Lecture 4
“Augustan” Poetry
Terminology (beware!):
Neoclassicism in English ≈ ‘klasszicizmus’ in Hungarian
“Augustan” age/era/poetry/style
- a widely used but somewhat confusing concept
- implies that English culture resembles certain aspects of ancient Rome under Caesar Augustus (27 BC – 14 AD)
- Charles II hailed by many (Dryden!) as a second Augustus, who brings stability and peace after war → but when the Stuarts were increasingly seen as tyrants, the epithet was transferred to later monarchs (problem: Augustus too was often seen as a tyrant)
- I will use it as an approximate equivalent for the Age of (Alexander) Pope, c. the first 3 decades of the 18th century
- Augustus’s rule coincided with the growth of Roman Empire; ideology: imposing Pax Romana on the colonies → Pax Britannica as the “justification” of the British Empire (e.g. Robinson Crusoe “civilising” the “savage” natives)
- Literary Augustianism: Augustus’s rule coincided with a great flourishing of literature, and the two poets who were seen as the greatest lived then: Virgil and Horace, and both in many ways supported Augustus (Virgil’s Aeneid (translated into English by Dryden) includes the best known wording of Pax Romana) → both benefit: ruler creates security (financial or otherwise), poet sings his/her praise, and establishes his/her authority
o problem: the greatest poets of the early eighteenth century were dissatisfied with the way the country was run under the Whig ministries of the Hanoverian kings (especially under Sir Robert Walpole), and their works are sometimes savagely critical of the system; Pope, Swift, Gay, all Tories, they belonged to the “Scriblerus Club”, today often grouped as the “Tory satirists”
→ but: critical or adulatory, Augustan poetry is typically public poetry, often directly concerned with day to day (party-)politics
o a set of values and a system of genres was derived from the Latin poets (Dryden’s critical essays!)
o key words, key values: taste, wit, decorum or propriety, powers of reason and scepticism, argumentative poetry, analysis (directly addressing issues of contemporary science and philosophy), order, strength, dignity, symmetry, balance, erudition, classical allusion, refinement, harmony, grace, polite manners, urbaneity
wit: the capacity to relate unlike ideas (an intellectual faculty) + fine and clear expression
True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,
What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest,
Something, whose Truth convinc’d at Sight we find,
That gives us back the Image of our Mind:
(Pope, An Essay on Criticism, ll. 297–300)
decorum: a.) stylistic rules that determine e.g. the proper relation between the form and the substance of a poem; b.) the norms of decent, polite social behaviour
Neoclassical genres:
- from Virgil:
o the epic: seen as the noblest genre, but no great epics actually written between Milton’s Paradise Lost and Wordsworth’s Prelude (Possible exception: Macpherson’s Ossian)
§ Mock-epics / Mock heroics instead: a form of satire in which the dignified language and the formal conventions of classical epics are combined with trivial of base (typically contemporary) subjects, thus mocking the latter (Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe, Pope’s The Rape of the Lock)
o Eclogues/Bucolics→ pastoral poetry: Pope wrote very successful ones at the beginning of his career
– from Horace
o the satire: many find it the most important genre of the era, can come in prose or dramatic form as well, but strict satire is poetry emulating, adapting (typically) the satire of Horace (e.g. Pope) or Juvenal (e.g. Samuel Johnson): the first is a relatively genial critical discussion of any subject of public interest, the latter invariably attacks some specific social form or corruption; the poet acts as a defender of norms
o ode: relatively few really memorable odes in the early 18th century, will become very important later on
o epistle (‘letter’): e.g. Horace’s De Arte Poetica from which many of the age’s poetical principles were derived, including: poetry is art, i.e. it has rules which have to be critically examined and rationally understood; stylistic propriety; didacticism (to ‘please’ and to ‘instruct’); conciseness → some of Pope’s Imitations of Horace are based on his epistles; educated, polite, occasionally humorous conversation between members of an elite
- the Couplet: the preferred verse form of Augustan poetry
o pair of rhymed lines; sequences of such pairs in verse-paragraphs
o end-stopped couplet: each line constitutes a syntactic unit
o heroic couplet: couplets in iambic pentametres (Dryden’s translation of Virgil; an air of gravity, dignified tone → seen as the equivalent of classical hexameter)
o epigrammatic use – playfulness;
o signalling important issues
o suitable for argumentative verse (analytical thinking: one couplet one logical unit)
Why did I write? what sin to me unknown [125]Dipp'd me in ink, my parents', or my own?
As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came.
I left no calling for this idle trade,
No duty broke, no father disobey'd. [130]
The Muse but serv'd to ease some friend, not wife,
To help me through this long disease, my life,
To second, Arbuthnot! thy art and care,
And teach the being you preserv'd, to bear.
(Pope: “Epistle to Arbuthnot”) / - Augustan poetry can be tender
- strictly no mysticism: no high calling, muse serves the friends (altogether human poetry), no inspiration mentioned; the poet is a person like any of us; what he has is technical skill (numbers=metre) and supporting community
- Pope’s life-long illness mentioned
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man. […]
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;[…]
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
(Pope: Essay on Man, Epistle II, lines 1–18) / - Augustan poetry as philosophical
- meditating about the limits of human knowledge
- teaching humility (like Swift in Gulliver)
- poet not a prophet: has no privileged knowledge, no special access to God
He gave the little Wealth he had,
To build a House for Fools and Mad: [480]
And shew'd by one satyric Touch,
No Nation wanted it so much:
That Kingdom he hath left his Debtor,
I wish it soon may have a Better.
(Swift: “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”, final lines) / - the humour of Augustan poetry, more precisely Swift’s dark humour
- a meditation on his own death
- his greatest gift to the British public will be the asylum he helped to fund → assigning the hole kingdom to the madhouse
- can (maybe) be taken seriously: literature as an attempt to make the world a saner, a less mad place