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No Dialect Please, You're a Poet English
Dialect in Poetry in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Edited by Claire Hélie, Élise
Brault-Dreux, Émilie Loriaux
Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature London: Routledge, 2019 Hardcover. x+210 p. ISBN 978-0367258047. £115
Reviewed by Frank
Ferguson, Ulster University Martha Silano’s “It Was How a Sentence”, a rumination on what
a poet does with language, suggests that they may release words into the world
like a virus.* Given our current global predicament, this allusion appears to
carry even more potential for ill (and good) than Percy Shelley’s pronouncement
in his Defence of Poetry that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators”
of the age. However, this might prompt a further question “What does a poet do
then with dialect?” How might dialect differ to language? What relationships
and value judgements do we envisage on the difference between them? What are
the political, social, cultural, literary and aesthetic implications of this
relationship? These are weighty questions particularly at a time when the
language systems that we have inherited and operate within are being
scrutinised, questioned, decolonised and reconstituted. It also arrives when
often the term “dialect” is placed in lower consideration than language as
something of less significance and less personal or communal accomplishment,
and very often laden with assumptions on speakers’ intelligence, ability and
fraught with classist, gendered, regional and racist stereotyping. It is very
welcome to see this comprehensive collection of essays and its various
conclusions on a range of English dialects within the British and Irish
archipelago. Indeed, it is particularly compelling when Britain itself is
making profound inquiries into its very nature and future to be reminded of the
multitude of English dialects over the past two centuries that have
shaped and continue to shape Britishness, Irishness, Englishness, Scottishness,
and Welshness. The collection is neatly arranged and begins the exploration
of English Dialect poetry in the nineteenth century with a fascinating, if
somewhat brief chapter by Alan Chedzoy. It is always difficult to wonder when
it would be appropriate to trace the beginnings of dialect poetry. Indeed, to
comprehend dialect, one must also look to when language was standardised which
creates even more questions as to which point to survey when English
effectively came into being. It is therefore unfair to ask of a book that does
so much to examine so many varieties of modern and contemporary dialect to go
back further in time to explore previous manifestations of dialects. The first section of the collection offers new and refreshing
examinations of pre-twentieth century dialect poetry. Sue Edney’s reading of
Tennyson brings an intriguing exposition of a poet who is often read these days
as a writer of imperial sonority, rather than one influenced by his locale and
local speech. Elise Brault-Dreux’s fascinating analysis of D.H. Lawrence’s
reaction to Robert Burns offers an intriguing insight into how Lawrence’s
Modernism was highly charged by the sound and signs of his Midlands speech
community. The next section of the collection focuses on British
Dialects in twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry. One might quibble at
the term British, given that the majority of poets covered are or were English.
But despite reservations about terminology, there is an excellent range of subjects
covered in thoughtful and insightful ways. Jane Hodgson’s chapter which
examines from a linguistic point of view, the problematic nature of navigating
the meaning associated with dialect is particularly refreshing and insightful,
drawing as it does on the complicated history and comprehension of the term. It
offers a very helpful escape route away from the often blinkered and populist
interpretations of what people think they mean when they claim something as
dialect. Katy Shaw’s chapter on the use of dialect poetry by women during the
Miners’ Strike of 1984-5 is a standout chapter for me in this section, offering
as it does a means to understand the power of language and poetry to galvanise
communities to stand against threat and uncaring government policy. It also
steers the section away from a preponderance of focusing too much on male
canonical figures, which while the conclusions offered are generally important
and in need of utterance, obscure the important work done by less privileged
poets and communities. The final section on (Not so) New Dialects in Contemporary
Poetry is very broad in its examination of what might be understood by English
Dialect. There are fascinating survey chapters on Scotland and Ireland, by
Mathilde Pinson and Clíona Ní Ríordáin which are quite breath taking in their
scope. One feels for the Welsh a little at this point and the lack of a
similarly instructive exploration of Welsh/English poetic connections. The collection concludes with acknowledgement of the
inheritance of Britain’s imperial past and history of migration through the
work of writers such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah and Daljit
Nagra. The final chapters provide very helpful answers to, but also pose more
questions on how we understand vernacular language through poetry, and how
often poetry purports to simultaneously channel vernacular speech but isn’t
really vernacular speech at all. This book provides much for linguists and literary scholars
to consider. It is a mammoth compendium of ideas and approaches to
understanding dialect within the very capacious portmanteau of what might be
understood as English dialect poetry. The positive and negative connotations of
the term dialect make it simultaneously a coveted and despised one for poets.
The focus of this collection deals with this attraction and repulsion that the
term engenders in a wide range of disciplines across a wide timeframe in the
British Isles and across a wide spectrum of poets. The recourse to the use of
dialect provides a means to anchor poetic speech in the vital space of the
region or the local space or even within the home, but which can lay the writer
up to charges of working in a form which some view as lacking prestige. Though
this form of denigration can then fire the writer or community to respond,
resist and retaliate. Yet there is something that is perhaps overlooked in the
book is that often the poets who chose to write in “dialect” were writing in a
minority or literary language that they believed had the same if not the
greater prestige than the standard English. It is this aspect of ‘dialect’ that
provides my difficulty with this book—the unconscious bias towards the concept
of the English language as the prime mover or dominant player “language” with
set rules and everything else being a dialect with some loose conventions. Such
views fail to see the significance of language movements within the United
Kingdom and Ireland that markedly claim what they write in to be languages in
their own right with quite strenuous procedures for signification and writing,
but distinct from English and operating within long established systems.
Moreover, a poet like Seamus Heaney is of particular interest for the
examination of the concepts of what occurs at the meeting points of cultural,
political and linguistic fault lines. Heaney’s interaction with Irish and
British English betrays an even more complex sweep through Hiberno-English,
Queen’s English, Anglo Saxon, Bellaghy English, Ulster Scots, Ulster English,
Mid-Ulster English, Irish, Scots, Latin and Greek. Like Burns his mastery as a
poet may not reside in the super-articulation of one single dialect but in his
adaptability to bend all to forms to use what is appropriate in each line.
There is to borrow another old English innuendo, a lot of it about. Perhaps rather
than to see dialect as something to be awkward around or ashamed of it is time
to stand up and be proud of it. Certainly, we can say that this book goes a
long way to help build confidence in and arouse scholarly excitement in poetry
in English dialect. _______ * Martha Silano, “It was how a sentence”. Agni
(2015) : 61-63.
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