Laudator Temporis Acti

Nicholas Horsfall, "The Poetics of Toponymy," in Fifty Years at the Sibyl's Heels: Selected Papers on Virgil and Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 477-486 (at 477):

Names are signposts in a child's imagination and thereafter in an adult's memory: my mental map of childhood London is not a visible map at all, but remains an elaborate tissue of homes, aunts, toyshops, dentists, friends' homes, favourite walks, cinemas. These private gazetteers of ours are perforce idiosyncratic and disorderly; they interrupt unpredictably and inconveniently those slightly more disciplined maps-in-the-mind which we acquire at school, and, if we are very lucky, from parents who read or, better still, recite to us the poetry they love. For that poetry (and all I say is just as true of song) will prove to contain names: 'silent on a peak in Darien', 'down in Demerara', 'at Flores in the Azores', 'silently rowed to the Charlestown shore', which will, many of them, sink into the mire of the not-explained and not-understood, only to emerge, many years on, gleaming, and weighed down with some relevant information.

Id., p. 478:

Nor should we neglect the place's very name, viewed not only as a key, but as a real, sounding word; for now, I defy a reader to find beauty or poetic merit in the names Didcot, Casalpusterlengo, Schweinfurth, or Hazebrouck.

Id., pp. 481-482:

And it might also be worthwhile to recall, before we consider some more serious aspects of the poetic qualities of toponyms, a brilliant game invented by Paul Jennings:¹⁵ suppose that toponyms were—well, common nouns, then what might they mean? What, after all, might a denver, a houston, a utah actually be, let alone do, once deprived of its capital letter? Naturally, the same game can be played with Italian, German, or French toponyms. The case of the letters leads the reader to concentrate upon letters and sounds, much as in trad. anon.'s 'In Peckham Rye did Alfie Biggs / A stately Hippodrome decree, / where Fred the bread-delivery man' with all due apologies to Coleridge.

¹⁵ In Oddly ad Lib (London 1965) 24ff., and in The Jenguin Pennings (Harmondsworth 1963) 15ff.; the parallel invention, of toponyms that become personal names (Oddly ad Lib, 28ff.), is less grandly felicitous.

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