Of ‘of’: The Romance of a Preposition

Abstract

For poetry in English, prepositions may be the most private parts of speech. They carry no manifest freight of reference, and thus cannot easily be misapplied for figuration without falling into the kind of solecism which even far-fetched tropes escape. For example, ‘Give it back of me’ — for ‘Give it back to me’ — sounds only like bungled English, whereas ‘Give her back to the grass’, say, or the notorious para-predication of Chomsky’s, ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’, would not. They would only sound figurative. (In this latter instance as Frank Kermode recently pointed out in the instance of an exemplary phrase used by John Searle (Kermode 1986), there are allusive dimensions to the total rhetorical activity of the sentence.) The romance of nouns, then of verbs, at various periods in the history of meditative grammar has been discussed by linguists,¹ and the implicit non-literal predications of adjectives and adverbs are acknowedged by rhetorical theory.