Proper Names, the Dictionary, and the Poetry of Experiment

Abstract

This essay focuses upon proper names: words that are not usually found in modern dictionaries – and that posed James Murray a number of problems in the early stages of his editing of the Oxford English Dictionary. After briefly considering the power of proper names in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, the essay sketches an overview of their changing relations with the dictionary, from the seventeenth century to the present day. It then discusses some of the ways in which J. H. Prynne, John Wilkinson, and Keston Sutherland have used proper names throughout their work, with its many challenges to meaning, in order to clarify as well as to complicate questions of reference.