'Pat Cloherty's Version of the Maisie', Richard Murphy (Critical Essay‪)‬

Everyone knows, but still remarks as if it were something new, that Wordsworth's ambition to write 'in the language of a man speaking to men' was apparently not successful. The ideal of writing in an unliterary language, in a real vernacular, seems to be rechampioned in every generation. It is invoked both for and against existing writing. In his De Vulgari Eloquentia in about 1290, Dante argued (in Latin) the case for composing The Divine Comedy in the Italian vernacular rather than in learned Latin. As an example of the unvernacular, Macaulay grumbled in 1831 about the language of Dr Johnson: 'All his books are written in a learned language, in a language which nobody hears from his mother or his nurse, a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love, a language in which nobody ever thinks'. (1) The obligation implied in all this is one which weighs particularly heavily on poets; in an Irish context, Yeats stated it most dramatically and memorably in his late 'A General Introduction for my Work': 'I tried to make the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate, normal speech. I wanted to write in whatever language comes most naturally when we soliloquise [...] upon the events of our own lives [...] I sometimes compare myself with the mad old slum women I hear denouncing and remembering; "How dare you", I heard one say of some imaginary suitor, "and you without health or a home"'. (2) Nevertheless, Yeats concludes that he 'must seek, not as Wordsworth thought, words in common use, but a powerful and passionate syntax.' (3) Wordsworth was far from unique in failing to remain true to his ideal. There are far more striking failures: T. S. Eliot's embarrassing vernacular at the end of the 'Game of Chess' section of The Waste Land, for example; or even worse, Yeats's own 'Ballad of Moll Magee':