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The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum By: Wallace Irwin (1876-1959) |
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by Wallace Irwin With an Introduction by
Gelett Burgess Showing how Vanity is still on Deck,
& humble Virtue gets it in the Neck! "A Leaden Heart I wear since she forsook me."
The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum Introduction "Tell me, ye muses, what hath former ages
Now left succeeding times to play upon,
And what remains unthought on by those sages
Where a new muse may try her pinion?" So Complained Phineas Fletcher in his Purple Island as long ago as 1633.
Three centuries have brought to the development of lyric passion no
higher form than that of the sonnet cycle. The sonnet has been likened
to an exquisite crystal goblet that holds one sublimely inspired thought
so perfectly that not another drop can be added without overflow. Cast
in the early Italian Renaissance by Dante, Petrarch and Camoens, it was
chased and ornamented during the Elizabethan period by Shakespere, and
filled with its most stimulating draughts of song and love during the
Victorian era by Rossetti, Browning and Meredith. And now, in this first
year of the new century, the historic cup is refilled and tossed off in
a radiant toast to Erato by Wallace Irwin. The attribute of modernity is not given to every new age. The cogs in
the wheels of time slip back, at times. The classic revival may be
permeated with enthusiasm, but it is a second edition of an old
work not a virile essay at expression of living thought. The later
Renaissance was but half modern in its spirit; the classic period of the
eighteenth century in England was half ancient in its mood. But the
twentieth century breaks with a new promise of emancipation to English
Literature, for a new influence has freshened the blood of conventional
style that in the decadence of the End of the Century had grown dilute.
This adjuvant strain is found in the enthusiasm of Slang. Slowly its
rhetorical power has won foothold in the language. It has won many a
verb and substantive, it has conquered idiom and diction, and now it is
strong enough to assault the very syntax of our Anglo Saxon tongue.[]
[] Note, for instance, the potential mood used indicatively in the
current colloquial, "Wouldn't that jar you!"
Slang, the illegitimate sister of Poetry, makes with her a common cause
against the utilitarian economy of Prose. They both stand for lavish
luxuriance in trope and involution, for floriation and adornment of
thought. It is their boast to make two words bloom where one grew
before. Both garb themselves in Metaphor, and the only complaint of the
captious can be that whereas Poetry follows the accepted style, Slang
dresses her thought to suit herself in fantastic and bizarre caprices,
that her whims are unstable and too often in bad taste. But this odium given to Slang by superficial minds is undeserved. In
other days, before the language was crystallized into the idiom and
verbiage of the doctrinaire, prose, too, was untrammeled. Indeed, a
cursory glance at the Elizabethan poets discloses a kinship with the
rebellious fancies of our modern colloquial talk. Mr. Irwin's sonnets
may be taken as an indication of this revolt, and how nearly they
approach the incisive phrases of the seventeenth century may easily be
shown in a few exemplars. For instance, in Sonnet XX, "You're the real
tan bark!" we have a close parallel in Johnson's Volpone, or The Fox: "Fellows of outside and mere bark!" And this instance is an equally good illustration also of that curious
process which, in the English language, has in time created for a single
word ("cleave," for instance) two exactly opposite meanings. A line from
John Webster's Appius and Virginia might be cited as showing how near
his diction approached modern slang: "My most neat and cunning orator, whose tongue is quicksilver;" and, for an analogy similar, though elaborate, compare lines 5 8 in
Sonnet XI. In Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, "A pernicious petticoat prince" is as close to "Mame's dress suit belle" of No... Continue reading book >>
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Humor |
Literature |
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