It was not until the neo-classical poetry was in its death-agony that we meet with adequate appreciation of the admirable language which Pope brought to perfection and bequeathed to his successors. “The familiar style,” wrote Cowper to Unwin,[55] “is of all the styles the most difficult to succeed in. To make verse speak the language of prose without being prosaic—to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, elegantly, and without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of the rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake.” The “familiar style,” which Cowper here definitely characterizes, was in its own special province as good a model as was the beautiful simplicity of Blake when “poetical poetry” had once more come into its own; and it is important to remember that this fact received due recognition from both Wordsworth and Coleridge. “The mischief,” wrote the former,[56] “was effected not by Pope’s satirical and moral pieces, for these entitle him to the highest place among the poets of his class; it was by his ‘Homer.’... No other work in the language so greatly vitiated the diction of English poetry.” And Coleridge, too, called attention to the “almost faultless position and choice of words” in Pope’s original compositions, in comparison with the absurd “pseudo-poetic diction” of his translations of Homer.[57] The “Pope style” failed to produce real poetry—poetry of infinite and universal appeal, animated with personal feeling and emotion not merely because of its preference for the generic rather than the typical, but because its practitioners for the most part lacked those qualities of intense imagination in which alone the highest art can have its birth. CHAPTER III THE “STOCK” DICTION OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY Since the time when Wordsworth launched his manifestoes on the language fit and proper for poetry, it may almost be said that whenever the term “poetic diction” is found used as a more or less generic term of critical disparagement, it has been with reference, implied or explicit, to the so-called classical poetry of the Augustan ages. But the condemnation has perhaps been given too wide an application, and hence there has arisen a tendency to place in this category all the language of all the poets who were supposed to have taken Pope as their model, so that “the Pope style” and “eighteenth century diction” have almost become synonymous terms, as labels for a lifeless, imitative language in which poets felt themselves constrained to express all their thoughts and feelings. This criticism is both unjust and misleading. For when this “false and gaudy splendour” is unsparingly condemned, it is not always recognized or remembered that it is mainly to be found in the descriptive poetry of the period.