Augustan Classicism

Question 1

How is the term Augustan used for periodization?

Answer 1

Sometimes descriptively for the period of Queen Anne’s reign (1702-14), sometimes for an ideal that was formative during the much longer period from about 1660 until the middle of the 18th century.

Question 2

The term Augustan is based on what historical analogy?

Answer 2

An analogy between Charles II, restored after the Interregnum, and Octavius Caesar, whose imperial establishment also ended a period of civil war.

Question 3

What attitude did the term Augustan convey?

Answer 3

The analogy regularly implied certain convictions or hopes, of mythic proportion, concerning Britain’s universal role, heaven’s favor and a new age of enlightened patronage in which arts of peace would flourish.

Question 4

The Dryden-era emphasis on the role of the “Augustan” moment gradually altered, so that by the time of Pope and Swift (and still more that of Hume) the analogy tended rather to stress…

Answer 4

the Augustan era’s reforming character. But Charles was no longer quite an Augustus in this regard, since the Restoration became a time of licence and corruption.

Question 5

Charles II might have been a friend of wits, but he lacked the true generosity of a patron. Name two examples.

Answer 5

Otway had starved, and Rochester’s loose genius had gone unchastened.

Question 6

Addison’s Spectator broached relatively few ideas with abundant examples. In the multiplication of these there is a noticeable element of ______==a device that was to be taken up by the 19th-c essayists

Answer 6

Game

Question 7

Addison’s Spectator stoops to coffee houses and candlesticks and extends to an astonishing variety of social and literary topics, and rises to…

Answer 7

the sublimity (a new concept) of “all the depths of eternity.”

Question 8

In the early 18th c., when Addison was writing the Spectator, what word signals the contemporaneous change in attitude toward natural objects previously seen as ugly monstrosities?

Answer 8

The sublime

Question 9

A discussion of perspective glasses (allowing the user to watch people without them realizing they are being watched) is found in

Answer 9

Addison’s Spectator

Question 10

Over the course of 18 papers, the Spectator did much to establish the strategic position of ______ in Augustan literature. Together these papers make up…

Answer 10

Milton; the earliest instance of a critical monograph meant for the general reader

Question 11

Augustan criticism could be narrow in conception because it was based on the assumption that

Answer 11

ancient authors had already scaled all the heights, so that these were now best approached by correctly realizing classical forms, or recreating an earlier writer’s tone or style.

Question 12

Augustan imitation worked best in scenarios where

Answer 12

Appropriate precedents existed

Question 13

Along with others, what otherwise acute Augustan critic faulted Shakespeare for his “perpetual Rambles, and his apparent Duplicity in some of his Plays, or Triplicity of Action”

Answer 13

John Dennis (1657-1734)

Question 14

Augustan criticism was prescriptive and we like to fault it for being based on rules. However,…

Answer 14

all judicial criticism applies rules of some kind

Question 15

Name some reasons epic didn’t survive beyond Milton

Answer 15

1. The personal difficulty in emulating Milton’s masterpiece
2. Increasing difficulties in the mythological parts
3. Information explosion had ended the epitomization of learning in traditional schemes of thought: encyclopedic completeness is onerous in the epic form (*)

Question 16

Discuss epic translation in the Augustan period

Answer 16

Drawing on previous more minor translators like Ogilby and the Earl of Lauderdale, Dryden did a unique translation of the Aeneid that brought it to life for his contemporaries. This involved adding and subtracting particulars. Pope also did the Iliad and to a lesser extent, the Odyssey; also interested in vivifying it.

Question 17

Pope’s Dunciad is in some ways visionary or apocalyptic satire. In this way, it foregrounds as unlikely a figure as

Answer 17

Blake, in his visions

Question 18

The Dunciad’s mode of self-annotation and mock scholarship have survived in much more recent works like

Answer 18

Nabokov’s Pale Fire

Question 19

The Rape of the Lock is satire but can also be enjoyed throughout as

Answer 19

a true epic diminished to contemporary proportions–epic quintessence in “feminine miniature” (Fowler’s)

Question 20

The Rape of the Lock so perfectly achieves a diminuitive epic form that miraculously few epic features are lost. This, in a way, is the culmination of the baroque tendency of ____ __ _____ but already displays _______ delicacy

Answer 20

“much in little”; rococo

Question 21

The compression of the Rape of the Lock works chiefly by… (then explain)

Answer 21

allusion (implicit reference) of a particular sort. Hardly a line has not a literary lineage, but Pope goes further, seeking primarily the stock periphrases or classic phrases most susceptible to delicacy (“th’ Etherial Plan”) or else ones that can be revivified by their new context (i.e. “verdant Field” for a card table; “hoary Majesty” for the King of Spades, etc.).

Question 22

In the Rape of the Lock, small items are selected for… (then give an example or two)

Answer 22

particular amplification: “little Engine,” “glitt’ring Forfex” (scissors); “shining Altars of Japan” (lacquered tables).

Question 23

The objects described in the Rape of the Lock display an elegiac fondness not only for the epic world but

Answer 23

for the world itself, whose mutability is focused in the domain of beautiful feminine decor (“alas! frail Beauty must decay, / Curled or uncurled, since Locks will turn to grey…”)

Question 24

Analyze:
“The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,
Transformed to Combs, the speckled and the white.
Here Files of Pins extend their shining Rows,
Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux”

Answer 24

Symbols of Indian empire and cosmetic trivia, modishly small black Bibles: the jumbled confusion of objects describes a confusion of values, managed throughout with a disarming subtlety that was quite new.

Question 25

Rosicrucian machinery in the Rape of the Lock adds such a brilliant and delightful tone that

Answer 25

it draws the sting out of the satire

Question 26

Heroic couplet

Answer 26

Rhyming decasyllabic couplet, traditional for heroic verse from the time of Chaucer

Question 27

The heroic couplet, detachable, lent itself to

Answer 27

satiric epigram

Question 28

Much effort was required in writing heroic couplets to sustain flexible continuous movement through verse paragraphs of many couplets. This form doesn’t become dependably muscular until ______, and is perfected by ______

Answer 28

Dryden; Pope

Question 29

One of Pope’s ways of perfecting the heroic couplet involved perfecting

Answer 29

caesuras, or pauses within the line

Question 30

The standard use of caesura after the ____ ______ in Pope’s heroic couplets allowed for…

Answer 30

fourth syllable; countless effects of significant variation

Question 31

Pope’s metrical system has to be related to the rhetorical organization bound up with it. This allowed very free inversion of word order in the interest of

Answer 31

antithesis, parallelism, or similar patterns making for rhythmic emphasis.

Question 32

Formal satire (Augustan)

Answer 32

Formal satire does not use any extraneous genre as vehicle; instead, it returns to an ancient monologue form of medium length, in which the satirist adopts a tone either of indignation or of raillery, and attacks vice through direct moral observations made more or less in his own person.

Question 33

Menippean satire: explain and give one example

Answer 33

Classical genre; the principal satiric prose kind. Originally it alternated between prose and verse, but in subsequent forms the alternating components became dialogue, narration, and extreme digression. (A Tale of a Tub)

Question 34

Name another genre revalued in the Augustan period, aside from satire

Answer 34

Georgic

Question 35

Among other reasons, why might georgic have resurfaced in the Augustan period?

Answer 35

A new phase in the dialogue between religion and science. Bacon’s “new science” (1645), the founding of Royal Society (1660), and the growth of scientific observation, esp microscopy, made it necessary to describe God’s presence in nature in new ways.

Question 36

Revaluation of God’s presence in nature, as seen in Augustan georgics, meant the implementation and realization of old ideals as often as their disintegration. The emblematic world schemes were replaced by

Answer 36

more detailed accounts and more discriminating classifications.

Question 37

In the Augustan age, the threat of a potentially disharmonious and dark or random nature were causing anxiety, and called for frequent affirmations of

Answer 37

the “preestablished harmony” of the cosmos.

Question 38

In the August age, the crisis in epic allowed _______ to take over its

Answer 38

georgic; encyclopedic and nationalistic functions.

Question 39

Why might the English interest in writing georgic poetry in the Augustan period have been delayed in comparison with the European?

Answer 39

One answer: the close imitation of Virgil’s Georgics wasn’t possible until imitation itself had developed as a genre. And that in turn had to await the increased closeness of texture brought by seventeenth-century extensions of epigram.

Question 40

Georgic has always contrasted with pastoral by providing instruction, among other things. Even Pope’s version of georgic explains

Answer 40

a landscape saturated with historical and political implications.

Question 41

18th-c georgics served a valuable function by combining poetic pleasure with enough information to allow intelligent readers to

Answer 41

take an interest in manufacture and trade, and enter into their aims with patriotic enthusiasm

Question 42

When irony begins to creep into Augustan georgic, as in John Gay’s Trivia, we can speak of

Answer 42

mock georgic (e.g. detailing the ugliness, dangers, and horrors of city life in georgic conventions)

Question 43

Augustan georgic evinced several developments that were to be of unforeseen consequence. One resulted from the fact that the subject matter of preceptive poems was comparatively laborious, so that poetic virtuosity tended rather to go into the ______ ______ of the performance. Expected levels of finish soon became very high.

Answer 43

Formal aspects

Question 44

As georgic formal features were polished to an ever greater degree, there flourished a vigorous tradition of… (explain with examples)

Answer 44

imitative form–expressive adaptation of sound to sense. Milton, following Virgil, had already pointed the way in his sublime account of creation in PL vii. Pope’s georgic An Essay on Criticism (1711) was another seminal work in this area.

Question 45

A favorite model for 18th-c nature poetry was

Answer 45

the sublime account of creation in Paradise Lost vii

Question 46

What genre is An Essay on Criticism

Answer 46

A kind of updated georgic. Georgic because it is digressive, instructive, of medium length; updated in not only subject matter (i.e. not rustic) but in its Augustan epigrammatic finish and its imitative form (i.e. sound-reflects-sense)

Question 47

Give an example of imitative form in Pope’s georgic An Essay on Criticism

Answer 47

“When Ajax strives, some Rock’s vast Weight to throw, / The Line too labours, and the Words move slow”

• First line’s awkward clusters of consonants; second line’s long vowels in unstressed position)

Question 48

The imitative form and its effects weren’t limited to georgic. Rather,

Answer 48

a tradition centered in georgic extended to other poetry about nature and creation

Question 49

Dr Johnson found the imitative adaptation of sound to sense “nugator, not to be rejected, and not to be solicited.” Later still, mimetic variation becomes a potential strength in many kinds of poetry. What is the change?

Answer 49

A movement away from the epigrammatic compression underway by Johnson’s time and continuing long after. Poetic structure loosened (like that of visual art) until it was less differentiated from prose and less amenable to mimetic shaping.

Question 50

An (Augustan) georgic development that proved of permanent value was the cultivation of

Answer 50

indirection

Question 51

Why does Augustan georgic cultivate indirection?

Answer 51

Preceptive poets made a special aim of imparting their precepts obliquely–otherwise the result would have been too prosaic.

Question 52

How did Augustan georgic achieve indirection, or obliquity in imparting precepts? Give an example.

Answer 52

One way was digression, allowing for the insertion of unannounced contents. But it had most to do with implicitness–the attempt to teach without readers quite noticing. Perfect example: An Essay on Criticism

Question 53

In much Augustan georgic and georgic-related poetry, additional contents are included besides the obvious subject matter. Examples?

Answer 53

Nature will be presented, perhaps, as a mirror of moral qualities in man (Denham; Parnell) or else of sublime verities (Thomson)

Question 54

In much Augustan georgic and georgic-related poetry, additional contents are included besides the obvious subject matter, adding to the genre’s obliquity and implicitness (instructing without seeming to). Sometimes this might tempt us to find, prematurely,

Answer 54

a suggestion or iteration of something that has only emerged more recently–poetry with a deliberately obscured subject.