In Praise of Adjectives
Well now, there's an odd thing for a writer to say. After all, like any other writer, I have cut my teeth on mantras like "verbs make language move, adjectives clog it up". And in a general sense I still believe it. When I've written a poem, I still tend to do a rough count of the verb-adjective ratio, and I expect to find it about 2:1. If it were the other way about, I'd be worried.
And yet… come with me for a moment into a creative writing workshop where a poem is being considered. The group are dissatisfied with its impact, and someone has pointed to a surplus of adjectives as the cause - sometimes several to a line. Nearly everyone agrees with this diagnosis, and I might have done too, but for the maverick mature student at the back who, when asked his opinion, murmurs "Sweet day: so cool, so calm, so bright".
He's right, of course: it isn't the number of adjectives but the choice and disposition of them. And I'm beginning to think there may be a slight difference in the way good writers choose verbs and adjectives. With a verb, the most important consideration, as often as not, is forensic accuracy: you want the verb that conveys exactly, not approximately, how a thing happened, or how someone said or did something. This is the root of the prejudice of some teachers against adverbs: the feeling that the verb should, often, not need clarifying with more words if a more exact verb had been chosen in the first place. It's true too that verbs make fantastic shorthand, carrying whole fields of imagery within themselves; it would surely have taken Paul Henry far longer to convey in any other way the mood that comes over from two verbs here (from "The Glebelands"):
The river pedals after the sun.
The paint flakes off the trees.
With adjectives, although accuracy is still a consideration, it seems to me that we are often looking also for surprise, for the qualifier that will cause the reader to look at the object in a new or unexpected way. This is the more important in that certain adjectives tend to attach themselves so naturally to certain nouns that they can tell us nothing we didn't already know - a pink sky may be worth remarking on, a blue sky generally not. These expected adjective-noun combos become, in effect, clichés, and can soon kill a poem or story.
But few parts of speech can make you open your eyes wide and re-read the line like a truly unexpected adjective. Here is the 17th-century bilingual Welsh poet Morgan Llwyd, writing in English, in his long poem "1648":
Our king, queen, prince and prelates high their merry Christmas spent
With brawny hearts, while yet their dogs could Lazarus lament.
"Brawny" connotes now, as it did then, physical toughness, though back in Morgan Llwyd's day, more of its original meaning of "fleshy" or "fleshly" may have survived. In itself it is a compliment if anything, but perhaps because of the alliteration, brawn has also long been an antonym of "brain"; it carries the hint that where there is much brawn, brain ought not to be expected in any quantity. And in British English it also carries a culinary sense: pig's head rendered down by boiling to jelly. It is therefore the last adjective you might expect to see conjoined to "heart" - an arm may be fleshy and tough and no harm done, but a heart? These aristocrats, stuffing themselves with meat at Christmas, are all flesh, nether head nor heart: their very dogs can pity the poor man at the gate but they cannot, because their hearts are toughened and their conscience rendered down to jelly. That's a word justifying its place in the line, adjective or no.
But how then are we to explain the magic of that line of Herbert's: what is there remotely unexpected or surprising about the adjectives "sweet", "cool", "calm" and "bright", applied to a sunny morning? As Mr Carson said, it's the way you tell 'em, and in this case it is all in the way the genius Herbert has made the line move. In an 8-syllable line he has placed no fewer than three long pauses, effectively caesuras, after the words "day", "cool" and "calm", and the line is end-stopped after "bright" for good measure. There is no logical way of reading it but slowly, pausing on those words, savouring them as you would the qualities they represent if you stepped out of your door on that day. Sometimes the element of surprise is in the commonplace, if readers can be nudged into taking time to look at it afresh; sometimes too, the simplest words are genuinely the most accurate and apposite, though it may take a Herbert to arrange them in such a way that they lose their familiarity.
Anyway, there is no point in being anti-adjective, or anti-any part of speech, for the sake of it. There may be sense in using them sparingly - to continue Llywd's culinary image, as if they were the spices to the meal: a piece of writing overspiced with adjectives can become cloying, but leaving out the spice altogether may produce something deeply unmemorable.
If, of course, you are George Herbert, no rules apply.
And yet… come with me for a moment into a creative writing workshop where a poem is being considered. The group are dissatisfied with its impact, and someone has pointed to a surplus of adjectives as the cause - sometimes several to a line. Nearly everyone agrees with this diagnosis, and I might have done too, but for the maverick mature student at the back who, when asked his opinion, murmurs "Sweet day: so cool, so calm, so bright".
He's right, of course: it isn't the number of adjectives but the choice and disposition of them. And I'm beginning to think there may be a slight difference in the way good writers choose verbs and adjectives. With a verb, the most important consideration, as often as not, is forensic accuracy: you want the verb that conveys exactly, not approximately, how a thing happened, or how someone said or did something. This is the root of the prejudice of some teachers against adverbs: the feeling that the verb should, often, not need clarifying with more words if a more exact verb had been chosen in the first place. It's true too that verbs make fantastic shorthand, carrying whole fields of imagery within themselves; it would surely have taken Paul Henry far longer to convey in any other way the mood that comes over from two verbs here (from "The Glebelands"):
The river pedals after the sun.
The paint flakes off the trees.
With adjectives, although accuracy is still a consideration, it seems to me that we are often looking also for surprise, for the qualifier that will cause the reader to look at the object in a new or unexpected way. This is the more important in that certain adjectives tend to attach themselves so naturally to certain nouns that they can tell us nothing we didn't already know - a pink sky may be worth remarking on, a blue sky generally not. These expected adjective-noun combos become, in effect, clichés, and can soon kill a poem or story.
But few parts of speech can make you open your eyes wide and re-read the line like a truly unexpected adjective. Here is the 17th-century bilingual Welsh poet Morgan Llwyd, writing in English, in his long poem "1648":
Our king, queen, prince and prelates high their merry Christmas spent
With brawny hearts, while yet their dogs could Lazarus lament.
"Brawny" connotes now, as it did then, physical toughness, though back in Morgan Llwyd's day, more of its original meaning of "fleshy" or "fleshly" may have survived. In itself it is a compliment if anything, but perhaps because of the alliteration, brawn has also long been an antonym of "brain"; it carries the hint that where there is much brawn, brain ought not to be expected in any quantity. And in British English it also carries a culinary sense: pig's head rendered down by boiling to jelly. It is therefore the last adjective you might expect to see conjoined to "heart" - an arm may be fleshy and tough and no harm done, but a heart? These aristocrats, stuffing themselves with meat at Christmas, are all flesh, nether head nor heart: their very dogs can pity the poor man at the gate but they cannot, because their hearts are toughened and their conscience rendered down to jelly. That's a word justifying its place in the line, adjective or no.
But how then are we to explain the magic of that line of Herbert's: what is there remotely unexpected or surprising about the adjectives "sweet", "cool", "calm" and "bright", applied to a sunny morning? As Mr Carson said, it's the way you tell 'em, and in this case it is all in the way the genius Herbert has made the line move. In an 8-syllable line he has placed no fewer than three long pauses, effectively caesuras, after the words "day", "cool" and "calm", and the line is end-stopped after "bright" for good measure. There is no logical way of reading it but slowly, pausing on those words, savouring them as you would the qualities they represent if you stepped out of your door on that day. Sometimes the element of surprise is in the commonplace, if readers can be nudged into taking time to look at it afresh; sometimes too, the simplest words are genuinely the most accurate and apposite, though it may take a Herbert to arrange them in such a way that they lose their familiarity.
Anyway, there is no point in being anti-adjective, or anti-any part of speech, for the sake of it. There may be sense in using them sparingly - to continue Llywd's culinary image, as if they were the spices to the meal: a piece of writing overspiced with adjectives can become cloying, but leaving out the spice altogether may produce something deeply unmemorable.
If, of course, you are George Herbert, no rules apply.