Article: Warren's recondite vocabulary.

Every now and then Warren slam dunks readers with unusual words that send them scampering for a dictionary. In rereading all of Warren's poems, I have encountered many words whose meanings are tough to guess at (even in context) or drawn from the less traveled regions of an educated vocabulary. In his poems, often even words whose meanings we know can seem like esoteric entries in a New York Times crossword puzzle dictionary. Technically, for the use of a recondite vocabulary, the rhetorical figure of speech that perhaps comes closest to defining the trait in Warren is amplificatio, or the elevation of style by using what Renaissance rhetorician Henry Peacham defines as ...

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