Technical terms

Samuel Johnson says that “all appropriated terms of art should be sunk in general expressions, because poetry is to speak a general language.”

Barfield disagrees: “Johnson was hopelessly wrong.”

What poets do above all is express things in terms that are not general: “They express, as nearly as any word can do, a concrete, particular thing , and not an abstract, generalized idea . . . .it may be worth pointing out here an instinctive tendency in poets, and others, to use general term of things which they are ignorant of or despise, or in which they can discern no poetic value, and particular – even technical – terms of things which really inspire them. Love is the begetter of intimate knowledge; for what we love it is not tedious, but delightful, to observe minutely.”

He continues: “No genuine lover of poetry and of words can pick up a book on, say, Botany or Metallurgy, and read of spores and capsules and lanceolate leaves, or pearly and adamantine lustres, without feeling poetically enriched by that section of the new vocabulary which actually impinges on his own present consciousness of Nature. Nor can he even listen to a circle of enthusiasts – sailors, golfers, wireless men, actors, and the like – riding, as they do, their special hobby-horses idiomatically over all departments of life, without being delighted, without being frappe (for a short time only) by the result.”