Oppressive Rhyming: George Orwell on Poetry and Totalitarianism

Abstract

In George Orwell’s 1984, the poet Ampleforth observes that “the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes.” In this article I connect Ampleforth’s observation to Orwell’s many other writings on language and political control and then show how Orwell’s discussion of poetry’s resistance to political manipulation enhances Tocqueville’s and Burke’s accounts of totalitarianism. Specifically, Orwell illustrates how an easily “rhyming” polity is particularly vulnerable to totalitarian politics, while a society containing considerable disorder in its language and politics can be strongly resistant to such tyranny.

Notes

1 George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classics, 1977), 42–43.

2 Orwell, 231.

3 Orwell, 42, 231.

4 Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 138–39.

5 Roffman is slightly off when she argues that “his real crime is being a rhyming poet.” In fact, the Party values Ampleforth for his rhyming skills; his only crime is to be stymied by a particularly recalcitrant bit of subversive poetry. The durability of Kipling’s poem causes Ampleforth’s thoughtcrime, not his occupation as a poet or any lack of zeal on his part. Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, “‘A Monument to the Obvious’: George Orwell and Poetry,” in George Orwell, ed. Courtney T. Wemyss and Alexej Ugrinsky (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 69.

6 George Orwell, “The English People,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 3 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 24–26.

7 George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 4 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 127–40.

8 Orwell, “The English People,” 25.

9 Roy Harris, “The Misunderstanding of Newspeak,” in George Orwell (Modern Critical Views), ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 114.

10 Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”; see also Orwell’s discussion of ordinary English fish names in George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1950), 86–87; for Orwell’s criticism of the metric system for its lack of vivid names, see George Orwell, “As I Please,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 4 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 305–6.

11 George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 4 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 67–68.

12 Orwell, 69.

13 Quoted in Frederick W. Bateson, English Poetry and the English Language (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), 15.

14 George Orwell, “Letter to George Woodcock, April 24, 1948,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 4 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 418–19.

15 Orwell, “The English People,” 29; George Orwell, “New Words,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 3–12.

16 George Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 194.

17 See, for example, Gordon Comstock’s writing struggles in George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1956).

18 Maria Chialant notes that George Bowling, in Coming Up for Air, attempts to “recal[l . . .] a language whose euphony and semantics were still coincidental.” Maria Teresa Chialant, “Past and Present in Coming up for Air and Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Comparison with Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome,” in George Orwell, eds. Courtney T. Wemyss and Alexej Ugrinsky (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 15.

19 George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 56–59.

20 Orwell, 61–62; see also R. L. Patterson, “Orwell, Self-Taught Student of English History,” in George Orwell, eds. Courtney T. Wemyss and Alexej Ugrinsky (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 61.

21 Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling,” 184–97. On Orwell’s ambivalence toward the British Empire, see George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol. 1, 4 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), 235–42; Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), 27.

22 Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” 59.

23 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, eds. Francis Canavan and Edward John Payne, vol. 2, Select Works of Edmund Burke: A New Imprint of the Payne Edition (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 180–83, 245–46.

24 Burke, 2:171–72, 175–76.

25 See William Steinhoff, George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1975), 160.

26 George Woodcock, “George Orwell and the Living Word,” in George Orwell (Modern Critical Views), ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 136.

27 It is worth noting that at least one scholar believes that Orwell does not provide a satisfactory answer to the question of why people want such thorough power. See George Kateb, “The Road to 1984,” Political Science Quarterly 81, no. 4 (December 1, 1966): 579.

28 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 284–86.

29 See Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” 62–63.

30 Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 209.

31 Lionel Trilling provides a delightful discussion of English “cantankerousness” in Trilling, “George Orwell and the Politics of Truth,” in George Orwell (Modern Critical Views), ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 32.

32 See D. G. Kehl, “The Two Most Powerful Weapons against Doublespeak,” The English Journal 77, no. 3 (March 1, 1988): 59, doi:10.2307/818416.

33 For the thoroughness of this totalitarianism, see Michael Sheldon, Orwell: The Authorized Biography (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), 436–37; Patricia Rae, “Mr. Charrington’s Junk Shop: T. S. Eliot and Modernist Poetics in Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Twentieth Century Literature 43, no. 2 (July 1, 1997): 203, 212; Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 250; Steinhoff, George Orwell and the Origins of 1984, 170; Mark Connelly, The Diminished Self: Orwell and the Loss of Freedom (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987), chap. 3. Connelly, however, seems to turn Orwell into a fatalist (p. 24), which may not give Orwell’s optimistic side enough credit.