ic, but touched on a number of significant peripheral subjects. He
showed the virtue of concrete and specific imagery at a time when most
poets sought the sanctuary of abstractions and universals; commented
cogently on the styles of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare; anticipated
the later doctrine of the power of the incomplete and the obscure to
suggest and therefore to compel the imagination to create; adopted and
expanded Addison's distinction between the sublime and the beautiful;
and, borrowing a suggestion that he probably found in Dennis (_Critical
Works_, ed. Edward N. Hooker, Baltimore, 1919, I, 47), developed a
profitable distinction between the sublime image and the sublime thought
by examining their different psychological effects.

But, because they run counter to the accepted opinions of his age, it
is Purney's comments on matters of style that are especially striking,
although it must be remembered that most of them have to do with the
pastoral alone and do not constitute a general theory of poetics.
Perhaps his most original contribution is his attack upon the cautious
contemporary styles of poetry: "strong lines," a term that originally
defined the style of the metaphysical poets, but that now described the
compact and pregnant manner of Dryden's satires, for example, and the
"fine and agreeable," exemplified, let us say, by Pope's _Pastorals_ or
Prior's _vers de societe_. To these Purney preferred the bolder though
less popular styles, the sublime and the tender, corresponding to the
two pure artistic manners that Addison had distinguished. How widely
Purney intended to diverge from current poetry can be judged by his
definition of the sublime image as one that puts the mind "upon the
Stretch" as in Lady Macbeth's apostrophe to night; and by his praise of
the simplicity of Desdemona's "Mine eyes do itch." Both passages were
usually ridiculed by Purney's contemporaries as indecorous.

Equally original is Purney's concept of simplicity, which he insisted
should appear in the style and the nature of the characters, not in
denuding the fable and in divesting the poem of the ornaments of poetry,
as Pope had argued in the preface of his _Pastorals_. It was this
concept that also led Purney to his unusual theory of enervated diction.
How unusual it was can be judged by comparing with the then-current
practices and theories of poetic diction his recommendation of
monosyllables, expletives, the archaic language