Later Classicism and the Enlightenment Flashcards
In Germany it was the Aufklarung of Kant; in France, the movement of the philosophes, of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and the other contributors to the Encyclopedie. In England, the “Enlightenment” can be said to go from…
The founding of the Royal Society (1660) to the 1770’s and beyond
The English Enlightenment is partly philosophical, partly scientific, and partly literary, and is associated with
the Royal Society, Locke, Berkeley, Newton, Pope, Johnson
The Enlightenment is characterized by a… (how is this achieved?)
Commitment to clarity; achieved by a distinctively analytic, empirical method. Studying the causes of change and analyzing them within a broad context of interrelated factors.
Enlightenment writers determined to address..
the generality of men (they were the first ever to aim at a readership so various)
Enlightenment writers’ commitment to addressing a wide variety of readers necessitated
presenting their work in essays, recommended by elegance of style
All writers use parallel phrases, but ______ multiplies on them, and underlines them rhetorically
Johnson
Johnson ensures that his phrases go two by two into a predictable ark; the sentence structure always seems clear. Why is this especially important for his writing?
So many of his sentences are abstract in content, and periodic in syntax (i.e. delay their main verb)
Johnson would have considered his own as a medium style; but it feels grand and carries the weight we associate with prose’s loftiest efforts. Part of this weight comes from his habit of
assigning pairs of overlapping words to a single object (e.g. “the constituent and fundamental principle”), a feature that has been disliked as heavily emphatic, although its aim was to assist clarity.
Aside from his use of overlapping word-pairs, the weightiness of Johnson’s writing is also due to his
diction, which is always considered, and never low. He avoids “accidental and colloquial senses” and often prefers philosophical terms and abstractions of classical derivation.
It “may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors [concordant discord]; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions.” Who said it, and of what?
Samuel Johnson, of the wit of metaphysical poets
Johnson’s usual judicial pattern: measurement of performance …
first against ordinary or classical proportions, and then, more fundamentally, against those of human nature.
Johnson’s judgments appeal to human nature by valuing the public’s long-term preference (“the common sense of readers”) above
temporary critical fashions (“literary prejudices”). (This may seem more egalitarian than it was: Johnson meant the informed public.)
Boswell makes two innovations to biography:
- Introducing overriding themes or preoccupations that structure much of the material.
- Expresses a new sensibility, an intuitive sympathy (however inadequate) for his subject’s inner life.
Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) is full of descriptions realized in crisp, telling detail. The style is __________
picturesque
Burke never uses ___ word when he could use ___
one; two
Despite a robust and vigorous response to empirical description, the mood and sensibility of the Enlightenment can occasionally be dark–when all its bold vistas seemed only to disclose, in the end, more of man’s frailty. Name examples
- Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes
- Parnell, Blair, Edward Young, Gray
Name three consistent themes in graveyard poetry of the late Augustan period. Then identify a work that combines them all.
- Retirement; 2. memento mori; 3. the vanity of human pretensions.
Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard (1751)
The melancholy of the late Augustan Graveyard Poets should be distinguished from pathological affliction: it was most often a benign variant taking such forms as
resignation or gentle sadness.
The melancholy one sees in Graveyard Poets like Gray or Young is contained, even impersonal. With time the emotion grows more _________ and more ______, until at last it intensified into…
enthusiastic; unreal; the Romantic melancholy of the next generation
An early attempt at the subject of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (but not nearly as successful) was Mark Akenside’s
The Pleasures of Imagination (1744)
In Renaissance writing, esp dramatic lit, subjectivity begins to stir–displaying the feelings associated with decisions and exploring a range of private emotions. When does subjectivity fully arise in literature? Explain
The 18th century. Literature makes a sustained attempt to express the individual feelings of those with the leisure to discover themselves. Paradoxically, this attempt often had the appearance of taking part in the Enlightenment’s pursuit of general ideas. Perhaps generality of language offered a type of disguise, as if the individual feelings being expressed were mankind’s rather than the poet’s.
As subjectivity (and with it, consciousness) grows in the literature of the 18th century, what naturally grows with it, but on the reader’s part?
Sympathetic identification. The feeling of one sentient individual for another.
One of the ways 18th-c literature achieves inwardness is to explore moods refined from the feelings associated with literature. Name an example, and briefly describe how this poet achieves this.
Gray; by accumulating recognizable allusions or fainter, languishing half-echoes–not only of Augustan predecessors but also (and especially) of Spenser and Milton. Il Penseroso is a vital context.
The emerging subjective explorations of inwardness and feeling in the 18th century often take the genre of the private ___ or meditative poem of elaborate stanza structure and stately, ceremonious movement. This adumbration of a new sphere of mental being goes through WW and Keats to Wallace Stevens. What’s a good starting point for it in the 18th c?
ode; William Collins
Discuss the ode as it progresses from the 18th century
It becomes a medium for meditative, somber, inward-reflecting poetry in a writer like William Collins (1721-59), goes through WW and Keats and all the ways to Wallace Stevens.
Collins’s “Ode to Evening” mythologizes the transient moment of…
creativity itself. Important precursor to the Romantic tradition of meditative odes.
From the poetry of self-reflective mood, in the 18th-c, there emerged a new idea of
the imagination
The development of self-reflective moods in 18th-c poetry, and the corresponding rise of the idea of the imagination, often produced poems centred on a distanced persona of…
the poet himself, often portrayed as “enthusiast” or “pilgrim” or “votary”
Discuss enthusiasm in the (~~mid) 18th century
The concept was viewed with some suspicion in the aftermath of the Civil War, but after Shaftesbury’s qualified defense in Characteristics it gradually regained favor, particularly in unecclesiastical versions. But among poets of the imagination the religious note is noticeable–as if they were offering a substitute to orthodox religion.
As enthusiasm reemerged in the late 18th century and even took on its religious tones, imagination itself was undergoing a hesitant revaluation. Trace this
It had begun with Shaftesbury, and led on through such passages as Joseph Warton’s praise of the “ecstatic eye” in The Enthusiast: or the Lover of Nature (1744) to the awakened sensibility of the late 18th century.
The rise of enthusiasm (and poetry of the imagination) in the 18th century often took the form of
the meandering reflections of the idealized enthusiast, as in the “wild wanderings” among the beauties of nature in James Beattie’s The Minstrel (1771-4)
