Abstract
In September 1800 Coleridge wrote to William Godwin recommending him to write a book on language that would ‘destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things: elevating as it were Words into Things and living Things too’.1 It is a pity that Godwin never pursued the suggestion, for Coleridge was, in effect, asking him to express systematically an attitude to language that, Coleridge believed, distinguished the poetry written by himself and Wordsworth from the poetry of the eighteenth century.
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Notes
Johnson objects to Pope’s definition because he believes that wit is located both in the thought and its expression, but he is far from disagreeing with Pope’s distinction between the two. Johnson’s theory of language is orthodoxly Lockean. See Rackstraw Downes, ‘Johnson’s Theory of Language’, Review of English Literature, III, 1962, pp. 29–41.
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© 1981 Richard Cronin
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Cronin, R. (1981). Language and Genre. In: Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16471-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16471-4_1
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