But the significance of Blake’s work in the purging and purifying of poetic diction was not, as might perhaps be expected, recognized by his contemporaries and immediate successors. For Coleridge, writing some thirty years later, it was Cowper, and his less famous contemporary Bowles, who were the pioneers in the rejecting of the old and faded style and the beginning of the new, the first to combine “natural thoughts with natural diction.”[82] Coleridge’s opinion seems to us now to be an over-statement, but we rather suspect that Cowper was not unwilling to regard himself as an innovator in poetic language. In his correspondence he reveals himself constantly pre-occupied with the question of poetic expression, and especially with the language fit and proper for his translation of Homer. His opinion of Pope’s attempt has already been referred to, but he himself was well aware of the inherent difficulties.[83] He had, it would seem, definite and decided opinions on the subject of poetic language; he recognized the lifelessness of the accepted diction, which, rightly or wrongly, he attributed especially to the influence of Pope’s “Homer,” and tried to escape from its bondage. His oft-quoted thesis that in the hands of the eighteenth century poets poetry had become a “mere mechanic art,” he developed at length in his ode “Secundum Artem,” which comprises almost a complete catalogue of the ornaments which enabled the warblers to have their tune by heart. What Cowper in that ode pillories—“the trim epithets,” the “sweet alternate rhyme,” the “flowers of light description”—were in the main what were to be held up to ridicule in the _Lyrical Ballads_ prefaces; Wordsworth’s attack is here anticipated by twenty years. But, as later in the case of Wordsworth, Cowper in his early work has not a little of the language which he is at such pains to condemn. Thus Horace again appears in the old familiar guise, Now o’er the spangled hemisphere, Diffused the starry train appear (“Fifth Satire”) whilst even in “Table Talk” we find occasional conventional descriptions such as Nature... Spreads the fresh verdure of the fields and leads The dancing Naiads through the dewy meads.