BECKWITH] INTRODUCTION Dol 
realistic. The tendency is to humanize and to localize within the group 
the older myth and to develop later legendary tales upon a naturalistic 
basis. Poetry, on the other hand, develops set forms, plays with double 
meanings. Its character is symbolic and obscure and depends for its style 
upon artificial devices. 
9. Common to each are certain sources of emotional interest such as depend 
upon a close interplay of ideas developed within an intimate social group. 
In prose occur conventional episodes, highly elaborated minor scenes, 
place names in profusion which have little to do with the action of the 
story, repetitions by a series of actors of the same incident in identical 
form, and in the dialogue, elaborate chants, proverbial sayings, antithesis 
and parallelism. In poetry, the panegyric proceeds by the enumeration of 
names and their qualities, particularly place or technical names; by local 
and legendary allusions which may develop into narrative or descriptive 
passages of some length; and by eulogistic comparisons drawn from nature 
or from social life and often elaborately developed. The interjectional 
expression of emotion, the rhetorical question, the use of antithesis, repeti- 
tion, wordplay (puns and word-linking) and mere counting-out formule 
play a striking part, and the riddling element, both in the metaphors em- 
ployed and in the use of homonyms, renders the sense obscure. 
