Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept

Variety

Variety

The Life of a Roman Concept

WILLIAM FITZGERALD

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

William Fitzgerald is professor of Latin language and literature at King’s College London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29949-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29952-5 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226299525.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fitzgerald, William, 1952– author.

Variety : the life of a Roman concept / William Fitzgerald.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-29949-5 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-29952-5 (e-book) 1. Latin literature—History and criticism. I. Title.

PA6003.F58 2016

870.9'001—dc23

2015027956

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Page duBois

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Rescuing Variety

1 Words and Meanings

2 Variety’s Contexts

3 Putting Variety at Issue: Varietas in Pliny the Younger, Lucretius, and Horace

4 Confronting Variety: Listing, Subjectivity, and Genre in Latin Poetry

5 Miscellany: Variety and the Book

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

The bulk of the work on this book was completed in 2010/11, during a year of research leave comprising a sabbatical term granted by King’s College London and a fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am grateful to both bodies for making this possible. My thanks are also due to the inspiring participants of the conference Variety and Miscellany in Latin Literature, which I convened at King’s College London in June 2009: Ruth Morello, John Henderson, Catherine Connors, Erik Gunderson, Victoria Rimell, Rebecca Langlands, Eugenia Lao, Carlotta Dionisotti, and Joseph Howley. Ullrich Langer shared his work on literary pleasure in the Renaissance, which provided vital impetus to the project in its early stages. I benefited from Joseph Howley’s thoughts on Aulus Gellius as examiner of his excellent thesis and in subsequent conversations on his forthcoming book. Audiences at St. Andrews, King’s College London, Kent, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Oxford, Cambridge, and Reading provided helpful feedback, and readers’ reports from the University of Chicago Press guided my revisions of the original manuscript. Susan Bielstein supported, encouraged, and improved this book, and this is not the first time I have had reason to be grateful to her for shepherding a book of mine through the long process to publication. I am grateful also to Kathryn Krug, who was a most scrupulous and eagle-eyed copy editor. As always, my wife Kathy O’Shaughnessy has been encouraging and questioning in perfect measure. The dedicatee, varia and multiplex in all the best senses, has been an inspiration throughout our friendship.

INTRODUCTION

Rescuing Variety

What is there to say about variety? Not much, judging by the puzzled or amused reaction among friends and colleagues making the What are you working on? inquiry. And, in fact, the blankness that confronts one’s attempt to focus on the concept of variety is part of what attracted me to the subject. Variety needs rescuing. It seems too big, too obvious, too nebulous to be interesting. And yet, clearly it meant something to the Romans. When the words varietas and varius crop up, as they do with great frequency, they carry a force and specificity that are ill-served by their English equivalents, at least as they are understood now. But well into the twentieth century the English words various and variety had a specificity and resonance, deriving from a long and rich tradition of speaking about variety, that they have now lost. What is the conceptual range of these words, and what issues do they put at stake? Where are they at home, and what is their semantic field? To what effect do they bundle meanings in their particular way? How far do they make their presence felt in the post-classical world? The first part of this book is a portrait, though not necessarily the history, of a word that has passed, more or less unaltered, from Latin into English, bringing with it a constellation of connected words, metaphors, and topoi.

Why is the concept of variety so difficult to bring into focus? The question may appear foolish, for it would seem to be the very nature of variety to evade focus. The loss of contour, the baffling of focus, and the forestalling of a consistent attentiveness are part of the meaning of variety, and together they make it a difficult concept to discuss. And yet these very qualities have been the object of a discussion which has its own tradition. Their value can be understood in negative or positive terms, and the arguments, metaphors, and commonplaces associated with them over many centuries delineate a particular field of human experience, which can be bought into focus.

Our first thoughts about variety might cast it as an ornament, or a correction. Variety is often seen as a corrective, an essential counterweight to the boredom and tedium to which unity and homogeneity are prone. Unvaried or lacking variety are common criticisms. While the corrective sense of variety is certainly part of the tradition, it is by no means the whole story. As a distinctive value, variety has a role to play in the story of some very big ideas. A good example of this is the concept that Arthur Lovejoy (1960) dubbed The Great Chain of Being, the idea of a hierarchical chain stretching from the perfect being to the lowest form of existence, and conforming to the principles of plenitude and continuity. In the Great Chain of Being each link differs from that immediately above and that immediately below by the least possible degree of difference (1960, 59), and, as Lovejoy continues, In this assumption of the metaphysical necessity and the essential worth of the realization of all conceivable forms of being, from the highest to the lowest, there was obviously implicit the basis of theodicy (1960, 64). In Plotinus’s version of this idea (Ennead 2.24–25), the good of the whole consists chiefly in the variety of its parts; it is, for instance, better that one animal be eaten by another than that it should never have existed at all. Conflict is a necessary concomitant of diversity, and the one should be tolerated for the sake of the other. Variety, then, has a value for Plotinus, but to what sphere does this value belong? Is it an aesthetic notion? If so, it is capable of considerable extension. Plotinus goes on to say that to complain that there is evil in the world is as senseless as to complain of a tragedy because it includes among its characters not only heroes, but also slaves and peasants who speak incorrectly. To eliminate these low characters would be to spoil the beauty of the whole (Enn. 3.2.11). The roots of variety’s value lie in the aesthetic realm, as Plotinus’s comparison indicates, but is his prioritization of variety over justice an assertion of the overriding value of the aesthetic? To prioritize the variety of creation is to identify creativity as the essence of divinity, over other characteristics such as justice, for instance. What gives force to this argument? I will argue that the idea that God displays his creativity through variety gains crucial support from two aspects of the ancient varietas complex, which I will describe in the first and second chapters of this book: the close connection between copia (abundance) and varietas in the rhetorical tradition, and the topos that nature rejoices in variety. These are just two of the strains of thinking about variety that I will take up in the second chapter of this book, in which I will discuss how variety has become an issue in a number of different spheres of thought.

Variety Now

What does variety mean to us now? Readers of a certain age will remember a form of entertainment known as Variety, a vital link between the music halls of the Victorian era and early television, persisting into the 1970s, but now defunct. This diverse entertainment, with its acts drawn from different spheres and cultural levels (singing, dancing, acrobatics, comedy, dramatic recitation, etc.) arranged simply by numbers on the program, gave way gradually to more homogeneous forms of entertainment demanding a more concentrated, absorbed audience. The strong association of entertainment with variety, which lies behind the name of Variety (or Varieté in its original French form) is no longer as powerful as it once was. New cultural forms have sprung up in the meantime, and none of them prominently features the word variety. On the other hand, and more recently, we have seen the rise of the blog, an authored work whose ancestor has been identified as the commonplace book, which originated in the Renaissance.¹ Commonplace books were collections of quotations, observations, and reflections drawn from the author’s reading, and often intended only for the author’s use, without any principle of order—miscellanies reflecting the tastes, opinions, responses, and thoughts of the author relating to whatever it is that might come up. As we shall see in later chapters, ideas of autobiography or self-portrait are deeply implicated with the value of variety.

But if variety has a primal scene for us now, it must be the supermarket shopper, scanning shelf after shelf of the same item, packaged in different sizes and containers, of different provenances and price, and more or less damaging to the health; or the metropolitan diner, weighing the options of various cuisines offered by an array of restaurants. In short, the arena of variety is choice, a central value of the consumer society. In this context, the concept of variety seems somewhat removed from its base in aesthetics. But that may not be the case, since the history of variety as an aesthetic concept comprehends the experience of what the Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard called the oeil vagabond (roving eye), which sweeps a varied prospect with a sense of its own empowerment (more on this in chapter 4). The concept of variety is tied to the experience of a certain kind of visual field, and so engages the subjectivity of the viewer in distinctive ways.

One of the manifestations of aesthetic variety that will concern me in this book (chapter 5) is the miscellany, an important ancient form with a long afterlife. Barbara Benedict (1996) associates the literary miscellanies of the eighteenth century, which flaunt their variety, with the rise of consumer culture: the metaphor of the feast, an ancient topos for miscellaneous texts, links consumption, choice, and variety. These associations belong to what one might call the prehistory of modern variety, the preconditions for variety’s having the value it now holds. There is clearly a strong aesthetic component to this aspect of consumer ideology. The suspension of the act of choice in the face of a variegated field, the play of the eye and the mind with the potential of focus and decision, these are as important as the actual exercise of choice. When a supermarket offers choice, it is not only offering a choice, allowing you to select exactly what you want, like, or need, it is also offering choice itself, the spectacle of your freedom and entitlement to choose, whether or not you exercise it. It is not uncommon to find the prioritizing of choice, and the short attention span that it encourages, as features of dystopian descriptions of modernity. But variety has always been potentially ambivalent, putting at issue the relative value of different modes of attention. My project is not simply that of uncovering lost meanings and ancient debates, though that is a central component of this book; the project has a genealogical aspect as well, reconnecting some of the issues of variety now with representations and debates that have a long history.

Variety, certainly, is an important ingredient of the modern consumer experience, related to the basic right of the consumer, choice. But it bears an uncomfortable relation to another keyword of contemporary culture, belonging to a very different sphere, and bearing with it associations that must be taken very seriously, namely diversity. It is as self-evident that a diverse society is desirable as it is that a consumer deserves choice. That the word diversity, rather than variety, is used in this context is a mark of the waning strength of the latter word. For instance, although the official Latin motto of the European Union is In varietate concordia, this appears on EU websites in the English version United in Diversity. The Latin motto was selected after a contest, open to secondary students in EU member countries, held in 1999–2000. One might be inclined, then, to think of this as T-shirt Latin, concocted by a student with very little understanding of the resonances of the words used, which are Latin because that is the language of impressive mottoes. But the fact that it is modeled on the motto In varietate unitas of Ernesto Moneta, Italian patriot and winner of Nobel Peace Prize in 1907, refers the EU motto to an author who would have chosen the word advisedly. Perhaps Moneta, a campaigner for Italian unification, was not deliberately echoing ancient texts about the Roman empire (see p. 00), but it is not inappropriate that he was. It is hardly surprising that Moneta’s varietas has not been translated as variety—that would appear trivial. This was evidently not a problem in 1951, when E. M. Forster gave two cheers for democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism (1951, 79). Half a century later, variety seems too lightweight a word to do this kind of work.

But diversity is itself derived from the Latin adjective diversus (the form diversitas also exists), which is a significant member of the semantic field of varietas. Admittedly, biodiversity is often the model for contemporary political uses of diversity: Article 1 of UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, for instance, states that cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature. On the other hand, the modern topos that diversity is something to be celebrated echoes the ancient topos that nature rejoices in variety (gaudet varietate). Gaudium (joy) is another concept that is difficult to bring into focus. What is joy? Whatever it is, joy is an important correlative of variety in the classical tradition and feeds into the celebration of diversity in modern parlance. Even more important for the modern use of diversity is the fact that its predecessor, varietas, allows us to conceive of a particular kind of whole, one in which the parts insist on their separateness and yet, in this very insistence, create a beautiful whole. In the political arena, diversity, as the opposite and antagonist of assimilation, is about the protection of minorities from the coercive power of the culturally dominant. It is the value that underpins multiculturalism, which Hollinger (1995, 101–2) describes as the principle that (the US) ought to sustain, rather than diminish, a great variety of distinctive cultures carried by ethno-racial groups. This is to be distinguished from pluralism, which assumes an expanse of internally homogeneous and analogically structured units. The principle of diversity rejects focus on the brotherhood of man in favor of recognizing and tolerating difference. To see this (which is, admittedly, not all that’s involved) we must commit ourselves to an aesthetics of variety. So, while variety and various have lost some of the semantic power that they held well into the twentieth century, some of their meaning, semantic field, and conceptual baggage have migrated into other words that are important and powerful for us now.

A Latin Word

The danger of my project is that it will flow through the territory of such big, broad concepts as the aesthetic ideal of unity, the Great Chain of Being, and the contemporary politics of diversity, so that it is in danger of being diluted out of existence. It is a project that could easily be sucked into the vortex of the one and the many, or disappear as a component of concordia discors, never to be seen again. But my purpose is not to give an account of these, and other, encompassing concepts and ideals per se. Where I address them, it is from the perspective of an ancillary concept, that of variety, a word which has passed from Latin into English and the romance languages with little change.² This word (varius with its variants) brings with it a semantic field and a complex of metaphors and topoi; together, they make up the toolkit of the concept of variety. By staying close to the word itself I hope to reveal a distinctive bundling of ideas, values, and issues that remained remarkably stable over a long period of time. It is, then, both a consequence of my subject and an aspect of my argument that this book is organised not by period, but by topic, discourse, and author.

The aspect of my project that concerns classical reception sits awkwardly with current scholarly trends, in that it starts from the premise that the vocabulary with which ideas are expressed and debated is largely inherited, not created for the purpose at every turn, and that this vocabulary carries with it the history of its uses. In other words, meaning is not all, nor always, realized at the point of reception, as the mantra of reception studies has it.³ The historicizing trend of recent years sees the forces of context, to exaggerate a little, as a furnace in which what comes from the past is melted down and recast for present purposes. The naming of the field of Reception Studies is in part a reaction against the implications of the earlier name for this subject, the Classical Tradition, with its assumption of obligatory membership of a club with its rules, assumptions, and traditions; in short, its authority.⁴ The classical world is no longer thought to influence the modern; rather it is, graciously or ungraciously, received. What is lost in this metaphor is the resistance, or at least suggestiveness, of the ancient material, its ability to mold rather than be molded. But this is a crude polarization of metaphors. Better, perhaps, would be the metaphor of energy, in which classical material is figured as a form of energy, which finds various outlets in its modern continuations. Part of my subject, then, is the potency of ancient ideas of variety. I will often flout chronology, and my argument will bounce around from period to period or author to author. My purpose in this is, first, to show how the "varietas complex" has permeated discourse over a long period of time, and, second, to unpack the discussion that is potentially inherent in the complex of words, metaphors, and topoi that gravitate around the word.

While the first part of my project (chapters 1 and 2) belongs to the field of the history of ideas, broadly conceived, the rest can be considered literary criticism, and it is focused on Latin literature, with forays into its reception. Here I put variety into play in relation to three literary categories: author, genre, and the book. My authors are Lucretius, Horace, and Pliny, for all of whom variety is a central issue. In these three case studies (chapter 3), I show how variety functions within a problematic that is characteristic of the particular author, so that the concept of variety becomes a significant focal point of an oeuvre. In the letters of the Younger Pliny, the concept of variety provides the solution to the problem of self-presentation in face of the anxious question What do I amount to? It is the medium in which Pliny’s anxiety is translated into celebration. Lucretius, poet of the Epicurean universe, is concerned to show that a generously varied nature, and a nature generous in its variety, can be generated from a combination of atoms restricted in their variety. The Lucretian take on variety and nature finds resonances in poets as different as Catullus and Gerard Manley Hopkins. This chapter ends by considering some of the programmatic pronouncements of Horace, among them that shibboleth of a classical aesthetic, the phrase simplex et unum. I argue that the poet identifies himself, against the grain of his explicit statement, as a poet of varietas.

Horace features in both of the next chapters, and chapter 4 begins with a discussion of the first of his odes (c. 1.1). In this chapter I consider the ways in which different generic subjectivities confront variety through the activity of listing; from the lyric priamel of Horace’s first ode to the satiric list, or the panegyrical recital of wonders in Statius, the experience of variety comes in different generic forms. Whether the spectacle of variety is overwhelming, empowering, or simply an illusion, depends in part on genre, and I offer in this chapter a generic map of variety, or alternatively a map of some poetic genres through the lens of variety. Since genres are not isolated from each other, but contend, overlap, and conflate, this chapter provides another angle from which to consider the discussion that swirls around the concept of variety. Finally, in the last chapter, I address the literary kind that is defined by variety, namely the miscellany. While miscellany is not an ancient term, it is a convenient cross-generic category under which to examine books, in prose or verse, which lay claim to variety. Some of these feature prefaces and apologias that account for the varied character of the book, while others find less direct means of giving a rationale for their variety. What do the titles, apologias, metaphors, and metaliterary moments of miscellanies, ancient and modern, have to tell us about the aesthetics and ideology of the miscellany? For the literary critic, all of them raise the awkward question of how one is to interpret the variety of a varied work. What, in short, can one say about it? I address this question mainly in relation to Aulus Gellius’s heterogeneous profusion of erudite readings and conversations in his Noctes Atticae.

My approach to the subject of variety, then, is various. I consider it as a concept and a value, as a particular kind of aesthetic experience, and as a critical problem. While the toolkit of the variety complex is remarkably stable and continuous, it is not inert, for along with this toolkit comes a set of issues, problems, and controversies that have been subject to continuing debate. What questions does varietas raise or answer? Why should we care?

One reason to care is that classical western aesthetics is so dominated by ideas of unity, complementarity, harmony, and balance that variety is hard to imagine, except negatively. It is often seen as the adjustment needed to prevent the qualities of our central values from degrading through entropy, the counterweight to a regrettable tendency of certain approved qualities. As such, the necessity of variety reveals an ambivalence about the aesthetic value of unity and, in the rhetorical context, of values such as pondus (weight), copia (abundance), ubertas (fullness), and the like. Variety finds itself relegated to those least respectable of aesthetic concepts, ornament and decoration.⁵ Symptomatic of this are the words of the Pindar scholar Douglas Young, apropos Pindar’s concept of poikilia, one of the Greek relatives of varietas: "the concept of ornament—even that of variety for variety’s sake—is wholly absent from the words poikillein, poikilia and poikilos in the Classical period. They concern inherent complexity, elaborateness, or intricacy of essential argument, not mere decoration.⁶ In other words, according to Young, variety cannot, in any approved sense, be a goal in itself (variety for variety’s sake"). As we shall see, this has not always been the case.

To look at the ancient concept of variety is both to give us a new perspective on the history of some modern ideas and values, and also to reorient the focus of our understanding of ancient aesthetics. Central to our understanding of ancient aesthetics have been Horace’s words finally, let it be anything at all provided it is a single homogeneous whole (denique sit quodvis simplex dumtaxat et unum, Ars Poetica, 23, as translated by Rudd 1979). Behind these words lie Plato’s organic metaphor for the necessity of unity in a speech (Phaedrus 264c) and Aristotle’s privileging of synoptic wholes that consist of a beginning, a middle, and an end (Poetics 1450b–1451a). The importance of varietas and poikilia as aesthetic values has been underestimated, and the consequences for western aesthetics have been immense. Unity has meant different things at different times, but whether it be the Aristotelian unities of neoclassical critics, the organic unity most famously articulated by Coleridge,⁷ in which the whole is not only given primacy over the parts, but is their raison d’etre, or the New Critical unity, in which tensions are held in balance (as in an Empedoclean concordia discors), unity has been the dominating term in western poetics. But in the ancient world alternative aesthetic values exist, and indeed persist through the modern period, as this book will show.

To find these values we have to look beyond the canonical works of Plato, Aristotle, and Horace. As James Porter (2010) has recently reminded us, varietas and its Greek ancestor poikilia both have their roots in sensuous, visual experience. They belong to the strain of materialist aesthetics from which, Porter argues, the formalist tradition of Plato and Aristotle (often taken to stand for ancient aesthetics tout court) has diverted our attention, a strain in which sensuous experience and materialism have a crucial role to play. If we think more broadly about what might constitute ancient aesthetic thought, Porter argues, we find that many terms are applied across a wide range of different art forms and sensuous experiences. They represent aesthetic values. One of these is poikilia, and to this we could add the Latin varietas. These are words that evince a pleasure in particular kinds of sensuous experience, anchored in the material world. The colors and variegated surfaces or expanses that are described by these words demand or solicit a particular kind of attention. While the association of varietas with rhetoric might give a more formalist feel to the term, we should remember that, according to Cicero, varietas properly attaches to colors, and is used of other phenomena by extension (see below, pp. 17–18).

All too often, as Malcolm Heath (1989) has argued, we approach ancient literature with the mistaken assumption that our critical task is to rescue the unity of the work from the threat of digressions and diversions, while it is clear that poikilia and varietas are key terms in ancient aesthetics, broadly conceived.⁸ But if we can concede that a disproportionate amount of time has been spent worrying over unity, we can still be puzzled as to what to say about the variety of a literary work. Are we reduced to exclamation? We can point out, as ancient critics often did, that an author avoids monotony by varying the form in which similar elements recur, but this is merely to approve the avoidance of a fault. Is there a poetics, or a hermeneutics, of variety? Writing books on Catullus and Martial, I have been struck, as anybody must be, by the variety their books put on display. The same goes for Horace, Aulus Gellius, the Plinys, and many others. The phenomenon is given a passing nod by all commentators, and then dropped; after all, what is there to say about variety? Not only is it a difficult concept to bring into focus, it also presents a critical problem. How does one talk about a work’s variety?

Our critical vocabulary is poor when it comes to speaking of the centrifugal qualities of literary works. The deconstructive turn of postmodern theory does not provide a counterexample, since this strategy still relies on the assumption that the text is trying, against the proclivities of its own nature, to be univocal and unitary. Bakhtin’s notion of carnival is a more likely position from which to take a celebratory attitude to variety, as these words of Stallybrass and White (1986, 8) attest: Carnival is represented by Bakhtin as a world of topsy-turvy, of heteroglot exuberance, of ceaseless overrunning and excess where all is mixed, hybrid, ritually degraded and defiled. But even Bakhtin’s carnival has a polemical, parasitic relation to an unassailable centripetal norm. In the carnival, variety is a means and symptom of defilement, whereas in the ancient tradition nature rejoices in variety. The very difficulty of conceiving aesthetic form otherwise than through a dialectic of the building and dismantling of unity is a sign of how necessary it is to look at different strains in western poetics. While classicists of a deconstructive bent have taken apart texts that, vainly, profess unity, others have been busy debunking the professions of randomness made by authors of miscellaneous texts. Either way, the emphasis on debunking impedes the possibility of developing a positive perspective on variety. Concepts such as dissemination (Derrida), rhizome (Deleuze-Guattari), and flow (Serres) have been developed to describe organizational structures that are nonlinear; but we do not have to rely exclusively on new terms while old ones are still to be explored.

At its limit, an aesthetics of variety might abut on the discourse of the sublime, the concept that western aesthetics presents as an alternative to beauty, but variety is a distinct aesthetic criterion, which cannot be assimilated to the sublime. Edmund Burke, as we shall see, includes variety under the rubric of beauty, rather than sublimity, and there is an interesting line of thought about how variety relates to, but is not coextensive with, the sublime, as we shall see in chapter 3. Nor can the aesthetics of variety simply be identified with one pole of ideals such as the New Critical reconciliation of complexity with unity or of Horace’s concordia discors (Horace, Epist. 1.12.19), a balanced whole formed from the tension between opposites. In classical rhetoric, for one thing, variety is the complement of copia (abundance), not of unity, and sometimes it even appears to be the means of achieving copia. While the aesthetics of varietas does concern how elements relate to each other, it is not concerned with a reconciliation or balance achieved between the disparate.

We might start by thinking of variety, in its ancient sense, as a principle of non-assimilation, or more positively, as a perceptual field where one element sets another off, rather than complementing or completing it. An important member of the semantic field of varius/varietas in Latin is the verb distinguo (to separate, keep distinct, pick out, embellish, punctuate). Aristotelian aesthetics lays great stress on the synoptic, the perceptual field which can be taken in as a whole. The experience of variety is quite the opposite: without the orientation of a beginning, middle, or end, center or periphery, the eye is caught now by one thing, now another, or it passes over a single element (the hide of an animal, for instance) registering its many shades.

But I am anticipating a more detailed discussion, which I will conduct under the rubric of pleasure and aesthetics in chapter 2. It is time now to start at the beginning, with words and meanings.

1

Words and Meanings

I will start this chapter about words with some modern English usages, before going on to explore the original meanings of the Latin and Greek words from which they derive. My intention is to show that, not so long ago, the English words various and variety had a semantic richness that allowed them to sustain considerable emphasis, and the best way to show this is to look at how they feature in some passages of English poetry. My purpose is to build a prima facie case for the value of excavating the meaning of