"unnatural" to the London readership, Wordsworth was careful to point out that he was using it not for an exotic or elevated effect, but as a sample of the contemporary "language of men", specifically the language of poor, uneducated country folk. On the other hand, the later Romantic poet John Keats had a new interest in the poetry of Spenser and in the "ancient English" bards, and so his language was often quite elevated and archaic. Modernism, on the other hand, rejected specialized poetic diction altogether and without reservation. Ezra Pound, in his Imagist essay/manifesto A Few Don'ts (1913) warned against using superfluous words, especially adjectives (compare the use of adjectives in the 18th-century poem quoted above) and also advised the avoidance of abstractions, stating his belief that 'the natural object is always the adequate symbol'. Since the Modernists, poetry has approached all words as inherently interesting, and some schools of poetry after the Modernists (Minimalism and Plain language, in particular) have insisted on making diction itself the subject of poetry. Notes References Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London, 1920. Fussell, Paul. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. New York: Random House, 1965. Higginson, William J., The Haiku Seasons: Poetry of the Natural World. Kodansha International 1996. Holman, C. Hugh, Harmon, William, eds. A Handbook to Literature. New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1986. Pound, Ezra, ABC of Reading. London: Faber, 1951 (first published 1934). Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson; tales from Norse mythology. Jean I. Young, trans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction, 1928. External links Examples of diction in poetry. Aristotle's Poetics, translated by Ingram Bywater (1920) Snorri Sturluson, "Skáldskaparmál", from the Prose Edda, translated by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916) William Wordsworth, "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" (1802) Appendix to Wordsworth's Preface, "By what is usually called poetic diction." Poetic rhythm Poetics