Sydney Lea‘s nonfiction piece, “Democracy and the Demotic: Reflections on the ‘lingua franca et jocundissima’ in American Poetry,” appeared in NER 16.3 (1994).
The title of my remarks is high sounding enough, yet in fact I do little more here than muse about a tradition in American poetry that my friend Stanley Plumly describes as “speech barking back at song.” More poet than scholar myself, I offer a kind of reverie.
♦
In a journal entry for 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson, engaging in a reverie of his own, imagined himself “a professor of Rhetoric–teacher of the art of writing well to young men.” “I should use Dante for my textbook,” Emerson surmised: “Dante knew how to throw the weight of his body into each act, and is, like Byron, Burke, and Carlyle, the Rhetorician. I find him full of the nobil volgare eloquenza; that he knows ‘God damn,’ and can be rowdy if he please, and he does please.” What Dante could teach was that daily surroundings were “the very best basis for poetry, and the material which you must work up.”
