We forget too often that the written word is merely (merely!) an attempt to represent the spoken word in the absence of a human presence before us. The technique of writing includes the device of punctuation to replicate the pulsations of breath which bring life to that presence, and that is why there is some truth to associating commas and periods with the pauses and breaks in our voice. Some truth, not all, because when high emotion alone irregulates our breath, clarity is obscured and confusion ensues. Feeling and reason both must be present, on the principle that life itself comprises both.
But imagine what is involved in composing and punctuating a sentence with an eye to imitating the living voice so faithfully. A writer, as a human being, has, moreover, more than one voice, indeed, as many voices as presumably one person has a personality for every new situation lived through. This is why we have to be fair in reading literature that might at first appear off-putting, for if we are able to attend closely to the construction of an author’s sentences, we can give ourselves the chance to experience a mood, or perspective, or even a way of being which we might otherwise not have the occasion to realize.
To illustrate this, let’s consider a passage from the writer W. Macneile Dixon’s essay “Wordsworth.” Dixon was writing as an academic in Great Britain toward the end of the Second World War, and this essay appears in his work entitled An Apology for the Arts. His title should alert us to the serious frame of mind we will likely need to put on (an apology is a serious explanation of the rationale for some study or undertaking), and indeed his foreword opens with this grand sentence: “For some years before the era of our present troubles I entertained myself with the idea of devoting a quiet retirement to the writing of a slight book upon a great subject, no less than the place and significance of the arts in human life.” The war dissolved that dream, but did not enervate the author, for the stateliness of the third paragraph of his essay on Wordsworth will fix the attention of anyone reading attentively:
Here, then, are three great things. The poetry of Wordsworth is sincere, we can trust it; it is lucid, we can understand it; it is original, there is nothing elsewhere like it in the world. It may fail at times in other qualities, but these are its abiding attributes; to these it owes its unceasing and unchallengeable power. And in no single poem are they more admirably blended than in The Prelude, where the poet speaks of himself and is himself.
The first sentence merely bridges us to this third paragraph from the second, where the writer had already but more covertly mentioned the poet’s three attributes of sincerity, lucidity, and originality. Dixon’s second sentence in this passage, though, is nothing short of statuesque, and it arrests our attention; we’re caught first by the punctuation and then we hear interiorly Dixon’s own sincere voice which his punctuation scores on the page. His third sentence continues with a concession, always a strong move in persuasion, and ends in a description of the poet’s absolute (unchallengeable) power. And to preclude our thinking that Dixon has lost himself in a reverie of uncritical adulation, he returns to the clear, solid ground of specific detail: we will see evidenced all he claims in Wordsworth’s one poem, The Prelude.
There is something important to learn here: close reading, reading which comprehends both content and structure, can open unfamiliar worlds for us. Dixon’s passage is more than one person’s enthusiasm for a great traditional poet; it is an enthusiasm understood, an energy rationally controlled. That second sentence, with its three pairs of clauses organized by semicolons, asserts both opinion and reason. Dixon believes Wordsworth’s poetry is sincere because we can trust it; that it is lucid because we can understand it; that it is original because we cannot find anything like it elsewhere. The semicolons take the place of those omitted conjunctions, and his voice here written on the page replicates, with the help of that punctuation and phrasing, the meaningful cadence of his own interior voice as he was constructing a sentence to embody that rhythm. The semicolons stop the rush of each opinion, and each clause following glides the thought down to a rational conclusion. This turns what might otherwise strike us as idiosyncratic suggestion into intelligent and animated insight.
Dixon’s skillful construction has produced a statuesque sentence whose form represents a dignified, considered conclusion about one great poet’s work. Statuesque, dignified, pleasing in form—these are qualities at the base of the classical conception of art, and it seems Dixon was able himself to effect the kind of art he wished to explain and defend in his work.
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