced to one of Dickens’ own descendants. I say again, it was like a trapdoor, a falling down . . . this was the grave of a man who compiled a famous dictionary of the English language . . .”

 

If I’m reading Wenthe correctly, I know the sensation. It has happened to me in Père Lachaise when I literally stumbled on the grave of Marcel Proust. It has also happened while sitting at home with a book in my hands.

 

“When reading," Wenthe writes, "you move along horizontally, linearly on a kind of platform of sense; but suddenly a word may drop you through that platform into another dimension. And a poem is a platform especially devised, like the dramatic stage, to provide these trapdoors of sudden entrance and exit.”

 

Wenthe quotes a poet I don’t know, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, for her use of the word carnation. It possesses, he says, a “glamour.” That was news to me. I’m from Ohio, where the state flower is the red carnation and I always thought it was a rather humble bloom. He clarifies: “I mean ‘glamour’ in its older sense, a Scots word meaning ‘magic, enchantment, spell’—perhaps with a sense of the supernatural, or of deception.”

 

In this sense, glamour is a word that can “give way, and mean more than one way,” Wenthe says. That’s how I think good writing often works, whether poetry or prose, and not just obvious examples like Finnegans Wake. Words and whole sentences can be dense with meaning and music without announcing the fact or even seeking attention. Some words echo with their etymology – amateur, for instance, which is rooted in love. Wenthe tells us – and I didn’t know this – that glamour started as a corruption of grammar. One of the enduring gifts of having studied Latin for four years (as a very lazy student) is hearing or at least suspecting such echoes. It helps to think of words as trailing clouds of connotative ectoplasm. “Language,” Emerson writes, “is fossil poetry.”

 

A related gift is associating certain words with certain writers, regardless of where we encounter them. Sere, for instance, is a Keatsian word, as are descry, tinct and pallid. We associate parallax with astronomy but thanks to Ulysses it belongs forever to James Joyce. Foppery, of course, is Shakespeare’s, like so many other words. About ectoplasm: That’s Ralph Ellison’s.

 

“When thinking of these etymological emergences," Wenthe writes, "I personally prefer the metaphor of the tomb t0 that of the root. Perhaps it's because of my encounter with the tomb of Samuel Johnson, lexicographer. A word can open like a tomb to reveal its past – or like a coffin”

 

[Wenthe’s essays was published in the March/April 2013 issue of The American Poetry Review.]