The Right Word For The Right Mandible

What can we learn from a genius, if we ourselves are not geniuses?

George Sterling had a gift for adjectives that, in my opinion, matched the brilliance of Shakespeare and Keats, and has made me scornfully aware that too many writers give little thought to precision or to fire.

A writer who saw Sterling's brilliance was Ambrose Bierce. *

One of a poet's most authenticating credentials may be found in his epithets. In them is the supreme ordeal to which he must come and from which is no appeal. The epithets of the versifier, the mere metrician, are either contained in their substantives or add nothing that is worth while to the meaning; those of the true poet are instinct with novel and felicitous significances. They personify, ennoble, exalt, spiritualize, endow with thought and feeling, touch to action like the spear of Ithuriel. The prosaic mind can no more evolve such than ditch-water in a champagne-glass can sparkle and effervesce, or cold iron give off coruscations when hammered. Have the patience to consider a few of Mr. Sterling's epithets, besides those in the lines already quoted:

'Purpled' realm; 'striving' billows; 'wattled' monsters; 'timid' sapphires of the snow; 'lit' wastes; a 'stainèd' twilight of the South; 'tiny' twilight in the jacinth, and 'wintry' orb of the moonstone; 'winy' agate and 'banded' onyx; 'lustrous' rivers; 'glowering' pyres of the burning-ghaut, and so forth.

Up to this point, I agree with Bierce, but then he adds:

Do such words come by taking thought? Do they come ever to the made poet? -- to the 'poet of the day' -- poet by resolution of a 'committee on literary exercises'? Fancy the poor pretender, conscious of his pretense and sternly determined to conceal it, laboring with a brave confusion of legs and a copious excretion of honest sweat to evolve felicities like these!

If Bierce is right, if such an ability depends on genius, and cannot be learned through study or applied through hard work, then what remains for the rest of us to do?

Everything.

Writers need not be geniuses to write, at the very least, well, or, again at the very least, interestingly. We might not show the flair of Sterling (or of Keats, or of Shakespeare), but we can still reject the first word that comes to the keyboard; we can think about what we need to convey; we can hold an image in our minds, turn it around to see all of its curves and planes as if it were a skull, and struggle to find the right word for the right mandible.

None of this effort would turn us into poets, but it would help to turn us into writers worth reading.

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* Ambrose Bierce, 'A Poet And His Poem.' From THE COLLECTED WORKS OF AMBROSE BIERCE, VOLUME 10. The Neale Publishing Company, 1911.