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Shades of gray: a diachronic reading of Thomas Hardy's "Neutral Tones".(Victorian poetry)(essay)(Critical essay)

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From: Victorian Poetry
Date: 20060622
Author:Senior, Claire

History has given names to many ages in the life of the world; ours is the age of words.

--E. J. Phelps, 1889

Richard Chenevix Trench, drawing on Coleridge and Emerson in On the Study of Words, suggested to his Victorian audience that "we are not to look for the poetry which a people may possess only in its poems, or in its poetical customs, traditions, and beliefs. Many a single word also is itself a concentrated poem, having stores of poetical thought and imagery laid up in it." (1) The lack of this sort of diachronic awareness in existing dictionaries was the impetus ...

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