Augustan poetry
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In
Overview
In the British literary period known as the 'Augustan era,' poets were more conversant with each other's writings than were the contemporary novelists (see Augustan prose). They wrote in counterpoint, directly expanding each other's works, and using satire to heighten their oppositional voices. In the early part of the century, there was a great struggle over the nature and role of the pastoral, primarily between Ambrose Philips and Alexander Pope, and then between their followers, but such a controversy was only possible because of two simultaneous literary movements. The general movement, carried forward only with the struggle between poets, was the same as in the novel: the invention of the subjective self as a worthy topic, the emergence of a priority on individual psychology, against the insistence that all acts of art are a performance and a public gesture meant for the benefit of society at large. Beneath that large banner raged individual battles. The other development, one seemingly agreed upon by both sides, was a gradual expropriation and reinvention of all the Classical forms of poetry. Every genre of poetry was recast, reconsidered, and used to serve new functions. The ode, the ballad, the elegy, and satire, parody, song and lyric poetry, would be adapted from their older, initial literary uses. Odes would cease to be encomia, ballads would cease to be narratives, elegies would cease to be sincere memorials, satires no longer would be specific entertainments, parodies no longer would consist of bravura, stylised performances, songs no longer would be personal lyrics, and the lyric would celebrate the individual man and woman, and not the lover's complaint.
These two developments (the emphasis on the person and the writer's willingness to reinvent genre) can be seen as extensions of Protestantism, as
Alexander Pope, the Scriblerians, and poetry as social act
The entire Augustan age's poetry was dominated by Alexander Pope. Since Pope began publishing when very young and continued to the end of his life, his poetry is a reference point in any discussion of the 1710s, 1720s, 1730s or even 1740s. Furthermore, Pope's abilities were recognized early in his career, so contemporaries acknowledged his superiority, for the most part. Indeed, seldom has a poet been as publicly acknowledged as a leader for as long as was Pope, and, unlike the case with figures such as John Dryden or William Wordsworth, a second generation did not emerge to eclipse his position. From a technical point of view, few poets have ever approached Alexander Pope's perfection at the iambic pentameter closed couplet ("heroic verse"), and his lines were repeated often enough to lend quite a few clichés and proverbs to modern English usage. However, if Pope had few rivals, he had many enemies. His technical perfection did not shelter him from political, philosophical or religious opponents, and Pope himself was quarrelsome in print. His very technical superiority led Pope to injudicious improvements in his editing and translation of other authors. However, Pope and his enemies (often called "the Dunces" because of Pope's successful satirizing of them in The Dunciad of 1727 and 1738) fought over central matters of the proper subject matter for poetry and the proper pose of the poetic voice, and the excesses and missteps as much as the achievements, of both sides demonstrated the stakes of the battle.
The Pope/Philips debate occurred in 1709 when Alexander Pope published his Pastorals. Pope's Pastorals were of the four seasons. When they appeared, Thomas Tickell, a member of the "Little Senate" of Addison's (see above) at Button's coffee shop wrote an evaluation in Guardian that praised Ambrose Philips's pastorals above Pope's. Pope replied by writing in Guardian with rock praise of Philips's Patorals that heaped scorn on them. Pope quoted Philips's worst lines, mocked his execution, and delighted in pointing out his empty lines. Philips responded by putting staff on the floor of Button's with which to beat Pope, should he appear. In 1717, Pope explained his theory of the pastoral in the Discourse on Pastoral Poetry. He argued that any depictions of shepherds and their mistresses in the pastoral must not be updated shepherds, that they must be icons of the Golden Age: "we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been when the best of men followed the employment" (Gordon). Philips's Pastorals were not particularly awful poems, but they did reflect his desire to "update" the pastoral.[citation needed]
In 1724, Philips would update poetry again by writing a series of odes dedicated to "all ages and characters, from Walpole, the steerer of the realm, to Miss Pulteney in the nursery". To do so, he shortened his line length to 3.5', or almost half a normal iambic pentameter line.
The Scriblerus Club wrote poetry as well as prose, and the club included among its number
Old-style poetic
Translation and adaptation as statement
Gay adapted Juvenal, as Pope had already adapted Virgil's Eclogues, and throughout the Augustan era the "updating" of Classical poets was a commonplace. These were not translations, but rather they were imitations of Classical models, and the imitation allowed poets to veil their responsibility for the comments they made. Alexander Pope would manage to refer to the King himself in unflattering tones by "imitating" Horace in his Epistle to Augustus. Similarly, Samuel Johnson wrote a poem that falls into the Augustan period in his "imitation of Satire III" entitled London. The imitation was inherently conservative, since it argued that all that was good was to be found in the old classical education, but these imitations were used for progressive purposes, as the poets who used them were often doing so to complain of the political situation.
Readers of adaptations were assumed to know the originals. Indeed, original translation was one of the standard tests in grammar school. Pope's translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey was not an attempt to make the works available to an Augustan audience, but rather to make a new work occupying a middle ground between Homer and Pope. The translation had to be textually accurate, but it was intended to be a Pope translation, with felicity of phrase and neatness of rhyme from Pope. Additionally, Pope would "versify" John Donne, although his work was widely available. The changes Pope makes are the content, the commentary. Pope's edition of Shakespeare claimed to be textually perfect (although it was corrupt), but his desire to adapt led him to injudicious attempts at "smoothing" and "cleaning" Shakespeare's lines.
In satire, Pope achieved two of the greatest poetic satires of all time in the Augustan period, and both arose from the imitative and adaptive demands of parody. The Rape of the Lock (1712 and 1714) was a gentle mock-heroic, but it was built upon Virgil's Aeneid. Pope applied Virgil's heroic and epic structure to the story of a young woman (Arabella Fermor) having a lock of hair snipped by an amorous baron (Lord Petre). The structure of the comparison forced Pope to invent mythological forces to overlook the struggle, and so he borrowed sylphs from ludicrous (to him) alchemist Paracelsus and makes them the ghosts of vain women. He created an epic battle over a game of ombre, leading to a fiendish appropriation of the lock of hair. Finally, a deus ex machina appears and the lock of hair experiences an apotheosis. To some degree, Pope was adapting Jonathan Swift's habit, in A Tale of a Tub, of pretending that metaphors were literal truths, and he was inventing a mythos to go with the everyday. The parody was in no way a comment on Virgil. Instead, it was an imitation made to serve a new purpose. The epic was transformed from a paean to national foundations to a satire on the outlandish self-importance of the country nobility. The poem was an enormous success, at least with the general public.
After that success, Pope wrote some works that were more philosophical and more political and therefore more controversial, such as the
John Gay and Alexander Pope belong on one side of a line separating the celebrants of the individual and the celebrants of the social. Pope wrote The Rape of the Lock, he said, to settle a disagreement between two great families, to laugh them into peace. He wrote the Essay on Criticism and the Essay on Man to emphasize, time and again, the public nature of human life and the social role of letters. Even The Dunciad, which seems to be a serial killing of everyone on Pope's enemies list, sets up these figures as expressions of dangerous and antisocial forces in letters. Theobald and Cibber are marked by vanity and pride, by having no care for morality, so long as they are famous. The hireling pens Pope attacks mercilessly in the heroic games section of the Dunciad are all embodiments of avarice and lies. Similarly, Gay, although he always has strong touches of personal humor and the details of personal life, writes of political society, of social dangers and of follies that must be addressed to protect the greater whole. On the other side of this line, however, were people who agreed with the politics of Gay and Pope (and Swift), but not in approach.
Precursors of Romanticism
The other side of this division include, early in the Augustan Age,
A notable successor in that line was Edward Yonge's Night Thoughts (1742–1744). It was, even more than "Winter", a poem of deep solitude, melancholy and despair. In all the poems mentioned, there are the stirrings of the lyric as the Romantics would see it: the celebration of the private individual's idiosyncratic, yet paradigmatic, responses to the visions of the world. These works appeared in Pope's lifetime and were popular, but the older, more conservative poetry maintained its hold for a while to come. On the other hand, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard set off a new craze for poetry of melancholy reflection.
Gray's Elegy appeared in 1750, and it immediately set new ground. First, it was written in the "country," and not in or as opposed to London. In fact, the poem makes no reference at all to the life of the city and society, and it follows no classical model. Further, it is not an
Therefore, when the Romantics emerged at the end of the 18th century, they were not assuming a radically new invention of the subjective self themselves, but merely formalizing what had gone before. Similarly, the later 18th century saw a ballad revival, with Thomas Percy's
See also
References
- Edward Yonge on bibliomania.com. Retrieved 1 July 2005.
- D'Urfey, Tom. Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy. 6 vol. London: Jacob Tonson, 1719–1720.
- "The Contemplator's Short Biography of Thomas D'Urfey (1653–1723)". Retrieved 27 June 2005.
- Gordon, I. R. F. "Pastorals 1709". Retrieved 29 June 2005.
- Huber, Alexander, ed. The Thomas Gray Archive, Oxford University. Retrieved 1 July 2005.
- Johnson, Samuel. "Life of John Philips" in Lives of the English Poets. 10 vols. London: H. Baldwin, 1779. Retrieved 15 July 2005.
- -- The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia 1759. Jack Lynch, ed. Retrieved 15 July 2005.
- Philips, John. The Splendid Shilling 1701. Retrieved 15 July 2005.
- Pope, Alexander. The Poetic Works of Alexander Pope. John Butt, ed. New Haven: Yale UP.
- Ward, A.W., A.R. Waller, W. P. Trent, J. Erskine, S.P. Sherman, and C. Van Doren. "'Hudibras' and Hudibrastic Verse" in The Cambridge history of English and American literature: An encyclopedia in eighteen volumes. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1921.