‘When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary’: Poets and Dictionaries, Dictionaries and Poets

Abstract

Many poets choose to use unusual as well as usual words, exploiting their different possible senses, registers, and sounds, together with their varying cultural, geographical, historical, and etymological associations. In consequence, both poets and other writers have regularly turned to dictionaries to provide raw material for their writing, not least to dictionaries with quotations from other writers. Dictionaries have returned the compliment: from Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) onwards, many monolingual dictionaries of English – and its constituent geographical varieties – have drawn upon the language of well-known writers to support their definitions of usage. This chapter discusses the mutual attraction between poets and dictionaries, and explores the linguistic issues that this relationship raises, particularly for the OED, with reference to writers and critics such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Hugh MacDiarmid, Seamus Heaney, and others.