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know a three-year-old boy who calls an auto-
mobile a "cadeúga." It is, both to him and in
point of fact, an excellently descriptive term,
based, like many a word in the pristine days of
speech, on the sound the thing makes. But you
can't go to the telephone and ask for a "cadeú-
ga" with any valid hope of seeing it appear.
And since the world with which the young ad-
venturer must communicate prefers to call the
affair a motor, or a car, or a machine (incom-
parably less exact and fitting terms), he will. in-
fallibly drop his own fresh and vivid coinage, and
conform. The tangential energy of the individual
beats its wings in vain against the centripetal
force of the community, and every infant an-
archist in speech yields at last to the usage of
that world by which, if he is to live, he must be
understood.

All this, of course, has larger implications. Ex-
pression in art can no more escape the demands
of intelligibility, than expression in every-day
speech. The poet writes in order to communicate,
and to communicate he, too, must be understood.
And the language of poetry in the broader sense,
poetic forms and conventions of whatever sort,
is established by long usage, like speech itself.
It may, from the point. of view of either rhyme or

-94-

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Publication Information: Book Title: Convention and Revolt in Poetry. Contributors: John Livingston Lowes - author. Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company. Place of Publication: Boston. Publication Year: 1919. Page Number: 94.
    
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