The Augustan Age, or the Neoclassical Age (1707 - 1740s, or 1760; or whenever the Romantic Age might be thought to have started).
1. Overview.
The tremendous influence of the contemporary philosophical, technological and religious views - scientism, empirical philosophy, materialist thought and revamped rationalism - as well as burgeoning scientific theories stemming from them: Newtonian physics, Cartesian mathematics, etc. The resulting shift from the religious away to the human - not towards a balance, unlike the Renaissance reorientation, but a non-theist, humanist and human-centered - or, better, reason-centred - paradigm. The Augustan literature: the literature that responds to, reinforces, embodies or occasionally at least tries to differentiate itself from these ideas, seeking to ground itself as much as them in the Classical period, and rewriting its history as attempt at continuation and redefinition of the latter.
2. Alexander Pope and the Neoclassicism.
Pope's "Essay on Criticism" is a didactic poem in heroic couplets, begun, perhaps, as early as 1705, and published, anonymously, in 1711. The poetic essay was a relatively new genre, and the "Essay" itself was Pope's most ambitious work to that time. It was in part an attempt on Pope's part to identify and refine his own positions as poet and critic, and his response to an ongoing critical debate which centered on the question of whether poetry should be "natural" or written according to predetermined "artificial" rules inherited from the classical past.
The poem commences with a discussion of the rules of taste which ought to govern poetry, and which enable a critic to make sound critical judgements. In it Pope comments, too, upon the authority which ought properly to be accorded to the classical authors who dealt with the subject; and concludes (in an apparent attempt to reconcile the opinions of the advocates and opponents of rules) that the rules of the ancients are in fact identical with the rules of Nature: poetry and painting, that is, like religion and morality, actually reflect natural law. The "Essay on Criticism," then, is deliberately ambiguous: Pope seems, on the one hand, to admit that rules are necessary for the production of and criticism of poetry, but he also notes the existence of mysterious, apparently irrational qualities — "Nameless Graces," identified by terms such as "Happiness" and "Lucky Licence" — with which Nature is endowed, and which permit the true poetic genius, possessed of adequate "taste," to appear to transcend those same rules. The critic, of course, if he is to appreciate that genius, must possess similar gifts. True Art, in other words, imitates Nature, and Nature tolerates and indeed encourages felicitous irregularities which are in reality (because Nature and the physical universe are creations of God) aspects of the divine order of things which is eternally beyond human comprehension. Only God, the infinite intellect, the purely rational being, can appreciate the harmony of the universe, but the intelligent and educated critic can appreciate poetic harmonies which echo those in nature. Because his intellect and his reason are limited, however, and because his opinions are inevitably subjective, he finds it helpful or necessary to employ rules which are interpretations of the ancient principles of nature to guide him — though he should never be totally dependent upon them. We should note, in passing, that in "The Essay on Criticism" Pope is frequently concerned with "wit" — the word occurs once, on average, in every sixteen lines of the poem. What does he mean by it?
Pope then proceeds to discuss the laws by which a critic should be guided — insisting, as any good poet would, that critics exist to serve poets, not to attack them. He then provides, by way of example, instances of critics who had erred in one fashion or another. What, in Pope's opinion (here as elsewhere in his work) is the deadliest critical sin — a sin which is itself a reflection of a greater sin? All of his erring critics, each in their own way, betray the same fatal flaw.
The final section of the poem discusses the moral qualities and virtues inherent in the ideal critic, who is also the ideal man — and who, Pope laments, no longer exists in the degenerate world of the early eighteenth century.
Pope was not as philosophers in any systematic sense, though he had obvious philosophical concerns, which manifested themselves most strongly in works like his An Essay on Man. He read a great deal of philosophy, but casually rather than formally: he was deeply interested in attempts to discern man's place in the universe and his relationship with God, but his interest was primarily poetic, not philosophical.
Like many of his contemporaries, Pope believed in the existence of a God who had created, and who presided over, a physical Universe which functioned like a vast clockwork mechanism. Important scientific discoveries by men like Sir Isaac Newton, who explained, in his Principia, the nature of the laws of gravitation which helped to govern that universe, were seen as corroborating that view. "Nature, and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night," Pope wrote, in a famous couplet intended as Newton's epitaph, but "God said, Let Newton be ! and All was Light." This view of the universe as an ordered, structured place was an aspect of the Neoclassical emphasis on order and structure which also manifested itself in the arts, including poetry. How does An Essay on Man reflect this perspective? Remember that Pope could also portray Belinda in The Rape of the Lock in the following fashion:
"The skilful Nymph reviews her Force with Care;
Let Spades be Trumps ! she said, and Trumps they were."
Pope's work also echoes, of course, Neoclassical philosophical concerns which were intimately bound up with religious ones. Human beings were seen as imperfect creatures who occupied a middle place in the great scheme of things; in the great chain of being. What assumptions did Pope assume that man could make about his role in the universe, based upon his perception of mankind's place in it? Pope believed, as Swift believed (it is one of the many attitudes which these two very different men shared in common) that God intended that Man should be rational, thoughtful, logical, and reasonable , but that, too often he was not; and that it was one of the poet's primary tasks to point out error, to instruct, to show the way. Pope was uniquely positioned to assume this role precisely because he maintained, all his life, (despite all of his literary feuds and squabbles) a crucial psychological distance — because he was a chronic invalid, because he was a Catholic during a period of Protestant ascendancy, because he was, physically, a dwarf — from the upper levels of English society to which his poetic genius had given him access.
Deism, or "Natural Religion," the belief in a Supreme Being as the source of finite existence, and the rejection of revelation and the supernatural doctrines of Christianity, derived, in the most general sense, from the scientific movement which grew out of the discoveries and theories of Columbus, Copernicus, Galileo, Francis Bacon, and his disciples in the Royal Society. Their explanations of man's relationship with God and his place in the physical universe came to depend more and more on reason rather than "revelation." Deists believed that reason indicated that God created the world, and ruled it by established law: they were adherents, that is, of a "natural" religion based on reason and the study of nature, and opponents of "revealed" religion. Deists were opposed, too, to the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination. Many eighteenth-century Deists, but by no means all, believed that God, having created the universe and set it in operation, took no further interest either in it or in humanity.
The general tenets of Deism may be summarized as follows: they believed that the Bible, though it contained important truths, was not divinely inspired; that many important Christian theological tenets -- the divinity of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity, and the theory of atonement for sins -- were the results of superstition or invention and had to be rejected. They believed that God, the creator of the universe, was essentially distinct from the universe; he was perfect, but worked by choice through unchangeable laws, and that miracles, therefore, were impossible. They believed in free will, that man, made in God's image, could himself eventually become perfect by studying Nature, which reflected the divine perfection, and that practical religion, for the individual, consisted in achieving virtue through rational conduct.
the Age of Sensibility
Though some people do talk about the Age of Sensibility - approximately 1720s or 1740s to 1780s, defined often as
A period of British literature spanning the years 1744-1785. 1789 and 1798 are alternate end dates. This period is sometimes referred to as the Age of Johnson because of Samuel Johnson's considerable influence upon literature. The characteristics of the Age of Johnson link this period with the end of the Neoclassical period, whereas the Age of Sensibility anticipates the Romantic period. In contrast to the Augustan era, the Age of Sensibility focused upon instinct, feeling, imagination, and sometimes the sublime. New cultural attitudes and new theories of literature emerged; the novel became an increasingly popular and prevalent form
- the term, and indeed the separateness of the phenomena it supposedly encompasses from the Augustan Age, which some would like to see as the “mainstream” of the 19th c., are profoundly dubious. It would be perhaps more useful to see the Age of Sensibility - also known as the Age of Rousseau - as the other side, the darker, repressed or forgotten twin of the Neoclassical and rationalist tendencies dominating the first part of the era and slowly decomposing, revealing their incongruities or turning increasingly to their opposites and that which they often omit, bracket or possibly suppress. Still, the Age of Sensibility is almost never a conscious negation of the Augustan spirit, but rather its continuation, expansion or redefinition, a movement which nearly haphazardly crosses the border - if does cross it indeed, and just points towards that direction; in case of some Gothic novels, the route was quite probably envisioned as very much within the “mainstream” terrain of the Age of Enlightenment. Being neither a strict negation nor a simple continuation - nor yet an emergence of a newer, fully-fledged cultural form, it would seem to be a shadowy presence of the unacknowledged and rejected by the luminaries of “reason” and “fact”; the shadow their “Enlightenment” incidentally casts; the fluidity of the Augustan Age's borderline - both from the viewpoint of chronology and sensibility; the process of reaching out beyond, or opening the confining borders of the Age's “mainstream”; and a prescience, if not the very first movements, of the Romantic Age (Northrop Frye sees the Age of Sensibility as a cultural gestalt encompassing both the “proper” Age of Sensibility and the Romantic Age, and spanning thus 1760s to 1840s).
Should one want to view it as a gradually emerging countercurrent of the age, the "age of sensibility", the second half of the 18th c. would have to be seen as quickening in pace and changed the mood as the course of history swept toward the climax of the revolutions that opened the modern epoch. Disquiet and later impatience with the status quo generated a new and unsettled spirit of criticism that slowly crept toward rebellion against what was thought as gratuitous opulence and grossly self-indulgent expenditure. Moral outrage arose along with receding importance of the Rococo along with reason and the use of one's sensibilities in questioning to gather an enlightened understanding of the self and the world. These approaches were the subjects written about as part of the "enlightened" thinking of Voltaire and Diderot, who taught the significance of understanding gained by systematic gathering and ordering of surrounding physical data. Concurrent with these ideas was a faith in the power of knowledge and education to improve human life.
Naturalism in art - mimetic, yet distinct from the mimeticism of the Augustans - was renewed with vigor bringing an insurgence of interest in the careful structure of landscapes and cityscapes. Leading thinkers, profoundly introduced by Rousseau and Diderot, idealized the values of sincere feeling, natural human sympathy over artful reason and the cold calculations of courtly societies. The slogan of sensibility was “Trust your heart rather than your head”, or, as Goethe put it, “Feeling is all”. Honest emotion was to banish the falsities and artificial as enemies to society and person. In art, sensibility meshed with the idea of Enlightenment thinkers and paintings took on a moral theme to move the hearts of the viewer toward correct social behavior.
Sentimentalism
Sentimentalism (that is, appealing to the sentiments), a current or a set of tendencies with the Age of Sensibility, is not to be mistaken here for a general muckiness, or any “overindulgence” in emotion. It refers to
A growing emphasis on the spontaneous “goodness” or naturalness of humanity (“sensibility”) and thus a firm withdrawal from the bleak anthropology of Calvinism which regarded human nature as depraved. This is the first truly influential turning away from the sense of “nature marred”, of the natural life which is and must be impure, sullied and corrupt. The shift takes place on both on personal and socio-political level - hence the influence of the movement on the humanities in general.
a conscious preoccupation with one's emotions - both the efforts to co-create, sustain, explore and expand an emotion, and the endeavours to understand, study or analyze (occasionally “dissect”) it. Sentimentalism, while stemming from Rousseau's and Diderot's vision of the “noble savage” and drawing on the impulse to valorize feeling and emotion over rationality, is thus at the same time informed by Locke and Hume and the empirical stance.
an appeal to “nature” understood also as an inherent moral sensibility (the capability to feel compassion, to feel-with), instead of “rational” morality - one based upon “logical” principles, which breeds diverging perspectives and hence conflict. While it becomes clear that “sensibility” and reason are thus seen as potentially at least extricable, and the former is valued over the latter, there is no irreconcilable conflict between the two. Indeed, the stories of such reconciliation spans many a sentimental novel. In Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, the narrator is using the sentimental character Yorick as a device to critique the obligation of morality, whether it is sentimental or rational; when Yorick meets a monk and refuses "to give him a single sous", he feels discontent is by disregarding what he senses he ought to do. He appears to obey "better reason". Rationally, he disregards his sentimental obligation because "there is no regular reasoning upon the ebbs and flows of our humours"; while he argues against the authority of sense, ultimately this sense creates discontent in his conscience. After the monk leaves empty handed, it is Yorick's "heart" that "smote [him] the moment [the monk] shut the door". Accordingly, Yorick has "behaved very ill". He complies with his rational maxim, the justified action of his "great claims" argument, yet, he senses from the conscience of his sentimental nature that he has done wrong.
sentimentalism might be seen to have come with the end of French rationalism with the death of Louis XIV, turning against the predominantly reason-orientated way of life which had been used to discipline and civilise society under absolutism. The German "age of enlightenment" first began when the French "age of reason" was supplemented or questioned by social-criticism and emancipatory tendencies; it collapsed therefore with the "epoch of empfindsamkeit" or the Rococo. The origin of German sentimentalism, unlike the French one, was chiefly religious; Empfindsamkeit is also known as secularized pietism because it frequently came with moralizing content that had increasingly broken free of church and religious ties.
The Gothic
1. Overview.
Gothic fiction is the forerunner of today's horror genre, although the Gothic style, changing and evolving, continues to boast many practitioners. Making its debut in the middle 18th c., Gothic fiction was initially a forerunner of the Romantic Age - one of the “other sides” of the Age of Enlightenment and one of the cracks in its edifice at first, a branch of the larger Romantic movement later. Taking its name from medieval architecture, as it often hearkens back to the medieval era in spirit and subject matter and often uses Gothic buildings as a setting, Gothic fiction employs such motifs to stimulate terror (or horror), revolt or revulsion and apprehension in the reader.
Gothic fiction places heavy emphasis on atmosphere, using setting, themes and diction to build suspense and a sense of the uneasy and the mysterious in the reader. Common subject matter includes the supernatural, inexplicable mysteries that will not yield to reason, and all sorts of psychoses, deviations and derangement. Gothic fiction may also feature a romantic plot or subplot, particularly in later incarnations in the Victorian era and the 20th c and the grotesque or the burlesque. While the Gothic novel is often considered the best example of the genre, some poetry and short stories are occasionally characterized as Gothic, such as the Graveyard Poets of late 18th c. and the short stories of Poe or Lovecraft, which have influenced Gothic writers ever since their publication.
Gothic fiction often deals with past eras, sometimes mythicizing them, other times using them as a symbol of excesses of darkness and oppression - and often both; the past is contrasted with the directions of the present, and it is not rare for it to have to the political dimension brought to the fore. In its early days, the Gothic genre took the medieval period as a major inspiration. Early Gothic novels were characterized as Romances, referencing a medieval narrative genre; these novels were often anti-Catholic, at times anti-Christian or generally anti-religious, and used a medieval setting to showcase what their authors believed to be the worst abuses of Catholic (religious) power. Conversely, Gothic fiction also romanticized the medieval period by adopting the style of its literature and returning to more fantastical or religious subject matter in favor of the rationalism and order that dominated the “mainstream” Enlightenment thought.
Modern Gothic fiction continues this tendency to look back to past eras, using such settings as Colonial America, Victorian England, or the Antebellum South. Like the medieval period to 18th and 19th century writers, these eras offer equal fodder for romanticization and moral criticism. Modern Gothic works set in the present day may take place in a 19th century mansion, much as early Gothic works commonly used Gothic castles as their setting.
2. Horace Walople, The Castle of Otranto.
Remembered for his letters and the first Gothic novel ever. Walpole's landmark work, published in December 1764, purports to be a translation (as the 1765 title page has it) "from the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto," and the events related in it are supposed to have occurred in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When the story opens, the villainous Manfred, prince of Otranto, in order to get an heir to his estate, has arranged a marriage between his only son, Conrad, and the beautiful Isabella. But on the night before the wedding, Conrad is mysteriously killed (he is crushed by a giant helmet). Lest he should be left without male descendants, Manfred determines to divorce his present wife, Hippolita, who is past childbearing, and marry Isabella himself. In the extract given here, from the first chapter, Isabella learns of his intention and decides to flee the castle by night.
Walpole writes as if by formula. The standard Gothic devices and motifs are all in place, even in this brief excerpt: moonlight, a speaking portrait, the slamming of doors, castle vaults, an underground passage, blasts of wind, rusty hinges, the curdling of blood, and above all, in practically every sentence, strong feelings of terror ("Words cannot paint the horror of the princess's situation . . ."). But Walpole was the inventor of the formula, and his influence — on Beckford, Radcliffe, and Lewis in this topic and then, along with them, on subsequent English fiction (and on literature and films more generally) — is incalculable. Influences or inspirations behind his book include a dream Walpole had, Gothic architecture, castles, old things in general, Aristotle's Poetics (and the idea of pity and fear purging), Horace's Art of Poetry, Shakespeare's plays.
3. Later Developments:
Ann Radcliffe (1764 - 1823). Published five novels between 1789 and 1797, all tremendously popular in their day and influential on other writers for long afterward. Their plots have been efficiently summarized by Russell Noyes in an introduction of 1956:
The hero is a gentleman of noble birth, likely as not in some sort of disgrace; the heroine, an orphan-heiress, high-strung and sensitive, and highly susceptible to music and poetry and to nature in its most romantic moods. A prominent role is given to the tyrant-villain. He is a man of fierce and morose passions obsessed by the love of power and riches. The villain can usually be counted on to confine the heroine in the haunted wing of a castle because she refuses to marry someone she hates. Whatever the details, Mrs. Radcliffe generally manages the plot and action so that the chief impression is a sense of the young heroine's incessant danger. On oft-repeated midnight prowls about the gloomy passageways of a rambling, ruined castle, the heroine in a quiver of excitement (largely self-induced) experiences a series of hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. Her emotional tension is kept to the pitch by a succession of strange sights and sounds . . . and by an assorted array of sliding panels, trap doors, faded hangings, veiled portraits, bloodstained garments, and even dark and desperate characters.
Matthew “Monk” Lewis (1775-1818). Remembered chiefly for The Monk, the story of a monk who finds himself descending into a world of degradation.
The novel itself is an attack on the brutality and hypocrisy that pervaded the Catholic Church at the beginning of the 17th c. Set in Spain, with the Inquisition as a present but distant backdrop for the majority of the novel, it shows how a Monk is brought down by his pride and quickly descends to more heinous crimes as he becomes obsessed first with a fellow monk who reveals himself as a female in disguise, and then a young innocent woman from a nearby wealthy family. He becomes the ultimate corruptor, moving from being a figure of pious presence who inspires the awe of all those in Madrid, to a monster capable of the most heinous crimes. There are occasional supernatural elements, but these are secondary to the human story where the author exposes the horrors forced upon the people of Spain (and elsewhere) by the Church and its minions. Many of the parts of the novel are horrendous to read even now, the cold brutality of the Abbess who runs the convent towards those who transgress her laws. You can see the fictional events of the novel coloured by the anger at the similar events that occurred in the Church's history. It is a novel containing lots of the gothic themes: supernatural agencies, murder, rape, incest, poisonings, hauntings, incarcerations and a tragic love story. These are merely a means to an ends though, in a novel which attempts to expose some truths and comment on the social conditions at the time rather than merely attempting to be a shocking gothic novel. It is unsurprising that is caused such consternation amongst the establishment at the time, and despite its age it is still very much relevant today. Filled as it is with reminders of what can so easily go wrong if religious fundamentalism is given the chance to reign supreme, where choices are taken from individuals and instead given to rigid institutions.
Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824), an Irish writer (and great-uncle of Oscar Wilde) best known as the author of Melmoth the Wanderer, the work considered by many to be the last traditional "Gothic" novel, though some see it as already first of a new kind, or at least a transitional work that marks the evolution away from conventional Gothic and its reliance on external atmospherics to a more psychological Gothic. Maturin does not forsake mouldering ruins, subterranean spaces, depraved villains, skeleton monks and the like, but his powerful interest in the psychology of suffering and alienation makes this something much more sophisticated than most early Gothics.
William Beckford (1760 - 1844). Most famous for Vathek, his Oriental tale written originally in French, a major text in the Oriental tale tradition in British lit, a genre that was extremely popular in the later 18th c. (cf Samuel Johnson's Rasselas) and in the Romantic period (cf Lord Byron's "The Giaour" and "The Bride of Abydos," among others). Not all Oriental tales have a "Gothic" component, although many do (cf. the vampire section of "The Giaour"); Vathek is over-the-top in its wild supernaturalism and its strange, calm mingling of the comically grotesque and the disconcertingly horrific.
Regularly mentioned in discussions of late eighteenth-century Gothic romances, the setting of Vathek is yet Arabian rather than European, and its exquisitely detailed architecture is futuristic rather than imitation medieval. It also has more incongruity of tone — suppressed comedy along with melodramatic high-seriousness — than the other works included in this topic. Vathek was written in French — "at a single sitting of three days and two nights," according to the Dictionary of National Biography — and then published in English translation as An Arabian Tale, from an Unpublished Manuscript (1786).
- Gothic novels were among the most popularly read fiction of the late 18th c., and though they were less popular in the Victorian era, 19th c. Gothic fiction is among the best known and most read today, including writers such as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Bronte sisters, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James. The vampire, one of the favorite stock characters of Gothic fiction, appeared in several important works of this era: John Polidori's The Vampyre, Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla, and Bram Stoker's Dracula, to name a few. The 20th c., not surprisingly, has been often seen as the series of revivals of the Gothic fiction, as the new subgenres have been seen constantly emerging (Southern Gothic, Canadian Gothic, Urban Gothic, etc.)
Non-Neoclassical Poetry of the Age.
1. Graveyard School of Poetry
A vista of names and literary events, often centred on the notion of “The Graveyard School” of poetry - a group of primarily 18th c. poets and writers whose writings frequently touched on themes of death, mortality, religion, and melancholy. Often elegiac in tone (and title) — an elegy is, by the 18th c., simply a poem in lament of a death — their poems make frequent use of funereal or gloomy imagery, though their purpose was rarely sensationalist; they were typically very Christian writers — many were in fact clergymen — who used the imagery of night, death, and gloom (“skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms”) in spiritual contemplations of human mortality and our relation to the divine. Exemplifying the shift towards the poetics of the sublime and the uncanny, they also took interest in ancient English poetic forms and folk poetry.
Quite popular even into the early years of the 19th c., the Graveyard School was, not surprisingly, an important factor in the development of the Gothic novel, helping to create not only a vocabulary of gloomy imagery but a popular taste that recognized the emotional, moral, and even "psychological" value of that imagery. In their frequent emphasis on the lives of ordinary, even unidentified individuals and the death of those individuals, the Graveyard School writers are sometimes taken as precursors of the Romantic interest in the commonplace, and the melancholic introspection of many Graveyard School works prefigures and contributes to the Romantic fondness for self-scrutiny of various emotional states, including "negative" states (see, for example, Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" or Keats' "Ode on Melancholy"):
Thomas Gray (1716-71), remembered mostly for his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), a meditative poem presenting thoughts conjured up by the sight of a rural graveyard (perhaps the most quoted poem in English). In 1757, he published his Pindaric od es, “The Progress of Poesy” and “The Bard”, the latter famous for the re-introduction of the titular theme; Gray's verse illustrates the evolution of English poetry in the 18th c.—from the classicism of the 1742 poems to the romantic tendencies of his later work.
Edward Young (1683-1765), whose influential The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742-1745) combined melancholy, the flair for the sublime and Christian apologetics.
William Collins (1721-1759). Collins' work was out of the poetic mainstream in its exploration of more powerful emotional and psychological effects, romanticized after his death as a "mad poet" who early death was itself poetically tragic; widely understood to be, in his work, a precursor of many Romantic traits.
William Cowper (1731-1800). Very much a borderline figure: a hymn writer and poet, a lawyer who abandoned the profession, and a sufferer from "melancholia" (depression), suffered also from bouts of some more disturbing mental disequilibrium, associated in his mind with religious conviction and a deeply troubling sense of his own damnation. Known, at the same time, for his translations from Latin and Greek (including The Odyssey) and for the long poem The Task (1785), well-known in its day, passages of which evoke the trademark melancholy
2. The masterpieces of forgery:
James Macpherson. A Scottish poet and literary collector most famous as the perpetrator of a literary hoax: Macpherson claimed to have "translated" the poems of a Gaelic bard named Ossian, and the series of those poems, published 1760-63, were hugely popular in the late 18th c., taken as evidence of and support for the "natural poet" concept so popular with the Romantics and their precursors. The poems were in fact written by Macpherson himself, though he never admitted the fact. Macpherson's own work, sometimes elegiac in tone, puts him within the far reaches of the Graveyard School. His prose poems, written in a loose, rhythmical style, filled with supernaturalism and melancholy, influenced powerfully the rising romantic movement in literature, especially German literature.
Thomas Chatterton (1752-70). He was already composing the “Rowley Poems” at the age of 12, claiming they were copies of 15th c. manuscripts at the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. In 1769 he sent several of these poems to Horace Walpole, who was enthusiastic about them. When Walpole was advised that the poems were not genuine, he returned them and ended the correspondence. After this crushing defeat, Chatterton went to London in 1770, trying, with small success, to sell his poems to various magazines. On the point of starvation, too proud to borrow or beg, he poisoned himself and died at the age of 17. Apparently an original “genius” as well as an adept imitator, Chatterton used 15th c. vocabulary, but his rhythms and his approach to poetry were quite modern. The “Rowley Poems” were soon recognized as modern adaptations written in a 15th c. style, but the vigor and medieval (“medieval?”) ambience of such poems as “Mynstrelles Songe” and “Bristowe Tragedie” are though to reveal Chatterton's genuine gift.
3. Robert Burns (1759-96). A Scottish national poet (wrote in the Scots language as well as English and “light” Scots dialect), who wonderfully exemplifies the incoming shift from the court literature to the folk - or at least the folk-based - one: Burns collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them (like the famous “Auld Lang Syne”). Famous for his sense of humor, reflected in his satirical, descriptive, and playful verse - and his ability to depict with loving accuracy the life of his fellow rural Scots.
His themes included republicanism and Radicalism which he expressed covertly in Scots Wha Hae, Scottish patriotism, anticlericalism, class inequalities, gender roles, commentary on the Scottish Kirk of his time, Scottish cultural identity, poverty, sexuality, and the beneficial aspects of popular socialising (carousing, Scotch whisky, folk songs, and so forth). Burns and his works were a source of inspiration to the pioneers of liberalism, socialism and the campaign for Scottish self-government, and he is still widely respected by political activists today, ironically even by conservatives and establishment figures because after his death Burns became drawn into the very fabric of Scotland's national identity. Burns's views on these themes in many ways parallel those of William Blake, but it is believed that, although contemporaries, they were unaware of each other; Burns's works are of course much less overtly visionary. Generally classified as a proto-Romantic poet.
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