[R. P. Blackmur's] themes were grand, and he worked his language hard in their service, but if all else failed or was felt as failure he still loved words for their own sake, and cared for the creative possibilities of a word. He had inventive powers to match the care. Only the maximum resource of language satisfied him, and he believed that words become an idiom of the imagination by not stopping before their appropriate limit. Words, by themselves or left to themselves, have every character short of idiom: idiom is what we put into our words, or what we bring them to, even at the risk of driving them beyond their official relations and properties. Think of … this paragraph from his essay on Madame Bovary:

Emma is one who cannot leave things alone, full of the creative spirit of adolescence. Lacking training, she depends on instinct, which...