Mark Smith

I am currently working on a book —The Only Rule of Language— about the customary but mutable rules of verbal performance known as “usage.” In it, I explore the practices through which poets, philologists, and lexicographers of the last three hundred years or so have become aware of the changeableness of words in use. Literary translation of foreign poems is one archive where it is possible to discern variations in English usage. Another is the historical record of illustrative examples of sentences assembled in dictionaries such as the OED . In this research project, as in much of my scholarly work, I am interested in the Shelleyan problem of how and to what degree the linguistic currencies of everyday life and experience are altered by the innovations and anomalies of poetry. | Romantic poetry and prose, modernist poetry and poetics, contemporary poetry and poetics, theory and practice of literary translation, creative writing (poetry and narrative non-fiction), history of literary criticism, William Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Ezra Pound

Mark Smith is Associate Professor, English & Creative Writing at MacEwan University. Their stated interests include I am currently working on a book —The Only Rule of Language— about the customary but mutable rules of verbal performance known as “usage.” In it, I explore the practices through which poets, philologists, and lexicographers of the last three hundred years or so have become aware of the changeableness of words in use. Literary translation of foreign poems is one archive where it is possible to discern variations in English usage. Another is the historical record of illustrative examples of sentences assembled in dictionaries such as the OED . In this research project, as in much of my scholarly work, I am interested in the Shelleyan problem of how and to what degree the linguistic currencies . This summary considered all 2 collected sources.