Modern American Poetry

(^434) Bonnie Costello
scrutinized the idea of America as a “languageless country” and explored the
truth and misprision in the notion that America had merely bastardized the
mother tongue (American language as counterfeit English). It is clear that
Moore had read Mencken’s The American Language,first published in 1919,
before writing “England” (1920). The question of the genuine has particular
relevance here, as the English evoked the concept in order to abhor all things
American, especially its “stolen” language. Mencken identified an American
language that was something more divergent than a derivative of English; it
was an entire new “stream.” While the English expressed abhorrence of
American “expectoration” in the “pure well of English undefiled,” Mencken
celebrated the fecundity and class and regional diversity of a new language—
the autonomy of America’s new idiom. The book begins by documenting
English snobbery about Americanisms, with the first four chapters entitled
“The Earliest Alarms,” “The English Attack,” “American ‘Barbarisms,’” and
“The English Attitude Today.” Moore asks concerning “all that noted
superiority” (recognized in the world abroad): “if not stumbled upon in
America, / must one imagine that it is not there?” She may be remembering
a long passage Mencken quotes from Sydney Smith, which begins: “In the
four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an
American play? Or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the
world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons ... ?” (18). In referring to
America as a “languageless country,” Moore may be recalling Mencken’s
quotation from Coleridge: “the Americans presented the extraordinary
anomaly of a people without a language” (3). Moore admits that “the letter a
in psalm and calm when / pronounced with the sound of ain candle, is very
noticeable,” and hardly music to the ear trained on the King’s English. (She is
recalling Mencken’s examples of how the English revile American sounds:
“missionary becomes missionary, angel, angel, danger, danger, etc.”) But why
should this mere accident of linguistic history become a summary of national
character? With Mencken, Moore rejects a notion of “natural” English, some
pure, undeveloping “well” of undefiled words. “The genuine” in language has
little to do with purity of origin. The emergence of American speech, like the
endless transformation of the landscape, was a sign of vitality in use. The link
between language and landscape here is important. Moore identifies the
dynamic, evolutionary character of culture with the diversity of nature and
dynamism of the landscape. At the same time, by connecting language to
landscape she reminds us that it is constructed as well as organic, that it
operates as a sign as well as a signified.
If Moore challenged European superiority with a call to American
creativity and diversity, she was also wary of how the myth of the American