English Literature

ENGLISH LITERATURE:
FROM
THE LATE RENAISSANCE
TO
THE RISE OF ROMANTICISM
A Course for Second Year Students in English
Tutor: dr. Ioana Mohor-Ivan
English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism
Obiective:
familiarizarea studenilor cu direciile i personalitile literare marcante

ale literaturii engleze din secolele al XVII-lea, al XVIII-lea i al XIX-lea
nsuirea conceptelor teoretice i a metodologiilor de analiz a

discursului literar.
aplicarea acestora n analiza de text.
Tipuri si modalitati de activitate didactica:
prelegere teoretica
analiza de text
discutie
eseu.
Tematica generala:
Poetry of the Later Renaissance
The Restoration
The Augustan Age
18th Century Variants of the Novel
The Movement from Neo-Classicism to Romanticism in Poetry
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
Chapter 1 Poetry of the Late Renaissance

1.1.
1.2.
1.3.
1.4.
1.1.
Introduction
Cavalier Poetry
Metaphysical Poetry
John Milton
Introduction
Though literary history does not lend itself to tidy divisions and the late
Renaissance in England should be seen as a whole movement from Sidney and
Spenser to Marvell and Milton (Vickers 1990, 160), the literary modes, genres or
individual texts included in this survey tend to belong to the historical period
spanning the accession to the throne of James I (1606) and the restoration of
Charles II (1660), at the centre of which there lies the Puritan Revolution which
wrought immense social changes and impinged upon the quality of English
literature.
Throughout the Jacobite and Caroline ages the court remains an undisputed
centre of national authority, influence, power, reward and intellectual
inspiration. As such, the literature produced in this context will tend to reflect
courtly values, favouring an intricate, allusive and decorative writing, where the
emphasis is placed on love (not necessarily marriage), warfare (largely free of
political context) or devotional piety (quite apart from practical morality.) In the
period of the Civil.Wars and Commonwealth, the urgency of crisis dominates
English society, while the court looses its privileged position. Social divisions
(e.g. Puritan / Anglican, or Parliamentarian / Royalist) reflect themselves
within the literary field. If decorative writing survives among cultured
parliamentarians and royalists, new developments are registered with the
growth of a more civic and utilitarian writing favouring plain-style verse or
plain-style prose, particularly within politico-religious controversy.
If the lyric mode is representative for the courtly values that poetry enshrines
and finds expression in the two alternate poetic modes - Cavalier and
Metaphysical - which dominate the first half of the century, John Miltons verse
is not only too varied in tone and scope to be adequately contained by either of
them, but also exemplifies the Puritan ethos and its hostility towards the courtly
culture, remaining thus apart.
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
1.2.
The Cavalier Poets
The Cavalier are a group of poets associated with the Court as cavaliers, not
only in the sense of being Royalists in opposition to the Puritan Roundheads,
but also as Renaissance Courtiers, having accepted the ideals of the
Renaissance gentleman popularised by Castigliones The Courtier: at once a
lover, soldier, wit, man of affairs, musician and poet. Moreover, poets like
Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace and Robert Herrick were
fervent admirers of Ben Jonsons lyric verse (hence the other label - The
Tribe/Sons of Ben attached to the group), whose eloquence and elegance they
tried to imitate in their own artful poems.
The characteristic theme of their verse is love. Yet its treatment differs from the
Elizabethan praise of an abstracted and idealised beauty, being more carefree,
flippant, and often sexual. The dichotomy between Art / Nature is also present
in much Cavalier poetry, which often contains pastoral scenery and images,
drawn from a combination of a nostalgic English past and classical mythology.
Most poems are also hedonist, embodying the very essence of the Latin carpe
diem (seize the day) philosophy, while the dark side of the poems is provided
by the sense of impending decay or death implied in the theme of transience.
1.2.1. Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
Though primarily remembered as a dramatist, the author of the famous
comedies of humours and Volpone, Jonson was also a scholar, critic and poet,
and it is with the songs and poems in the masques together with the collected
verse of Epigrams and The Forest (both published in 1616) and Underwoods
(1640) that his influence among the Cavalier poets is to be explained.
A classicist by formation, Jonson took the lead from Latin poets like Catullus
and Horace, showing a similar concern for humane, largely secular topics and
the craftsmanship of the verse. The light playfulness of Song: To Celia, a poem
about the act of flirtation, realised, placed and valued, or the brisk and alert
movement of Vivamus, with its outspoken carpe diem philosophy are also proof
of Jonsons command of metrics, verse and stanza forms.
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
Song: To Celia
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And Ill not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine:
But might I of Joves nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee lat-e a rosy werath,
Not so much honoring thee,
As giving it a hope that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breath,
And sentst it back to me;
Since when it grows and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.
Vivamus
Come, my Celia, let us prove,
While we can, the sports of Love;
Time will not be ours, for ever,
He at length, our good will sever.
Spend not then his gifts in vain:
Suns that set may rise again:
But if once we lose this light,
Tis with us perpetual night.
Why should we defer our joys?
Fame and rumour are but toys.
Cannot we delude the eyes
Of a few poor household spies?
Or his easier eyes beguile,
So removd by our wile?
Tis no sin, Loves fruit to steal,
But the sweet theft to reveal:
To be taken, to be seen,
These have crimes accounted been.
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
1.2.2. Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

Like Jonson, his literary forebear, Robert Herrick turned to the classical lyric for
inspiration and worked to achieve eloquence and precision of form. Though his
major collection of poems, Hesperides (1648) takes on an impressive variety of
forms including elegies, epigrams, songs, hymns and imitations of the same
Horace and Catullus, it is the lyrics like To the Virgins, to make much of time a
classic exposition of the carpe diem motif -, or Corinna's Going A-Maying a
synthesis of classical paganism with English folk themes which gives a special
twist to his celebration of the seasonal custom which have earned him the
reputation of a distinguished verbal craftsman.
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher hes a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer hes to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, bur use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
Corinna's Going A-Maying

GET up, get up for shame, the blooming morn
Upon her wings presents the god unshorn.
See how Aurora throws her fair
Fresh-quilted colours through the air :
Get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see
The dew bespangling herb and tree.
Each flower has wept and bow'd toward the east
Above an hour since : yet you not dress'd ;
Nay ! not so much as out of bed?
When all the birds have matins said
And sung their thankful hymns, 'tis sin,
Nay, profanation to keep in,
Whereas a thousand virgins on this day
Spring, sooner than the lark, to fetch in May.
Rise and put on your foliage, and be seen
To come forth, like the spring-time, fresh and green,
And sweet as Flora. Take no care
For jewels for your gown or hair :
Fear not ; the leaves will strew
Gems in abundance upon you :
Besides, the childhood of the day has kept,
Against you come, some orient pearls unwept ;
Come and receive them while the light
Hangs on the dew-locks of the night :
And Titan on the eastern hill
Retires himself, or else stands still
Till you come forth. Wash, dress, be brief in praying :
Few beads are best when once we go a-Maying.
Come, my Corinna, come ; and, coming, mark
How each field turns a street, each street a park
Made green and trimm'd with trees : see how
Devotion gives each house a bough
Or branch : each porch, each door ere this
An ark, a tabernacle is,
Made up of white-thorn neatly interwove ;
As if here were those cooler shades of love.
Can such delights be in the street
And open fields and we not see't ?
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
Come, we'll abroad ; and let's obey

The proclamation made for May :
And sin no more, as we have done, by staying ;
But, my Corinna, come, let's go a-Maying.
There's not a budding boy or girl this day
But is got up, and gone to bring in May.
A deal of youth, ere this, is come
Back, and with white-thorn laden home.
Some have despatch'd their cakes and cream
Before that we have left to dream :
And some have wept, and woo'd, and plighted troth,
And chose their priest, ere we can cast off sloth :
Many a green-gown has been given ;
Many a kiss, both odd and even :
Many a glance too has been sent
From out the eye, love's firmament ;
Many a jest told of the keys betraying
This night, and locks pick'd, yet we're not a-Maying.
Come, let us go while we are in our prime ;
And take the harmless folly of the time.
We shall grow old apace, and die
Before we know our liberty.
Our life is short, and our days run
As fast away as does the sun ;
And, as a vapour or a drop of rain
Once lost, can ne'er be found again,
So when or you or I are made
A fable, song, or fleeting shade,
All love, all liking, all delight
Lies drowned with us in endless night.
Then while time serves, and we are but decaying,
Come, my Corinna, come, let's go a-Maying.
Beads, prayers.
Left to dream, ceased dreaming.
Green-gown, tumble on the grass
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
1. 3. The Metaphysical Poets

Metaphysical is a term used to group together certain 17th- century poets like
John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan or Richard
Crashaw, who tried to deepen the traditional lyric forms of love and
devotion by stretching them to comprehend the new scientific discourses and
theories, the topical debates on humanism, faith and eternity. As such, their
poetry investigates the world by a rational investigation of its phenomena,
rather than by intuition or mysticism.
It is traditional to oppose the Cavalier to the Metaphysical poets: whereas the
Cavaliers preferred more straightforward expression, valuing elegance, the
metaphysical poets were fond of abstruse imagery and complicated
metaphors, sharing common characteristics of wit, inventiveness, and a love
of elaborate stylistic manoeuvres. Reacting against the deliberately smooth
and sweet tone of much 16th-century verse, the metaphysical poets adopted a
style that is energetic, uneven and vigorous, otherwise labelled as the
poetry of strong lines.
The term was first applied by John Dryden when, in 1693, he criticised
Donne because he affects the Metaphysics in his amorous verses where
nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice
speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts. Dr. Samuel
Johnson consolidated the critique in the 18th-century, when he described the
far-fetched nature of their comparisons as a kind of discordia concors; a
combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in
things apparently unlike. It was only in the 20th-century that their poetry
was brought back to favour, when T.S. Eliot defended the style as fusing
reason with passion and showing a unification of thought and feeling.
1. 3. 1. John Donne (1537-1631)
John Donnes literary output lends itself to two major divisions: the first
phase, coinciding with his youth and studies, combines gaiety and
sophistication of the urban wit with the specific immersion in metaphysical
concerns. The most interesting are the love poems collected in Songs and
Sonnets, addressed to different persons, some cynical in nature, others
marked with a violence of passion. The second phase belongs to the later part
of his life, when the young and sophisticated scholar had grown into a grave
and philosophical divine, the Dean of St. Pauls Cathedral. The poems
included in Donnes Divine Poems and Holy Sonnets reflect religious
tensions and his poetic exploration of mans relationship with God. Although
thus changed in focus and theme, they still retain the same intensity, the
same combination of passion and argument that is characteristic of his
earliest endeavours.
As such, the following attributes characterize Donnes both love and
religious poems, and are considered to have set the pattern for other poets
labelled as metaphysical due to the fact that they shared a similar poetic
style and way of organising thought:
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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It is sharply opposed to the intricate, allusive, highly decorative

writing and the idealised view of sexual love which constituted the
central tradition of Elizabethan poetry;
It adopts a diction and meter modelled on the rhythms of actual speech;
It is usually organised in the dramatic or rhetorical form of an urgent

or heated argument: the opening of the poems shock the reader into
attention, sometimes by asking a question; then the thought or
argument is ingeniously developed in terms of ideas developed from
philosophy or scientific notions;
It is marked by realism, irony, and often cynicism in its treatment of

the complexity of human motives;
It puts to use a subtle and often outrageous logic
It reveals a persistent wittiness, making use of paradox, puns, and

startling parallels.
These characteristics may be exemplified by Loves Growth, in which
commonplaces of Elizabethan thought are ingeniously transmuted by
Donnes argumentation, which teases them out in a mock-serious way and
sustains the argument through a series of images that surprise and yet
compel acquiescence in their validity.
Loves Growth
I SCARCE believe my love to be so pure
As I had thought it was,
Because it doth endure
Vicissitude, and season, as the grass;
Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore,
My love was infinite, if spring make it more.
But if this medicine, love, which cures all sorrow
With more, not only be no quintessence,
But mixt of all stuffs, paining soul, or sense,
And of the Sun his working vigour borrow,
Loves not so pure, and abstract, as they use
To say, which have no Mistress but their Muse,
But as all else, being elemented too,
Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.
And yet no greater, but more eminent,
Love by the Spring is grown;
As, in the firmament,
Stars by the Sun are not enlargd, but shown.
Gentle love deeds, as blossoms on a bough,
From loves awakened root do bud out now.
If, as in water stirrd more circles be
Producd by one, love such additions take,
Those like so many spheres, but one heaven make,
For, they are all concentric unto thee;
And though each spring do add to love new heat,
As princes do in times of action get
New taxes, and remit them not in peace,
No winter shall abate the springs increase.
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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1. 3. 2. Andrew Marvell (1621-78)

Andrew Marvells poetry ranges from political (the Horatian Ode: Upon
Cromwells return from Ireland) to pastoral poems (The Garden), from satirical
(The Loyal Scot) to passionate love verse (To His Coy Mistress). Nevertheless,
Marvells chief influence was Donne, whose metaphysical conceits he adopted.
The Definition of Love treats the theme of star-crossed love in a
characteristically metaphysical fashion, making recourse to an accumulation
of ingenious and elaborate imagery to reach the obvious conclusion that
though destined to remain united in mind, the two lovers will eternally be
separated in body by a greater power than they can contradict.
The Definition of Love
My Love is of a birth as rare
As tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by despair
Upon Impossibility.
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble hope could ner have flown
But vainly flapt its Tinsel Wing.
And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended Soul is fixt,
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And alwaies crouds it self betwixt.
For Fate with jealous Eye does see
Two perfect Loves; nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruine be,
And her Tyrannick powr, depose.
And therefore her Decrees of Steel
Us as the distant poles have placd,
(Though loves whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embraced.
Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And Earth some new Convulsion tear;
And, us to joyn, the World should all
Be crampd into a Planisphere.
As Lines so Loves oblique may well
Themselves in every Angle greet:
But ours so truly Parallel,
Though infinite can never meet.
Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debarrs,
Is the Conjunction of the Mind,
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
And Opposition of the Stars.
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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1.3. 3. Henry Vaughan (1593-1633)

If Marvell illustrates the secular development of metaphysical verse, Henry
Vaughan is representative for its religious concerns. A Welsh country-side
doctor, interested in the occult, Henry Vaughan was also a late adept of the
philosophy of mystic correspondence between the world of creatures and the
spirits. This is mirrored in his poems, where Vaughan often seems to be
recounting direct experiences of the supernatural, identified with visions of
the countryside and childhood innocence, like in one of his best-known
poems, The Retreate:
The Retreate
Happy those early days! When I
Shind in my Angell-infancy.
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white, Celestiall thought,
When yet I had not walkt above
A mile, or two, from my first love,
And looking back (at that short space,)
Could see a glimpse of his bright face;
When on some gilded Cloud, or flowre
My gazing soul would dwell an houre,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My Conscience with a sinfull sound,
Or had the black art to dispence
A sevrall sinne to evry sence,
But felt through all this fleshly dresse
Bright shootes of everlastingness.
O how I long to travel back
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plaine
Where first I left my glorious traine,
From whence thInlightned spirit sees
That shady City of Palme trees;
But (ah!) my soul with too much stay
Is drunk, and staggers in the way.
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move,
And when this dust falls to the urn
In that state I came return.
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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1.4. John Milton (1608-74)

Widely considered among the five greatest poets in English language,
John Milton is the last great liberal intelligence of the English
Renaissance, as the values he advocated in his work are: tolerance,
freedom and self-determination, the same that Shakespeare had
expressed in his time.
In all his writings, Milton drew on an extensive classical education which included seven years at Cambridge, seven years further study, a
years travel in Italy devoted to the study of the Bible and theology,
literature and philosophy, in Latin Greek, Italian and English. (Vickers
1990, 196).
a) Miltons early poems (from the 1620s) include the famous On the
Morning of Christs Nativity (1629), his first considerable poem in English.
It is a poem in two parts, consisting of an introductory invocation of 4
seven-line stanzas, in which the poet summarizes the generally accepted
Christian understanding of what happened at Christmas, and then turns to
the pagan Muse for inspiration:
This is the month, and this the happy morn
Wherein the son of Heavens eternal King,
Of wedded maid and virgin mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,
That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.
That glorious form, that light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of majesty
Wherewith he wont at Heavens high council-table
To sit the midst if Trinal Unity,
He laid aside; and here with us to be,
Forsook the courts of everlasting day,
And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.
.
Say, heavenly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein
Afford a present to the infant God?
Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain,
To welcome him to his new abode?
The second part of the Ode is designed as the Hymn itself and consists
in 27 eight-line stanzas in a more lyric metre. Having been failed by the
Muse, the poet takes it upon himself to glorify Christ as a transcendent
paragon of heroic action, decribing his virtuous deed and victory, while
still in cradle over the pagan gods of the ancient world:
Peor and Baalim,
Forsake their Temples dim,
With that twice-batterd God of Palestine,
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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And mooned Ashtaroth,

Heavns Queen and Mother both,
Now sits not girt with tapers holy shine,
The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn,
In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz
mourn.
b) The works of the 1630s may be included in Miltons so-called

pastoral period, for they reflect the poets mood as he lived in
retirement at his fathers country-house in Buckinghamshire.
LAllegro and Il Penseroso (c. 1632) are a pair of contrasted poems
related to the synkriseis tradition of classical literature, which extend the
lyrical mode established by the Ode in order to juxtapose the cheerful
and the thoughtful man. Though notionally opposed, the qualities of
both are alluring, because the two are in fact complementary, dividing
all legitimate pleasures into the private and the public realms.
But let my due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloisters pale,
And love the high embowed roof,
With antique pillars massy proof,
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing organ blow
To the full-voicd choir below,
In service high, and anthems clear,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all Heavn before mine eyes . . .
Comus (1634) is a masque written at the request of his friend, the

composer Henry Lawes, to celebrate the appointment of the Earl of
Bridgwater, owner of the Ludlow Castle, as Lord Lieutenant of Wales.
The text employs a simple plot - three travellers, a lady and her brothers
are stranded in a forest by nightfall; as the brothers go in search of a
spring, the lady befalls into the hands of Comus, an evil sorcerer,
offspring of Bacchus and Circe, who lures travellers into drinking a
magic potion that turns them into monsters; an Attending Spirit
intervenes helping the brothers free their sister to present the morality
theme of Virtue triumphing over Vice. Despite Comuss attempts to
tempt the Lady and the persuasive rhetoric of his argument:
Wherefore did Nature pour her bouties forth,
With such a full and unwithdrawing hand [. . . ]
But all to please, and sate the curious taste?
the Lady finds no difficulty in rejecting his false rules:

She fables not, I feel that I do fear
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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Her words set off by some superior power;

And though not mortal, yet a cold shuddering dew
Dips me all oer, as when the wrath of Jove
Speaks thunder.
Lycidas (1637) is a pastoral elegy published to the memory of Edward

King, a former Cambridge student and possibly a friend of Miltons
who had drowned on a journey to Ireland. Nevertheless, the poem
moves from its commemoration of the actual person to reflections on
the writers own mortality and ambitions, while also engaging in
polemic and touching upon the political, philosophical and religious
concerns of the time:
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw.
The hungry sheep look up and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread:
Besides what the grim Wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace; and nothing said;
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.
The ending, after offering a vision of Lycidas rising to heaven, like the
stars, has Milton himself (as the uncouth swain) utter the final lines
which bring the remarkable optimism of a renewal:
Weep no more, woeful shephers, weep no more,
For Lycidas, you sorrow, is not dead
Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills,

While the still morn went out with sandals grey;
He touched the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay.
And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.
c) During the period of the Civil wars and the Commonwealth all of
Miltons energies went into the support of radical republicanism, his work
becoming civic and utilitarian. While prose propaganda on topical issues
like the defence of the new state (Defence of the British People; Second
Defence, Eikonoklastes), divorce, education or the freedom of the press
(Aeropagitica) dominates his literary output, the only poems that he wrote
are 24 sonnets, public and political rather than personal, with the
exception of On His Blindness (1652), the poem which records Miltons
reaction at his loss of sight, as he reconciles his own desire to surrender
hope with his faith in Gods will:
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light denied,
I fondly ask. But Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either mans work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed
And post oer land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.
d) After the Restoration, having been imprisoned but released after a

paying a fine, Milton returned to the full-time composition of poetry,
producing the three great epics which mark the end of his literary
career.
Paradise Lost (1667) remains the most impressive of the three. Though
at first Milton seems to have been tempted by the Arthurian legends as
the fit subject for a national British epic, he then decided on the theme
of the Fall, because the latter went beyond national confines, allowing
the poet to analyse the whole question of freedom, free will and
individual choice.
The same as in On His Blindness, Miltons intention was the assert
eternal providence,/And justify the ways of God to men. For this,
Milton set out to demonstrate that even sin was a part of Gods plan for
humanity, for mankind would not exist outside Paradise if Satan had
not engineered the fall of Adam and Eve. Undergoing constant revision,
in its final form Paradise Lost is clearly divided in two halves: the first
one deals with the Fall of Satan and his rebellious Angels, while the
second parallels it in the Fall of Man. Yet for both the Fall involves
individual choice and becomes an assertion of their free will: reasoning
between heaven and hell, Satan chooses the latter, to be free and
supreme:
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in hell:
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Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
After Eve has yielded to Satans temptation and bitten of the forbidden
fruit, Adams choice to share in the transgression of divine law is
similarly an act of free will: the effect of his choice is one of loss, but a
loss that will later turn to gain the gain of a future for humanity on
earth and, like the ending of Lycidas the final image of Paradise Lost is
profoundly forward-looking:
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (1671), both published four

years after Paradise Lost, show a different conception of humanity
from that portrayed in the first epic. Unlike Adam and Eve, Christ and
Samson are both superhuman, i.e. beyond the bounds of normal human
beings, and their triumphs (Christs over the tempting Satan, or
Samsons over the Philistines) are less clearly explorations of human
qualities than ideal exempla of what humanity should be rather than
what it is. In Samson Agonistes Milton also returns to the theme of
blindness, as Samson is eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves:
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!
The sun to me is dark
And silent is the moon,
When she deserts the night
Hid in her vacant, interlunar cave.
To live a life half-dead, a living death.
The poem becomes a journey from darkness to light, from defeat to

victory. Samsons final act of strength as he pulls down the temple of
his foes turns his own death into an achievement, while the last lines
compare his fame to the Phoenix, and turn Samson into a Christ-like
figure, resurrected after death:
So virtue given for lost,
Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,
Like that self-begotten bird
In the Arabian woods embossed,
That no second knows or third,
And lay erewhile a holocaust,
From out her ashy womb now teemed,
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Revives, reflourishes, then virtuous most

When most unactive deemed,
And though her body die, her fame survives,
A secular bird ages of lives.
Task
Consider the following topics to defend in oral or written form:
1. The Lyric Mode during the 17th century: Cavalier poetry
Definition of the lyric
Cultural contextualization: the late Renaissance
Definition of Cavalier poetry
Characteristics of Cavalier poetry
Representative poets
Choose a text for illustration
2. The Lyric Mode during the 17th century: Metaphysical poetry
Definition of the lyric
Cultural contextualization: the late Renaissance
Definition of Metaphysical poetry
Characteristics of Metaphysical poetry
Representative poets
3. John Milton and the Lyric
Overview of Miltons literary career
Miltons lyrical texts:
o Odes
o Pastoral poems
o Sonnets
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Chapter 2 The Restoration

2.1. Background to the Literature of the Restoration
2.2. John Dryden
2.3. Restoration Drama
2.1 Background to the Literature of the Restoration
2.1.1. Political and Social Issues:
a) restoration of monarchy
b) development of a two-party parliamentary system
c) the growth of a protestant, middle-class and stable society
d) social beliefs and behaviours modelled on Thomas
Hobbes (1588-1679) The Leviathan, or the Matter, Form
and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil
(1651), i.e. a total organism in which the individual is the
total subject of state control.
e) increased urbanization triggering a shift in the balance of

power from the country-side to the city
f) renewed commitment to empire-building
2.1.2. Cultural Issues:
a) insitutionalisation of scientific investigation and research
(The Royal Society, 1662-63)
b) The Age of Reason: characteristic value-system espousing
a preference for rationality, order, general truths
c) Deism: belief in a rational religion of nature
d) Empiricim (John Locke, 1632-1704, George Berkeley, 16851753)
2.1.3. Literary Issues: Neoclassicism
a. a regard for tradition and reverence for the classics
b. a sense of literature as art (i.e artificed, artificial, made by
craft)
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c. a concern for social reality, and the communal commonplaces of

thought which hold it together
d. a concern for nature, i.e. the way things are and should be
e. a concern with pride (threat against the status quo)
2.2. John Dryden (1631-1700)
John Dryden (1631-1700) is the dominant figure in the literature of the
Restoration, a highly prolific writer expressing himself in all the
important contemporary forms (odes, satires, epistles, fables, literary
criticism, drama), as well as always placing himself at the centre of the
greatest debates of the time (be them political, religious, or the
specifically literary questions of neoclassicism.)
a) From the very beginning of his literary career, Drydens writing
evinces strong interest in topical matters. His occasional poems
celebrating events of public character: the death of Cromwell - Heroic
Stanzas (1659) -, the return of Charles II - Astraea Redux (1660) -, or the
expanding glory of his nation and age - Annus Mirabilis (1667). This
last poem interprets the wonders of 1666 - the Great Fire of London
and the two national defensive victories against the Dutch, as trials sent
by God to bind King and People together, closing on an image of
London restored, ready to take her place as a trade centre for the world:
Yet London, empress of the northern clime,
By an high fate though greatly didst expire:
Great as the worlds, which at the death of time
Must fall, and rise a nobler frame by fire.
b) In the 1680s, Dryden moved on to writing formal verse satires, as

part of the ages preference for the genre. Restoration satire, mainly
written in verse, could be of two kinds: the first one took the form of a
very general sweeping criticism of mankind, such as A Satire Against
Reason and Mankind, written by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
exemplifies. The other type tended to be very specific, with allusions to
real figures in politics and society. Samuel Butlers Hudibras is a
commentary on the Civil Wars and the events leading to the
Restoration, attacking the Puritan religion and debasing its enemies by
using the burlesque, caricature, and the grotesque.
Drydens satirical works belong to the second type, being specifically
targeted. Absalom and Achitophel (1681) uses an allegorical form in
order to comment on the fundamental religious and political issues of
the time: the succession to the throne, disputed between the Kings
Catholic brother, James, and his Protestant, but illegitimate son, the
Duke of Monmouth. The poem blends the heroic and the satiric,
distancing contemporary events through the analogues found in the
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biblical story of Absaloms revolt against his father, David, the king of
Israel. Other contemporary figures are similarly matched to their
biblical counterparts, most notable being the association of the Whig
earl of Shaftesbury, the principal supporter of Monmouths claim, to
Achitophel, Absaloms chief adviser in the Bible. One of the most
impressive features of the poem resides with Drydens skill in
rendering the fragility of the Restoration settlement, while reasserting
his faith in the kings ability to control the situation. Among other
things, this involves a tactical success in the presentation of the main
characters. David is not offered as a simple heroic character at the start.
Dryden is careful to mention the kings faults, but finally transforms
them into qualities, related to principles of warmth and creativity:
In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin,
Before polygamy was made a sin;
When man on man multiplied his kind,
Ere one to one was cursedly confined;
When nature prompted, and no law denied
Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;
Then Israels monarch, after heavns own heart,
His vigorous warmth did variously impart
On wives and slaves, and, wide as his command,
Scattered his makers image through the land.
These are to be contrasted with the sterile energy of Achitophel, which

wilde Ambition misdirects to work to the downfall of the
Tree/nation - by shaping Absalom into a rebel and, eventually, to his
own destruction:
Oh, had he been content to serve the Crown,
With virtues only proper to the Gown;
David, for him his tuneful Harp had strung,
And Heaven had wanted one Immortal song.
But wild Ambition loves to slide, not stand;
And Fortunes Ice prefers to Virtues Land:
Achitophel, grown weary to possess
A lawful Fame, and lazy Happiness;
Disdaind the Golden fruit to gather free,
And lent the Crowd his Arm to shake the Tree.
Absalom and Achitophel also proves Drydens mastery of the heroic

couplet a pentameter couplet, containing a complete statement which becomes the norm with Neoclassicist authors.
MacFlecknoe (1684) is another specifically-targeted satire, this time
against a literary rival, Thomas Shadwell, with whom Dryden had had
an argument. In order to expose his victim to ridicule, Dryden uses the
devices of the mock-epic - which treats the low, mean or absurd in the
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grand language, lofty style, solemn tone of epic poetry in order to link
Shadwell to a minor poet, Richard Fleckoe, who had been ridiculed by
Andrew Marvell in a previous poem. The ageing Flecknoe is made by
Dryden an anti-monarch, ruling over realms of Nonsense absolute,
who hands on his power (in an absurdly pompous ceremony of
procession and coronation) to his son (Mac) Shadwell:
And pondering which of all his sons was fit
To reign, and wage immortal war with wit,
Cried: Tis resolved; for nature pleads that he
Should only rule who most resembles me.
Sh ---- alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years:
Sh ---- alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Sh ---- never deviates into sense.
c) A different side to Drydens literary interests is represented by his

lyrics: various songs and odes which follow the Restoration fashion
(which prefers stronger dance rhythms, with the poet more ready to
imitate musical effects through verbal devices):
Song for Saint Cecilias Day (1687)
From harmony, from heavenly harmony
This universal frame began:
When Nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high:
Arise, ye more than dead.
Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,
In order to their stations leap,
And Musics power obey.
Alexanders Feast (1693)

CHORUS:
Bacchus blessings are a treasure;
Drinking is the soldiers pleasure;
Rich the treasure,
Sweet the pleasure;
Sweet is pleasure after pain.
Soothed with the sound the King grew vain,
Fought all his battles oer again;
And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he
slew the slain.
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To the Pious Memory. . .Mrs. Anne Killigrew (1686) is an elegy over the
death of the title figure, whose talent for poetry and painting offers
Dryden an opportunity to consider the arts themselves, their present
style, their central role in civilisation.
d) Drydens abiding interests in principle of authority and methods of
government also went into two poetic statements of his religious creed.
While Religio Laici (1684)
defends the middle-way of the Anglican Church, The Hind and the
Panther (1687), written after his conversion to Catholicism, is a beast
fable in which a milk-white Hind (standing for the Roman Church)
debates theology with the intelligent, carnivorous and spotted Panther
(representing Anglicanism).
e) Drydens literary criticism is represented by the various essays,
prefaces, dramatic prologues and epilogues in which he expressed his
opinions on literature and art. Some of the best known ones are:
Essay of Dramatic Poesie (1668)

Essay of Heroic Plays (1672)
Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693)
Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700)
Having proclaimed himself a classicist, Dryden follows the model of the

Graeco-Roman tradition and considers that literature must imitate
nature and give a picture of truth in order to both delight and instruct.
Moreover, he stresses the importance of decorum (a literature principle
in accordance to which style and subject-matter must be matched) and
of the rules (e.g. the rule of the dramatic unities) which literature must
obey.
f) As a playwright, Dryden is careful to put into practice his critical
opinions, both in the comedies - The Wild Gallant (1663), The Rival
Ladies (1664), Marriage la Mode (1672) and the tragedies The
Conquest of Granada (1668), All for Love (1678) -which he wrote for
the Restoration stage. The last play mentioned is an example of neoclassical revision of the Shakespearean Antony and Cleopatra, a heroic
tragedy which employs an elaborately formal style, is written in rhyme,
and respects the unities of time, place and action, which the original
violated. The differences between the two texts are visible if one
compares the following excerpts:
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, Act II, sc. ii
Enobarbus:
I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnishd throne,
Burnd on the water; the poop was beaten gold;
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were
silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggard all description: she did lie
In her pavilion - cloth of gold, of tissue Oer-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outsork nature: on each side her,
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colourd fans, whose wind did seem
To glow with delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.
Agrippa:
O, rare for Antony!
Enobarbus:
Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
So many mermaids, tended her I the eyes,
And made their bends adornings; at the helm
A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle
Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands
That yarely frame the office. From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her; and Antony,
Enthroned I the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too
And made a gap in nature.
ALL FOR LOVE, Act iii

Antony:
To clear her self,
For sending him no Aid, she came from Egypt.
Her Gally down the Silver Cydnos rowd,
The tackling Silk, the Streamers wavd with Gold,
The genlt Winds were lodgd in Purple Sails:
Her Nymphs, like Nereid, round her Couch, were
placd;
Where she, another Sea-born Venus, lay.
Dollabella:
No more: I would not hear it.
Antony:
O, you must!
She lay, and leant her Cheek upon her Hand,
And cast a Look so languishingly sweet,
As if, secure of all Beholders Hearts,
Neglecting she could take em: Boys, like Cupids,
Stood fanning, with their painted Wings, the Winds
That plaid about her Face: But if she smild,
A darting Glory seemd to blaze abroad:
That Mens desiring Eyes were never wearyd
But hung upon the Object: to soft Flutes
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The Silver Oars kept Time; and while they plaid,

The Hearing gave new Pleasure to the Sight;
And both to Thought: twas Heavn or somewhat more;
For she so charmd all Hearts, that gazing Crowds
Stood panting on the shore, and wanted Breath
To give their welcome Voice.
II.
Antony:
Oh, Dollabella, which way shall I turn?
I find a secret yielding in my Soul;
But Cleopatra, who would die with me,
Must she be left? Pity pleads for Octavia
But does it not plead more for Cleopatra?
[Here the Children go to him, etc.]
Ventidius:
Was ever sight so moving! Emperor!
Dollabella:
Friend!
Octavia:
Husband!
Both Children: Father!
Antony:
I am vanquished: take me,
Octavia; take me, Children; share me all.
[Embracing them.
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2.3. Restoration Drama

Between 1642 and 1660 the theatres in England were officially closed
and the actors were put outside the law, being considered rogues or
vagabonds. When theatre was officially reopened three months after the
restoration of Charles II, a new type of theatre, quite different from its
Elizabethan and Jacobian predecessors, emerged.
Unlike the Globe or the Fortune, the Restoration theatres were roofed,
bigger and less intimate. While the Elizabethan thrust stage was
incorporated, it gradually grew shallower, with the action being jutted
back, behind the picture frame. Artificial lightning, stage boxes, or
moveable perspective scenery were also introduced.
Another innovation consisted in the introduction of women players,
which encouraged a more realistic sexual atmosphere on stage, and also
witnessed to the beginning of extratheatrical relationships being
established between performers and members of the audience.
The audience itself also changed in its social composition, shrinking
from the wide spectrum of national life of the Elizabethan playgoers to
encompass mainly members of the aristocracy and the newly-rich
middle-classes. With this, an era of specialist drama (catering for
narrower tastes) was ushered in.
As such, the two main genres favoured by the Restoration theatre are:
the heroic tragedy and the comedy-of-manners.
2.3.1. Heroic Tragedy
The Heroic Tragedy may be seen as the wish-fulfilling counterpart of
the comedy-of-manners, set far from the reality of the intrigue-ridden
London, in strange places where people with exotic names discuss
heroic ideals related to love and honour. Its basic conception is simple:
at its centre there is a hero, conceived as a superman, and placed in a
situation where he is to choose between fulfilling his own emotional
needs, or dedicating himself to the public good. His actions are meant
to arouse not pity or terror, but wonder and admiration. In keeping
with the neo-classical standards, the plays are written in rhyme, and
very often make use of the splendour and fascination of the spectacle.
Among the playwrights making their contribution to the Restoration
tragedy the most notable are: John Dryden, with The Conquest of
Granada and All For Love, Nathaniel Lee, with his Nero, Sophonisba,
Gloriana or The Rival Queens, and Thomas Otway, with The Orphan
(1680) or Venice Preservd (1682). By far the most original, Otway wrote
tragedies of failure, remorse and suicide, rather than of ambition,
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corruption and destiny. In Venice Preservd, the hero Jaffeir becomes a

foe to Venice by joining a conspiracy against the its senators not for
the sake of freedom, but mainly to avenge his love, Belvidera:
Jaffeir: . . . from this hour I chase
All little thoughts, all tender human follies
Out of my bosom. Vengeance shall have room.
Revenge!
Pierre: And Liberty!
Jaffeir:
Revenge! Revenge!
Having become an outcast, his plans and friendships fail, Jaffeir is

eventually obliged to kill his best friend and himself:
Jaffeir: How cursed is my position, tossed and jostled
From every corner; fortunes common fool,
The jest of rogues, an instrumental ass
For villains to lay loads of shame upon,
And drive about just for their ease and scorn.
What the play proves is the inadmissibility of dissent, for Jaffeir is a

hero because his actions ensure that the social order should not be
overturned, affirming thus the status quo rather than questioning and
re-examining it.
A case apart is represented by George Lillo, in whose plays like The
London Merchant (1731) or The Fatal Curiosity (1736) the domestic
tragedy of the Elizabethan theatre finds a new middle-class setting. The
Fatal Curiosity is set in Cornwall where an old couple murder a visiting
stranger in the hope of monetary gain, only to discover that the young
stranger was their own son, thought long lost at sea:
Agnes: The stranger sleeps at present, but so restless
His slumbers seem, they cant continue long.
Come, come, dispatch! Here, Ive secured his dagger.
Old Wilmot: Oh, Agnes, Agnes! If there be a hell, tis just
We should expect it.
[Goes to take the dagger but lets it fall.]
Agnes: Nay, for shame! Shake off this panic, and be more
yourself!
Old Wilmot: Whats to be done? On what had we determined?
Agnes: Youre quite dismayed. Ill do
The deed myself.
[Takes up the dagger.]
Old Wilmot: Give me the fatal steel.
Tis but a single murder
Necessity, impatience, and despair,
The three wide mouths of that true Cerberus,
Grim poverty, demands. They shall be stopped.
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2.3.2. The Comedy-of-manners

At the other end of the spectrum there lies the comedy-of-manners, an
import of the French comedy of morals, which mirrored the manners,
modes and morals of the upper-class society.
Its main subject is sex: sexual attraction, sexual intrigue, sexual
conquest, with an acute interest in the relationships between love and
money, or love and marriage. The typical play features a witty and
amoral couple at the centre, a fatuous fop, a discarded mistress and a
cuckolded citizen in the middle distance, as well as a group of assorted
elderly lechers of both sexes in the background. The plot, which is
highly complex and involves the proliferation of intrigue in subplots,
deals alternatively with the pursuit of love and money.
Another subject of interest is related to the uses and abuses of
affectation (or socially determined behaviour): its characters are
obsessed with fashion, gossip and their own circle in society. Strong
contrasts are made between innocence and knowingness, often
represented as contrasts between rustic country-manners and the
refinements of the city.
Its aims are twofold: to correct (by making vice seem ridiculous) and to
amuse. As such the plays offer a realistic picture of life, less stylized and
more naturalistic, creating the illusion of a more familiar world than
that presented in the tragedies.
George Ethereges plays - The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub
(1664), She Woud If She Coud (1668) or The Man of Mode or, Sir
Fopling Flutter (1676) were among the first notable successes. The
Man of Mode uses interwoven plots to counterpoint youth and old age,
town and country, male and female. At one end of the scale we find
Dorimant, the young gallant always in search of pleasure until forced to
agree to marriage; at the other there Sir Fopling Flutter, the old country
squire, the innocent in town, whose mindless foppery is satirized:
[Sir Fopling dancing by himself.]
Young Bellair: See Sir Fopling dancing.
Dorimant: You are practising and have a mind to recover, I see.
Sir Fopling: Prithee Dorimant, why hast not thou a glass hung up here?
A room is the dullest thing without one?
Young Bellair: Here is company to entertain you.
Sir Fopling: But I mean in case of being alone. In a glass a man may
entertain himself.
Dorimant: The shadow of himself indeed.
Sir Fopling: Correct the errors of his motion and his dress.
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Medley: I find, Sir Fopling, in your solitude you remember the saying
of the wise man, and study yourself.
Sir Fopling: Tis the best diversion in our retirements.
William Wycherleys plays - The Gentleman Dancing Master 1672); The

Country Wife (1675); The Plain Dealer (1676) belong to the 1670s
when the presence of the actresses had become firmly established. As
such as subjects are related to physical sex and cuckoldry, and
Wycherley has often been considered the most obscene and amoral of
the Restoration playwrights. The Country Wife is a comedy of
seduction and hypocrisy, dealing with Horners sexual conquests of
both the fashionable town wives and the artless country wife of the title:
Horner: You would not take my advice to be gone home before your
husband came back; hell now discover all. Yet pray, my dearest, be
persuaded to go home and leave the rest to my management. Ill let
you down the back way.
Mrs Pinchwife: I dont know the way home, so I dont.
Horner: My man shall wait upon you.
Mrs. Pinchwife: No, dont you believe that Ill go at all. What, are you
weary of me already?
Horner: No, my life, tis that I may love you long. Tis to secure my
love, and your reputation with your husband. Hell never receive
you again else.
Mrs. Pinchwife: What care I? Dye think to frighten me with that? I
dont intend to go to him again. You shall be my husband now.
Horner: I cannot be your husband, dearest, since you are married to
him.
Mrs Pinchwife: Oh, would you make me believe that? Dont I see,
every day at London here, women leave their first husbands and go
and live with other men as their wives? Pish, pshaw! Youd make
me angry, but that I love you so mainly.
Horner: So, they are coming up. - In again, in, I hear em.
[Exit Mrs Pinchwife.]
Nevertheless, the masterpiece of the genre is considered to be William

Congreves The Way of the World (1700), whose way was paved by the
other three comedies that Congreve wrote in the 1690s: The Old
Bachelor (1693), The Double Dealer (1693) and Love for Love (1695).
The Way of the World makes use of the standard situation which
involves the witty pair of lovers, the amorous widow, the squire from
the country, intrigues and adultery, and the usual tensions between
desire and reputation. Though the plays main theme is marriage, its
reality and appearance, its relationship to love and money, Mirabell and
Millamant demonstrate that the terms need not be antagonistic, for their
marriage should primarily be linked to emotional fulfilment. At the
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same time, the the play remains memorable for the classic jousts of wit
into which the two lovers - in the tradition of the Shakespearean comic
lovers like Beatrice and Benedick engage, with Millamant
demonstrating great poise and a sense of appropriate modern
behaviour:
Millamant: Ill never marry, unless I am first made sure of my will and
pleasure.
Mirabell: Would you haveem both before marriage? Or will you be
contented with the first now, and stay for the other till after
grace?
Millamant: Ah, dont be impertinent My dear liberty, shall I leave
thee? My faithful solitude, my darling contemplation, must I
bid you then adieu? Ah-y adieu my morning thoughts,
agreeable wakings, indolent slumbers, all ye douceurs, ye
sommeits du matin, adieu I cant do it, tis more than
impossible. Positively, Mirabell, Ill lie a-bed in a morning as
long as I please.
Mirabell: then Ill get up in a morning as early as I please.
Millamant: Ah! Idle creature, get up when you will And dye hear, I
wont be called names after Im married; positively, I wont be
calld names.
Mirabell: Names!
Millamant: Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweetheart,
and the rest of that nauseous cant, in which men and their
wives are so fulsomely familiar, - I shall never bear that. Good
Mirabell dont let us be familiar or fond, nor kiss before folks,
like my Lady Fadler and Sir Francis: not go to Hyde Park
together the first Sunday in a new chariot, to provoke eyes and
whispers; and then never be seen there together again; as if we
were proud of one another the first week, and ashamed of one
another ever after. Let us never visit together, nor go to a play
together, but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as
strange as if we had been married a great while; and as wellbred as if we were not married at all.
Mirabell: Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your
demands are pretty reasonable.
Millamant: Trifles, - as liberty to pay and receive visits to and from
whom I please; to write and receive letters, without
interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please;
and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to
have no obligation upon me to converse with wits that I dont
like, because they are your acquaintance; or to be intimate with
fools, because they may be your relations. Come to dinner
when I please, dine in my dressing-room when Im out of
humour, without giving a reason. To have my closet inviolate;
to be sole empress of my tea-table, which you must never
presume to approach without first asking leave. And lastly
wherever I am, you shall always knock at the door before you
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come in. These articles subscribed, I I continue to endure you a

little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife.
Of the younger generation of playwrights, John Vanbrugh, the author

of The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697) and George
Farquhar, the author of The Recruiting Officer (1706) and The Beaux
Stratagem (1707) ensured the genres continuing appeal on the English
stage. Farquhars plays, though using Restoration themes and plot
devices, are more realistic in setting and tone, and explore the comedy
of human motivation with more sympathy and a concern for morality.
At the same time, they leave the claustrophobic atmosphere of
fashionable London to be set in the country, which is depicted very
different form the limbo of earlier dramatists. The Beaux Stratagem is
thus set in Lichfield, where two impoverished London gallants hope to
recoup their fortunes but, instead, fall in love with the women they try
to trick. At times, the humour verges on pathos, like in the excerpt in
which Mrs Sullen, the victim of an oppressive marriage, is enchanted by
Archer, who had been hiding in her closet:
Mrs Sullen: Ah! [Shrieks, and runs to the other side of the stage.] Have my
thoughts raise a spirit? - What are you, Sir, a man or a devil?
Archer: A man, a man, Madam. [rising.]
Mrs Sullen: How can I be sure of it?
Archer: Madam, Ill give you demonstration this minute. [Takes her
hand.]
Mrs Sullen: Do you intend to be rude?
Archer: Yes, Madam, if you please?
Mrs Sullen: In the name of wonder, whence came ye?
Archer: From the skies, Madam - Im a Jupiter in love, and you shall be
my Alemena.
Mrs Sullen: How came you in?
Archer: I flew in at the window, Madam; your cousin Cupid lent me his
wings, and your sister Venus opened the casment.
Mrs Sullen; Im struck dumb with admiration.
Archer: And I with wonder. [Looks passionately at her.]
Mrs Sullen: What will become of me?
2.3.4. Women Playwrights: Aphra Behn (1640-89) and Susannah

Centlivre (1669-1723)
Aphra Ben can be considered the first Englishwoman to see herself as a
professional writer, or, as Ben herself often said, as an author who is
forced to write for bread and not ashamed to own it. It is precisely this
condition which should distinguish Ben from her contemporary peers,
most of them coming from the ranks of nobility, or at least enjoying the
benefits of good families and a proper education received at Oxford,
who took to writing plays in a gentlemanly manner. Ben was a poor
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woman, widowed at an early age and forced into an adventurous life,

including a governmental spying mission in Holland in 1666 during the
Dutch wars, as the only means of financially supporting herself.
Imprisoned for debt in the late 1660s, she turned to writing plays after
her release, maybe because she had noted the success male authors
were enjoying at the time, or because she considered that writing could
provide an easier access to independence than mercantile ventures.
Whatever the inspiration, the sequence of plays that followed witnessed
an outstanding success in production also proving that writing for
bread could succeed handsomely. Nevertheless, Bens contemporary
critics sneered at her self-professed pecuniary goal, suggesting that she
was only a hack writer, producing derivative plays guided more by
money than by aesthetics. Despite such criticism, Bens self-assumed
role of a professional writer provided an inspiration to many women
authors to follow, including Virginia Woolf who, in A Room of Ones
Own acknowledged that: here begins the freedom of the mind . . . for now
that Aphra Ben had done it, girls could say I can make money by my pen.
Apart from blaming Ben for finding inspiration for her plays in Molire
or Middleton, for example, the playwright was often criticised for
presenting just stock characters in stock situations, and for the
bawdiness of her plays. But seen within the context of Restoration
comedy which revelled in salacious situations including extensive
foreplay with adultery, her plays were of the same kind with the maleauthored ones which were successful at the time. It is true that she set
scenes in brothels - like in The Town Fop (1676) and created happy
scenes between illicit lovers, even as they were just getting out of bed
(like in The Forced Marriage (1679). But apart from seeing this as part
of the immoral and decadent note of Restoration comedy, one should
also be aware of the fact that such scenes are situated in the domain of
women. As sexualised objects of their society, womens realms of power
and development were the bedrooms and the brothels of the day, for
they lived in the spheres of sexual and marital arrangements, deriving
their personal power from liaisons with men. Such criticism then
should be seen as being gender-biased, because if these situations are
bawdy, they are so for men, who have the liberty of the public sphere.
For women, they were simply the only realm of potential narrative and
dialogue. Moreover, Ben herself responded to it saying that it is the
least and most excusable fault in the men writers . . .but for a woman it was
unnatural.
Susanna Centlivre, who was even more prolific than Ben, also has the
merit of introducing new images of women on the stage - a project
which her precursor did not undertake. One explanation for this
endeavour can be found in the circumstances of Centlivres life, which
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provided her with experiences that allowed for a more unique and
daring sense of possibilities for women characters.
Leaving home at 16, the future playwright lived part of her youth as a
boy. In drag as Cousin Jack she frequented the university, attending
classes in fencing, grammar, logic, rhetoric and the like. Living in a
cross-gender role must have provided her not only with an education,
but also with a set of adventures that were to prove useful in her
writing career. Indeed, Centlivre devised scenes for women in drag,
and though this was no novelty on the English stage, Shakespeare
having excelled at it, they are not derivative of the great master (as
some critics hurried to label them.) These are not happy, witty scenes
set in forest such as Arden, but rather they are dark, desperate ones in
which women cross dress in order to gain the power of freedom to
express their wills. For example, in The Perjurd Husband (1700),
Centlivres first play, Placentia dresses as a men because she wants to
gain access to her husbands new mistress. Only when she determines
that the woman is guilty of consciously stealing her husband, the
heroine reveals herself as a woman, but also stabs her rival to death. As
different from Shakespeare, the use of drag in Centlivres play does not
resolve the social issues (such as it happens for Portia in The Merchant
of Venice.), but demonstrates the anger and desperation of the female
characters. Though life in drag was not uncommon for women in the
17th century London (as documented some of the ages texts), the
necessity of male disguise must have caused in many privation and
anxiety, as they experienced the fear of discovery and the social distaste
for their roles. Yet, in order to gain access to education or daring
physical actions, women were certainly required to do mens apparel.
The same role reversal in Centlivres real life must have also provided
her with the viewpoint of an independent woman, living outside the
social order. This may be the explanation for the series of independent
female characters that appear in her plays, characters who invent
unusual social roles for themselves. Sometimes, as it happens in The
Beaus Duel, the heroine adopts the role of the sexual pursuer, a social
role identified with men. But perhaps her most memorable character is
Viola, the heroine of The Basset Table (1705). Valeria, a philosophical
girl, is both the brunt of the plays humour, but also the victorious
exception to the social code. She makes her first entrance in pursuit of a
fly, worrying that she will lose the finest insect for dissection, a huge fresh
fly, which dr. Lovely sent me just now, and opening the box to try the
experiment, away it flew. Though the other characters on stage berate
her for the unwomanly pursuit of such studies, Valeria manages to
defend herself well. Finally, one lady advises her to found a college for
the study of philosophy, where none but women should be admitted; and to
immortalize your name, they should be called Valerians. Once more, the
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answer of the heroine dispels the mocking tone verging on the

seriousness of the issue: What you make a jest of, Id execute, were it in my
power. Thus, Centlivres portrayal of a college for women achieves
both dramatic force as well as comic eccentricity in its treatment,
probably not far removed from her own illicit attendance of classes at
the university as a boy. Like the playwright herself, Valeria is an
outsider, but a forceful one, a woman who wants to live by her own
intelligence.
Task
1. The Epic Vs. the Mock-epic
Definition of the epic
John Miltons epic poems
Definition of the mock-epic
Cultural contextualisation: neoclassicism
John Dryden and the mock-epic
2. Restoration Drama
Historical and cultural contextualisation
Characteristics of the Restoration theatre
Genres of Restoration Drama:
The heroic tragedy (characteristics)
The comedy-of manners (characteristics)
Representative playwrights
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Chapter 4 The Augustan Age

4.1. Alexander Pope
4.2. Augustan Prose
4.1. Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Augustan is a descriptive term applied loosely to the literature and art
of early 18th-century Britain. It denotes a period of literary excellence
and refers back to the heyday of classical writing during the reign of the
Roman emperor Augustus (27 BC 14 AD), when many distinguished
authors such as Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Tibullus flourished. The
writers of this later, neoclassical age not only admired but tried to
imitate their style, aiming their own writing to exhibit urbane and
classical elegance, harmony, decorum and proportion.
Pope is the greatest poet of the age, in many ways summing it in a
similar manner in which Dryden did for the Restoration period.
His first notable poetic attempts are four Pastorals (1709), dedicated
each to one season and beginning with spring, which abound in visual
imagery and descriptive passages of an ideally-ordered nature:
Oh deign to visit our forsaken seats,
The mossy fountains and the green retreats!
Whereer you walk cool gales shall fan the glade,
Trees where you sit shall crowd into a shade:
Whereer you tread the blushing flowers shall rise,
And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.
Windsor Forest (1713) is a commendatory poem which combines a

celebration of rural Albion with a political affirmation of the peace
under Queen Anne. The poems conclusion, bowing towards the end of
the European war in the Tory partys Peace of Utrecht, calls up Father
Thames to foretell a wealthy, mercantile future for Britain in which
faction, discord and other foes of peace will be triumphed over:
Exil'd by Thee from Earth to deepest Hell,
In Brazen Bonds shall barb'rous Discord dwell:
Gigantick Pride, pale Terror, gloomy Care,
And mad Ambition, shall attend her there.
There purple Vengeance bath'd in Gore retires,
Her Weapons blunted, and extinct her Fires:
There hateful Envy her own Snakes shall feel,
And Persecution mourn her broken Wheel:
There Faction roar, Rebellion bite her Chain,
And gasping Furies thirst for blood in vain. (413-22)
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The Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (1717) and Eloisa to

Abelard (1717) are Popes most romantic poems, engaging with the high
heroics of love. The first is a melodramatic poem which addresses and
meditates over the ghost of the unfortunate lady whose love brought
her condemnation, ostracism and suicide. The second, written in
imitation of Ovids Heroids, is a bleak study in the self-imposed
loneliness of the legendary Eloise whose love for Abelard, the 11 thcentury scholastic philosopher, has been blighted.
If balance, or harmony is one of Popes early themes, the other one is
literary ambition. An Essay on Criticism (1711), as well as surveying
abuses in reading and writing, makes a plea for correctness in literary
composition and, in neoclassical fashion, highlights the relationship
between Art and Nature:
First follow Nature, and your judgement frame
By her just standard, which is still the same;
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of art.
The masterpiece of the earlier part of Popes career is, nevertheless, The
Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714). It is a mock-heroic poem on an actual
episode which involved two prominent families of the day, and its aim
to laugh the two out of the quarrel that resulted after Lord Petre had cut
off a lock from Miss Arabella Fermours hair. Pope elaborated the trivial
event into the semblance of an epic in miniature, which abounds in
parodies and echoes of The Iliad, The Aeneid, or Paradise Lost, forcing
thus the reader to constantly compare great things with small. Even if
the familiar devices of the epic are observed, the incidents or characters
are beautifully proportioned to the scale of the mock epic: the war
becomes in the poem the drawing room one between the sexes, the
heroes and heroines are the beaux and the belle of the day, supernatural
characters are present in the Sylphs (the souls of the dead coquettes),
the epic journey to the underworld becomes a journey undertaken to
the Cave of Spleen. As such, the poem traces the course of the fateful
day when Belinda, the society beauty, wakes up, glorifies her
appearance at a ritualistic dressing-table, engages into a game of cards,
sips coffee and gossips and finally has her hair ravaged. As in the
pastoral tradition, the action is set in the wider circle of time itself: at
the close of the poem, the violated lock is transported to heaven to
become a new star, an attractive trap for all mankind.
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The following excerpts illustrate both the mock-formality which defines

the genre, as well as the characteristics of Popes neoclassical couplet,
whose rhetorical organisation makes use of parallel and contrast, wit,
puns and wordplay:
Sol thro white curtains shot a timrous ray,
And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day:
Now lap-dogs give themselves the rousing shake,
And sleepless lovers, just at twelve, awake:
Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knockd the ground,
And the pressd watch returd a silver sound.
[]
Know farther yet; Whoever FAIR and CHASTE
Rejects Mankind, is by some Sylph Embrac'd :
For Spirits, freed from mortal laws, with ease
Assume WHAT Sexes and WHAT Shapes they please.
[]
What guards the purity of Melting Maids,
In Courtly Balls, and Midnight Masquerades,
The Glance by Day [obj1c], the Whisper in the Dark;
WHEN kind Occasion prompts their warm Desires,
WHEN Musick softens, and WHEN Dancing fires?(I.6776)
[]
Whether the Nymph shall break Diana's Law,
Or some frail China Jar recieve a Flaw,
Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade,
Forget her Prayer's, or miss a Masquerade,
Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball... (II.103-9)
[]
Here Britain's Statesmen oft the Fall foredoom
Of Foreign Tyrants, and of Nymphs at Home;
Here Thou, Great Anna! whom three Realms obey,
Dost sometimes Counsel take and sometimes Tea. (III.59)
Pope returned once more to the question of literary ambition with The
Temple of Fame (1715), a poem modelled distantly on Chaucers The
House of Fame. Written in the form of a dream vision, it presents the
fantastic visions induced by sleep in the mind of the poet, at the centre
of which there stands the presiding deity of the poem, the Goddess of
fame:
When on the Goddess first I cast my Sight,
Scarce seem'd her Stature of a Cubit's height,
But swell'd to larger Size, the more I gaz'd,
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Till to the Roof her tow'ring Front she rais'd.

With her, the Temple ev'ry Moment grew,
And ampler Vista's open'd to my View,
Upward the Columns shoot, the Roofs ascend,
And Arches widen, and long Iles extend. (258-65)
In the temple, the poet faces the statues of the various heroes that
populate its interior. The first to be described is that of Homer:
High on the first, the mighty Homer shone
Eternal Adamant compos'd his Throne;
Father of Verse! in holy Fillets drest,
His silver Beard wav'd gently o'er his Breast;
Tho' blind, a boldness in his Looks appears,
In Years he seem'd, but not impair'd by Years.
The Wars of Troy were round the Pillar seen:
Here fierce Tydides wounds the Cyprian Queen;
Here Hector glorious from Patroclus' Fall,
Here dragg'd in Triumph round the Trojan Wall
Motion and Life did ev'ry Part inspire,
Bold was the Work, prov'd the Master's Fire;
A strong Expression most he seem'd t'affect,
And here and there disclos'd a brave Neglect. (182-95)
There follow those of Virgil, Pindar, Horace and Aristotle, each of them
representing a classical ideal (of poetry, wisdom, or patriotism), which
they embody it and shadow forth.
Nevertheless, these are the ideals of fame, and, as such, they are further
opposed to its reality - presented in the dramatic procession of
suppliants who crowd around the Shrine of Fame, and in the Mansion
of Rumour, placed next to the Temple, where lies and truth contend
until "At last agreed, together out they fly, / Inseparable now, the Truth
and Lye" (494). But the allegory somehow reconciles these extremes,
and the poet decides neither to seek nor to reject the reward of Fame,
but to follow virtue rather than the fickle Goddess.
A different sideline to Popes literary activity is represented by his
translation of Homers famous epics, the Iliad (1715, 1720), and the
Odyssey (1725-6). A less distinguished project was, nevertheless, his
editing of Shakespeares Works (1725), which prompted a pamphlet by
a contemporary scholar and playwright, Lewis Theobald, in which the
latter was pointing out Popes scholarly deficiencies. In response, Pope
turned Theobald into the hero of his Dunciad, a satire and mock-epic
reply to the poets critics. In the final version of the work, another
contemporary, Colley Cibber, a playwright who, in the meantime, had
earned Popes disapproval, was moved into that position.
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The Dunciad was designed originally as a contribution to the war

against literary dullness carried on by the members of the Martinus
Scriblerus club which Pope had joined in 1713. The first version,
published in 1728, consisted of three books; a fourth, The New Dunciad,
was published in 1742, while the complete work appeared in 1743 as a
brilliantly wrought attack on all sorts of literary vices. In the first book,
the character Bayes (Colley Cibber), unpopular and despairing, tries to
decide where his talents will be best deployed:
Swearing and supperless the Hero sate,
Blasphemed his gods, the dice, and blamed his fate;
Then gnawed his pen, then dashed it on the ground,
Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound!
Plunged for his sense, but found no bottom there;
Yet wrote and floundered on in mere despair.
But Bayes decision is made up for him, because, like the aged Flecknoe, in
Drydens Mackflecknoe, the Goddess Dullness, contemplating her realm of
confusion and bad poetry, anoints the Hero king of the Dunces, his domain
being the empire of Emptiness and dullness. The celebrations which follow
his enthronement are described as a burlesque of the funeral games for
Anchises in the Aeneid in the second book, while the third book presents
Bayes, asleep in the goddesss lap, dreaming of the past and future triumphs
of the empire of Dullness, extended to all arts and sciences, the theatre and
the court. The last book sees the dream realized, describing how the
Goddess comes to substitute the kingdom of Dull upon the Earth and
closing on a bleak vision of cultural chaos:
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea's strain,
The sick'ning stars fade off th'ethereal plain;
As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand opprest,
Clos'd one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,
Mountains of Casuistry heap'd o'er her head!
Philosophy, that lean'd on Heav'n before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
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In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.

Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor'd;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All. (629-56)
In the last part of his literary career, Pope moved on to philosophical,

ethical and political subjects, through which he championed the same
values of traditional civilisation: right reason, humanistic learning,
sound art, good taste, and public virtue.
In his Essay on Man (1733-34), the poet, influenced by Deism,
approached the study of humanity scientifically, in relation to the
cosmos, confident that meaning can be found:
An honest mans the noblest work of God.
Know then thyself; presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
The Moral Essays (1731-5) continued the investigation at the social

level, focusing on various aspects of mans social morality:
See the same man, in vigour, in the gout;
Alone, in company; in place, or out;
Early at Business, and at Hazard late;
Mad at a Fox-chase, wise at a Debate;
Drunk at a Borough, civil at a Ball;
Friendly at Hackney, faithless at Whitehall.
In the more miscellaneous Imitations of Horace (1733-1738), consisting

of 11 translations and adaptations of Horaces Odes, Satires and
Epistles, Pope undertook the personal defence of his trade of satire.
Each addressed to some particular personal ally (the first of them being
the erudite physician and Scriblerian Dr. Arbuthnot) they unite,
however, in presenting the beleaguered but stubbornly truth-telling
poet against a backdrop of officially sponsored humbug and
corruption, allegorically portrayed in the following excerpt from An
Epistle from Mr Pope to Dr Arbuthnot (1735) in the picture of the
flatterer Sporus, a personification of vice in general, but also a
representation of a contemporary flatterer, Lord Hervey, spitting
venom at the ear of an Eve who, for the 18th-century readers, was too
readily identified with Queen Caroline:
Eternal Smiles his Emptiness betray,
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As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.

Whether in florid Impotence he speaks,
And, as the Prompter breathes, the Puppet squeaks;
Or at the Ear of Eve, familiar Toad,
Half Froth, half Venom, spits himself abroad,
In Puns, or Politicks, or Tales, or Lyes,
Or Spite, or Smut, or Rymes, or Blasphemies.
His Wit all see-saw between that and this,
Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss,
And he himself one vile Antithesis.
Amphibious Thing! that acting either Part,
The trifling Head, or corrupted Heart! (315-27)
4.2. Augustan Prose

4.2.1. Joseph Addison (1672-1719), Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) and
the Periodical essay
Despite the interesting body of verse produced during the Augustan
Age, the works that have worn best and still hold the interest of the
general reader are written in prose. While Pope seems artificial to many
modern readers, on the contrary, Swift and Defoe, hardly seem to have
become old-fashioned.
However, before dealing with them, the development of the
newspapers and of the periodical essays, standing as an interesting
literary sideline of the 17th and 18th centuries, should be considered.
Journalism had started developing during the Civil Wars, stimulating
the public appetite for up-to-minute news that was vital at the time. The
Restoration period with its interest in men and affairs, its information
services in the coffee houses developed an even wider interest in home
and foreign news and as the market for the printed word expanded, the
production rose to meet the demands of the public, largely represented
by middle-class readership. The result was the foundation of
newspapers and weekly journals.
The Tatler (1709-11) and The Spectator (1711-12, 1714) were journals of
coffee house gossip and ideas in London and progenitors of a long line
of well-informed magazines. Their founders, Joseph Addison (16721719) and Richard Steele (1672-1729), are looked upon, in many ways,
as being the fathers of the modern periodical. Their friendship began
when they were schoolboys together in London, their careers ran
parallel courses (they both attended Oxford) and brought them into
fruitful collaboration; they both enjoyed the patronage of the great
Whig magnates (except during the last four years of Queen Annes
reign, under the Tories) by whom they were generously treated. The
aim of these two conscious moralists was frankly educational; they
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never disguised their intention of improving the minds, morals and

manners of their readers.
Addison outlines a moral and educational programme for the post
Restoration English society, particularly for the nouveaux riches and
the rising middle-class in general, mainly through the discussion of
great authors and their books:
[Our aim] is to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with
morality. [. . .] And to the end that their [the readers] virtue and
discretion may not be short, transient, intermittent starts of thought,
I have resolved to refresh their memories from day to day, till I have
recovered them out of that desperate state of vice and folly into
which the age has fallen. I shall be ambitious to have it said of me,
that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools
and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and
coffee-houses.
Steele, in his turn, has the same educational purpose that he believes
can be achieved by insinuating moral or other teachings under the
guise of entertainment:
Though the other papers which are published for the use of the
good people of England have certainly very wholesome effects, and
are laudable in their particular kinds, they do not seem to come up
to the great design of such narrations, which, I humbly presume,
should be principally intended for the use of political persons, who
are so public spirited as to neglect their own affairs to look into
transactions of State. Now these gentlemen, for the most part, being
men of strong zeal and weak intellects, it is both a charitable and
necessary work to offer something, whereby such worthy and wellaffected members of the commonwealth may be instructed, after
their reading, what to think; which shall be the end and purpose of
this paper: . . . I have also resolved to have something which may be
of entertainment to the fair sex, in honour of whom I have taken the
title of this paper.
As can be seen, they both clearly point out the new social ideal of
balance between the morality and respectability of the old, rather
Puritan middle-class and the wit, grace and enlightenment of the
aristocracy, stressing moderation, reasonableness, self-control, urbanity
and good taste.
The Tatler (1709-11) was first launched by Steele (hiding behind a
pseudonym, Isaac Bickerstaff) with the contribution of Addison and its
title was meant as a bid for female readers. It provided the readers with
a mixture of news with personal reflections that made it highly
popular. Steeles essays applied his ideal to any topic that suggested
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itself as pleasing or useful: the theatre, true breeding as against vulgar

manners, education, simplicity in dress, the proper use of Sunday etc.;
he ridiculed common social types such as the prude, the coquette, the
rake, etc.
The Spectator (1711-12, 1714) was a joint undertaking, though
dominated by Addison. He turned it into the journal of an imaginary
gentlemans club (Mr. Spectators Club), whose members represented
contemporary social types (a man about town, a student of law and
literature, a churchman, a soldier, etc.). The most memorable of all
were Sir Roger de Coverley, a Tory country squire, rather simpleminded, thoroughly good-hearted, never for long away from his
country estate, full of prejudices and superstitions, and, respectively,
Sir Andrew Freeport, a Whig London merchant, a man of less charm,
but of far more intelligence. The intention was to outline the middle
way as being the best: though there is much good in the old, the
progress lies with the Whigs. The attitudes the essays display in
relation to the opposition between the city and the countryside and
between the social classes provide, in fact, the readers with significant
indications of the time. This sense of class and social identity is
significant in the papers consideration of market appeal, for it sets
down and perpetuates class values which would remain strong for two
centuries.
A Country Sunday
I am always very pleased with a Country Sunday, and think, if
keeping holy the Seventh Day were only a human Institution, it
would be the best Method that could have been thought of for the
polishing and civilising of Mankind. It is certain the Country-People
would soon degenerate into a kind of Savages and Barbarians, were
there not such frequent Returns of a stated Time, in which the whole
Village meet together with their best Faces, and in their cleanliest
Habits, to converse with one another upon indifferent Subjects, hear
their Duties explained to them, and join together in Adoration of the
Supreme Being . . .
My friend Sir Roger, being a good Churchman, has beautified the
inside of his Church with several texts of his own choosing. He has
likewise given a handsome Pulpit-Cloth, and railed in the
Communion-Table at his own Expense. He has often told me that at
his coming to his Estate he found his Parishioners very irregular;
and that in order to make them kneel and join the Responses, he
gave every one of them a Hassock and a Common-prayer Book: and
at the Country for that Purpose, to instruct them rightly in the Tunes
of the Psalms; upon which they now very much value themselves,
and indeed outdo most of the Country Churches that I have ever
heard.
As Sir Roger is Landlord to the whole Congregation, he keeps
them in very good Order, and will suffer no Body to sleep in it
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besides himself; for if by Chance he has been surprised into s short

Nap at sermon, upon recovering out of it he stands up and looks
about him, and if he sees any Body else nodding, either wakes them
himself, or sends his Servant to them.
Addisons words: I live in a world rather as a spectator of mankind

than as one of the species. purvey an attitude, a point of view rather
than committed engagement with issues and debates. Addisons wellbalanced attitude, well-informed distance, both tolerant and selfprotective, established the tradition of the periodical essay, aimed at
purveying opinions rather than news, characterized by a safe, witty,
reassuring observation and comment on the life and times of the 18 th
century and his work stands as a proof that the published word was
becoming a powerful instrument in society. Samuel Johnson in his Life
of Addison described his style as follows:
His prose is the model of the middle style; on grave subjects not
formal, on light occasions not groveling; pure without scrupulosity,
and exact without apparent elaboration; always equable, and always
easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences . . . Whoever
wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant
but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes
of Addison . . .
In spite of his identifying sentimentality and whimsical humor as the

main faults of Addisons style, Dr. Johnson praised it, above all, for its
admirable compromise between the grace and polish of the artist and
the ease, flow and simplicity of the journalist.
The Tatler and the Spectator were not, however, the only periodicals
of the time. Reference should also be made to other periodicals such as:
The Gentlemans Journal (1692-94) that eventually turned into the
long-lasting The Gentlemans Magazine (1731-1914), The Grub Street
Journal (1730-37), a satirical literary magazine (the jockey name is
synonymous with literary hack work) and The Monthly Review (1760), the most significant of the literary magazines. They all reflected the
image of London during the Augustan period and its tastes, that
dominated and influenced the tastes of the entire nation. That is why
many of the writers of the age (Pope, Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Johnson)
used journalism as a vehicle for their ideas.
4.2.2. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
Jonathan Swift is the greatest writer of the first half of the 18 th century
(if not of the whole century). He was a great humanist and a savage
satirist, taking the satire of such poets like Dryden and Pope to a
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46
polemical extreme, criticizing and mocking authority figures with an

ever-increasing venom.
Born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents, he came to England following
the troubles related to James IIs abdication. While staying in the
household of his kinsman, Sir William Temple, a retired diplomat,
during 1689-99, he read widely, rather reluctantly took orders
(embarking upon an ecclesiastical career), but at the same time,
discovered his gift as a satirist. He wrote two satires on corruption in
religion and learning: A Tale of a Tub (1704) and The Battle of the
Books (1704).
A Tale of a Tub (1704) is a prose satire on religious fanaticism. It tells
the story of three brothers representing the main branches of the
Christian Church: Peter represents Catholicism, Martin stands for
Anglicanism and Jack for Dissent. Their father leaves his coat to the
three boys, saying that they must not alter it, but all three of them fail
and fall out in the process. Accounting for the various ways in which
the brothers behave towards the coat, Swift ironically presents the
history of the development of Christianity: Rome is attacked for its
arrogance and doctrine of transubstantiation, Dissent (Presbyterianism)
for its religious fundamentalism, whereas the Anglican Church, while
celebrated as the most perfect in discipline and doctrine, still has its
flaws. The Tale is meant to divert attacks upon the ship of state and
religion by using the old seamans trick of throwing an empty tub into
the sea to distract whales. The preface is then followed by five
digressional episodes satirizing various modern absurdities, such as
pedantic scholarship and Puritanism. The narrator is the most
memorable character, interrupting the story with digressions (e.g. a
Digression in Praise of Digression), and whose pride in learning and
lack of common sense represent the zealous modern insanity that Swift
takes as his target for satire.
A Digression Concerning the Original, the Use, and
Improvement of Madness in the Commonwealth
Nor shall it any ways detract from the just reputation of his
famous sect, that its rise and institutions are owing to such an
author as I have described Jack to be, a person whose intellectuals
were overturned, and his brains shaken out of its natural position;
which we commonly suppose to be a distemper, and call by the
name of madness or frenzy. For, if we take a survey of the greatest
actions that have been performed in the world, under the
influence of single men, [. . .] we shall find the authors of them all
to have been persons whose natural reason had admitted great
revolutions from their diet, their education, the prevalency of
some certain temper, together with the particular influence of air
and climate.
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47
The above mentioned quotation is based on Swifts ironical doctrine of

the mechanical operation of the spirit, i.e. all spiritual and mental
states derive from physical causes (here the ascent of vapours to the
brain). Beneath his whimsy, a fearful question lies: what right has any
human being to trust that he is sane?
The Battle of the Books (1704) is part of the Ancients vs. the Moderns
controversy. This mock-heroic prose satire, revealing for the first time
Swifts mastery of light, ironic satire, makes use of allegory which was
to become the authors favorite device in Gulliver. The Spider standing
for the Moderns is opposed to the Bee, representing the Ancients.
For the rest of his life, Swift devoted his talents to politics and religion
(not clearly separated at the time) and most of his works in prose were
written to further a specific cause. Introduced to Pope, he enjoyed the
literary company of the Scriblerus club. Having befriended Addison
and Steele, he wrote several satirical pieces for the Tatler, including
The Bickerstaff Papers that was meant as an attack on projectors and
schemers, using Swifts favourite device (an astrologer appears as an
obvious fraudulent spokesman). He continued his journalistic activity
with his taking over the editorship of the Examiner, a weekly
propaganda paper for the Tories, and writing major essays defending
government policy. As a reward for his services, he was offered the
deanship of St. Patricks Cathedral in 1713, one year before the death of
Queen Anne and the fall of the Tories, that marked the end of the hopes
of preferment in England.
Under the circumstances, he returned to Ireland where he remained
until his death. He was not only an efficient ecclesiastical administrator
but started writing a series of pamphlets (many anonymously
published) on Ireland and its colonial status. In The Injured Lady
(1707), he protested that the Union between England and Scotland was
a betrayal of Protestant Ireland in favour of dissenting Scotland. In A
Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), he
attacked the English mercantilist policy draining Ireland of its wealth
and urged economic self-reliance and the boycott of English goods. The
Drapiers Letters (1724), that earned him the title of a Hibernian Patriot,
is a hard-hitting attack on the governments proposal for a new Irish
coinage. The mask of a Dublin tradesman is used both to protect the
Deans identity and to provide a rhetorical platform for the authors
criticism of the English rule. With A Short View of the State of Ireland
(1727), Swift abandoned his favourite ironic method and expressed
deep pessimism in relation to Irelands unstable economy. Finally, out
of his Irish pamphlets, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children
of Poor People from Becoming a Burden to Their Parents or to Their
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Country (1729) is the most bitter, bringing disturbing analogies to the

forefront. It offers as a solution for Irelands economic problems the
marketing of Irish children for English consumption.
. . . a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most
delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed,
roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally
serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.
This appalling proposal is couched in terms of quietly realistic

humanitarianism (they might suffer less); the details are expounded
with all the calm reasonableness of a merchant persuading his
customers of the superior quality of a particular kind of article.
A quite different side of Swift is revealled in his Journal to Stella (171013, published in 1766) and his poems (Stellas Birthday, Cadenus and
Vanessa, Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift). Vividly expressive, they
show a rich span of emotion and verbal invention. The Journal to Stella
was written for Esther Johnson, the daughter of Temples steward,
educated by Swift. Swift formed her character and came to love and she
followed him to Dublin where they met constantly until her death. He
wrote her letters and charming poems (seven birthday poems). Their
love was not unsettled even by the passion Swift awakened in a much
younger woman, Hester (Esther) Vanhomrigh. An enigmatic account of
his relation with Hester/ Vanessa is given in the poem Cadenus (an
anagram for Dean) and Vanessa, which narrates the love and
friendship between the middle-aged, reluctant Dean and the spirited
young woman, using the convention of the medieval courtly love.
As for the poem Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (1739), it is Swifts
own joking epitaph in which he presents his perception of himself:
He knew an hundred pleasant stories,
With all the turns of Whigs and Tories;
Was cheerful to his dying day,
And friends would let him have his way.
He gave the little wealth he had
To build a house for fools and mad,
And showed by one satiric touch,
No nation wanted it so much.
That kingdom he hath left his debtor;
I wish it soon may have a better
For a long time he was considered merely a mad misanthrope, but that
critical opinion convenient for the tastes of his own day could now
be seen to do less then justice to a writer who used satire with great
originality and wit to highlight what he saw as the faults and
hypocrisies of his age. His literary personality was aggressive in
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temperament, classical in taste, inventive in form and disciplined in

style.
However, Swifts masterpiece is Gullivers Travels (1726), looked upon
as the most universal satire, in spite of its being also full of allusions to
recent and contemporary events, whose main objects are mans moral
nature and the defective political, economic and social institutions
which human imperfections call into being, in other words, antagonism
to the current optimistic view that human nature is essentially good.
Swift used the device of the imaginary voyage in producing a
purportedly autobiographical narrative of Lemuel Gulliver, a ships
surgeon, who tells of his voyage to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa and
the country of the Houyhnhnms.
In his first voyage to Lilliput, he encounters diminutive inhabitants who
call him Man Mountain; his satirical plan is aimed at pointing out the
long-standing feud between England and France (Blefuscu) and the
petty functionalism of the kingdom with its political parties and
religious controversies.
In the second voyage to Brobdingnag, the perspective is reversed:
Gulliver is diminutive and the Brobdingnagians gigantic. The main
features of this second voyage are Gullivers revulsion at the magnified
details of human anatomy and his defensive account of English and
Continental politics. The account he gives of England grows
increasingly ironic as he unintentionally exposes the irrationality and
barbarism of his own culture, all the time convinced that he is making a
good impression. After two years, he leaves Brondingnag through a
misadventure and makes his way to England which he now sees as
Lilliputian.
During the next journey he visits the flying island of Laputa and the
neighbouring Lagado and Luggnagg. Laputas inhabitants are obsessed
with astronomical speculations involving mathematic and music; at
Lagados Academy of Projectors a satire on the Royal Society he
finds manic researches going on at the hands of scientists (one trying to
extract sunbeams from cucumbers, another one trying to build a house
starting from the roof, etc.). Swifts satire is this time directed against
some new scientific institutions of the time such as the above
mentioned Royal Society and other schools of learning.
Finally, he visits the land of the horses who live by the dictates of
reason and whose language is the perfection of nature. Having
listened to Gullivers account of European politics in general, the
Houyhnhnms decide he is a yahoo, i.e. the vilest form of life in their
country.
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. . . He asked me what were the usual causes or motives that made

one country to go to war with another. I answered, they were
innumerable, but I should only mention a few of the chief.
Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land
or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers
who engage their master in a war in order to stifle or divert the
clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. Difference
in opinions hath cost many millions of lives; for instance, whether
flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry
be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it
be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire; what is the best
colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or grey; and whether it
should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean with many
more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long
continuance, as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially
if it be in things indifferent.
Tomashevsky, the Russian Formalist critic, explains that in order to

present a satirical picture of the European social order, Gulliver tries to
tell everything with the utmost accuracy: he removes the shell of
euphemistic phrases and fictitious tradition, his narrative is stripped of
verbal justification, hence it emerges in all horror, as Gulliver
defamiliarises the world of everyday perception. This is the
culmination of Swifts angry polemic: he contrasts the rational, clean,
civilized horses with the foul, brutal, uncivilized Yahoos, a race of apelike beasts in human form. Gulliver himself has to recognize that the
Yahoos are the closest to his own species:
. . . several horses and mares of quality in the neighbourhood came
often to our house upon the report spread of a wonderful Yahoo,
that could speak like a Houyhnhnm, and seemed in his words and
actions to discover some glimmerings of Reason. These delighted to
converse with me; they put many questions, and received such
answers as I was able to return. By all which advantages, I made so
great a progress, that in five months from my arrival, I understood
whatever was spoke, and could express myself tolerably well.
The Houyhnhnms who came to visit my master, out of a design
of seeing and talking with me, could hardly believe me to be a right
Yahoo, because my body had a different covering from others of my
kind. They were astonished to observe me without the usual hair or
skin, except on my head, face and hands.
In a period when horses were one of the main servants of man, Swifts
examination of roles seems intended to provoke and offend, but in fact
it was dismissed as fantastic comedy and its satiric power was blunted.
As the above given quotation shows, his prose style is clear, simple,
characterized by concrete diction, uncomplicated syntax, economy and
conciseness of language, that shuns amazement and grows more
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51
teasing and controlled the more fierce the indignation that is called
upon to express.
Gulliver is banished and returns to England, where the impression
made on him remains so strong that he prefers the company of horses
to that of his own family. That determined many critics to see his work,
for a long time, as a deeply pessimistic judgment on human nature.
Nevertheless, it will continue to exert its influence on twentiethcentury writers like James Joyce in The Holy Offer (written in Swiftian
verse), Aldous Huxley in Ape and Essence, and George Orwell in his
Animal Farm.
Swifts literary career is remarkable for the way in which his artistic
energy both sewed and transcended ideological conservatorism,
mindful, in all he wrote, of the public and political responsibilities of a
writer. Through satire, parody and other kinds of literary
impersonation, Swift diverts attention away from his own limited yet
consistent principles towards the distortion of reason and sanity which
he detects in his enemies. His ambiguous art is reflected in the
anonymous and pseudonymous forms he habitually employed (he
very rarely spoke in his own voice or signed his name), largely a
stylistic preference (something of a legal safeguard). Consequently, his
most memorable works are based solidly on the intrinsic exploitation
of a seemingly innocent persona whose character eventually becomes
part of the satirical strategy of rebuking the readers complacency.
Swifts elusive literary identity illustrates an ambivalent sense of
national loyalty. Although he repeatedly referred to himself as
Englishman born in Ireland, he came to feel increasingly alienated
and vengeful towards England.
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Task
1. Neoclassical Satire
Definition of satire
Cultural contextualisation: neoclassicism
Types of neoclassical satire
Representative authors:
o Verse satires: John Dryden and Alexander Pope
o Prose satires: Jonathan Swift
2. The Essay during the 17th- and 18th- centuries
Neoclassicism: characteristics and favourite literary
genres
Forms of essay-writing:
The prose essay: John Dryden
The verse essay: Alexander Pope
The periodical essay: Addison and Steele
Choose a text for illustration.
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Chapter 5 The English Novel. 18th Century Variants

5.1. The Birth of the Novel
5.2. Daniel Defoe and the Fictitious Autobiography
5.3. Samuel Richardson and the Epistolary Novel
5.4. Henry Fielding and the Omniscient Narrator
5.5. Tobias Smollett and the Picaresque Tradition
5.6. Laurence Sterne and the Anti-novel
5.7. Oliver Goldsmith and the Sentimental Novel
5.8. The Gothic Novel
5.9. Maria Edgeworth and the Regional Novel
5.10. The Novel of Social and Domestic Life: Fanny Burney and Jane
Austen
5.1. The birth of the novel
The birth of the "Novel", with its associations of newness and
originality, occurs in the eighteenth century. Before that there had been
forms of long and continuous narrative prose, such as travel writings e.g. the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1375) and Thomas Nashes
The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) -, prose romances e.g. Aphra Behns
Oroonoko (1688), or prose satires e.g. Delarivier Manleys The Secret
History of Queen Zarah (1705) and The New Atlantis (1709). But it was
only in the 1720s that a recognisable "Novel" form emerges, i.e, one
which is concerned with the realistic depiction of middle class life,
values and experience, showing the development of individual (and
individuated) characters, over time. Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel
connects the emergence of the genre with the growth of the middle
classes in the eighteenth century (which creates a readership anxious to
read of itself and its values). His thesis is a materialist one, that social
and historical factors generated aesthetic responses. In particular he
isolates three key areas in which we see the influence of contexts:
the growth of economic/possessive individualism, and with it

the new mercantile capitalist values of investment and capital
accumulation.
related to this, the rise of materialistic philosophical

individualism, with its new emphasis on the individual (rather
than social groups) as the essential social unit.
the new demand for education/moral training associated with

middle class values. The middle classes existed as a readership,
and required reading material.
Other critics, particularly in writing of Robinson Crusoe, place an equal
emphasis on the influence of protestant individualism (especially
Calvinism) in directing new attitudes towards the individual.
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A key concern in terms of the development of the eighteenth century

novel is the recurring preoccupation with realism, and realistic
depiction of society. This is seen in Defoe's and Fielding's
preoccupations with the word "History" (and the need to defend
themselves against accusations of lying, and in their attempts to make
their works as realistic as possible, whether by using first person
narration as in Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, or by relying on
Aristolean notions of "mimesis". An alternative tactic was to use
epistolary form, most notably in the works of Richardson, (and
burlesqued by Fielding in Shamela), or to use consciously anti-romance
forms, in the picaresque tradition of Cervantes (as in Roderick
Random), as a means of asserting the realism of their writing.
Working against this was the need to shape experience into narrative
order, which would lead to the inevitable conflict between the demands
of narrative order and realistic portrayal. Part of the answer, in Defoe's
case, was to produce a loose novel, without a clear sense of narrative
order and progression, which employed the episodic technique. By the
time of Fielding, he is already self-consciously using Chapters and
Books to order his narratives. This conflict between realistic intention
and aesthetic narrative order is most clearly evident in Sterne's antinovel Tristram Shandy, in which the conventions of the Novel are
exploded before the novel has had a chance to become a settled form.
Another issue related to this was that of moral purpose. The eighteenth
century novel often appears torn between the demand not to offend, to
teach, and yet to be realistic. Novel writing is thus tied to the moral
demands of a middle class readership, with is need for pleasurable
instruction, evident in the way in which these early novelists deal with
sex, adultery, passion and desire.
5.2. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) and the Fictitious Autobiography
The writings of Daniel Defoe may be seen as fundamental to
eighteenth-century ways of thinking. They range from the early Essay
on Projects (1697), written with the moral and educational aim to
encourage polite learning, to refine the English tongue, and advance the
so-much neglected faculty of correct language, and to purge it from all
the irregular additions that ignorance and affectation have introduced,
to the quasi-factual A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a reconstructed
documentary account of London between 1664 and 1665, from the
Swiftian pamphlet The Shortest Way With the Dissenters (1702), in
which he satirises the Anglican Torry attitude to non-conformity, to
Robinson Crusoe (1719), one of most enduring fables in Western
literature as well as the strongest claimant to the title of the first true
English novel.
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The story of Robinson Crusoe is based squarely on the account of a

fugitive sailor, Alexander Selkirk, who survived on an uninhabited
island in the Pacific for five years. Defoes imaginative reworking of
Selkirks memoirs enjoys therefore a pronounced degree of realism. His
Crusoe is a mariner who takes to sea despite parental warnings and,
after suffering a number of misfortunes at the hands of Barbary pirates
and the elements, is shipwrecked off South America, where, according
to his journal, is able to resist for some 28 years, two months and
nineteen days. If, as a psychological study in isolation, the novel seems
now unconvincing, its strength comes from a combination of disparate
echoes and shapes: Jonah, Job, Everyman, the Prodigal Son, the colonial
explorer and the proto-industrialist. The economic aspects of Defoes
fiction have in particular prompted the interest of recent criticism:
Crusoes survival and his enterprising behaviour are seen as
expressions of Defoes own belief in the mercantilist mentality of the
expanding British Empire. Crusoe starts his journey as a trader, to make
money and thus increase his material comforts. Once shipwrecked on
the island, his only thought is to remould in his distant isolation the
whole pattern of the material civilisation he has left behind. This is
supplemented by a sober, businesslike religion, with due gratitude for
the Gods mercies and a belief that God helps those who help
themselves. The novel confirms for the reader the ultimate rightness of
Crusoes way of thinking and acting. It ends positively, going beyond
Crusoes rescue to show how the mariners investments make him rich,
while the island becomes colonised, ensuring thus the continuation of
the model of society that Crusoe established there.
Moll Flanders (1722) is another of Defoes attempts to pass as genuine a
work of imagination. This time it is the memoirs of a prostitute, and, as
Defoe wrote in the preface to the novel, he was keen to insist on their
truthfulness:
The author is here supposed to be writing her own history, and in the very
beginning of her account she gives the reasons why she thinks fit to conceal
her own name, after which there is no occasion to say any more about that.
It is true that the original of this story is put into new words and the
style of the famous lady we here speak of is a little altered; particularly she is
made to tell her own take in modester words than she told it at first, the copy
which came first to hand having been written in language like one still in
Newgate than one grown penitent and humble, as she afterwards pretends
to be.
The pen employed in finishing her story , and making it what you
now see it to be , has had no little difficulty to put it into a dress fit to be seen,
and to make it speak a language fit to be read.
Thus, the first person narration unravels Molls dissolute life as thief,
prostitute and incestuous wife, while also containing much social
comment on the gaols, the conditions of the poor, and the suffering of
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emigrants, all of them subjects of concern for the well-intentioned

middle-classes. Though Moll uses her beauty and sex as a commodity,
continually trying to sell them in the highest market in order to reach
financial security, she is penitent in the end, and the narrative allows
her not only to find happiness and peace but also to be accepted back
into society.
The title hero of Colonel Jack (also 1722) is another narrator telling his
story from the vantage point of someone who has achieved wealth and
respectability, after no less dissolute beginnings as pickpocket and
member of the London underworld. Looking back on his youth, the
mature colonel recounts his first major exploit as a thief:
As soon as it was day, I got out of the hole we lay in, and rambled abroad
into the fields, towards Stepney, and there I mused and considered what I
should do with this money, and many a time I wished that I had not had it,
for after all my ruminating upon it, and what course I should take with it, or
where I should put it, I could not hit upon any one thing, or any possible
method to secure it, and it perplexed me so, that at last, as I said just now, I
sat down and cried heartily.
When my crying was over, the case was the same; I had the money still,
and what to do with it I could not tell, at last it came into my head, that I
would look out for some hole in a tree, and see to hide it there, till I should
have occasion for it: big with this discovery, as I then thought it, I began to
look about me for a tree; but there were no trees in the fields about Stepney. . .
and if there were any that I began to look narrowly at, the fields were so full
of people, that they would see if I went to hide anything there, and I thought
the people eyed me as it was, and that two men in particular followed me, to
see what I intended to do.
This drove me further off, and I crossed the road at Mile-End, and in the
middle of the town I went down a lane that goes away to the Blind Beggars
at Bethnal-Green; when I came a little way in the lane, I found a foot-path
over the fields, and in those fields several trees for my turn, as I thought; at
last one tree had a little hole in it, pretty high out of my reach, and I climbed
up to the tree to get to it, and when I came there, I put my hand in, and found
(as I thought) a place very fit, so I placed my treasure there, and I was mighty
well satisfied with it; but behold, putting my hand in again to lay it more
commodiously, as I thought, of a sudden it slipped away from me, and I
found the tree was hollow, and my little parcel was fallen in quite out of my
reach, and how far it might go in, I knew not; so that, in a word, my money
was quite gone, irrecoverably lost, there could be no room, so much as to
hope ever to see it again for it was a vast great tree.
As young as I was, I was now sensible what a fool I was before, that I could
not think of ways to keep my money, but I must come thus far to throw it
into a hole where I could not reach it; well I thrust my hand quite up to my
elbow, but no bottom was to be found, or any end of the hole or cavity; I got a
stick off of the tree and thrust it in a great way, but all was one; then I cried,
nay, I roared out, I was in such a passion, then I got down the tree again, then
up again, and thrust my hand again till I scratched my arm and made it
bleed, and cried all the while most violently: then I began to think I had not
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so much as half-penny of it left for a half-penny roll, and I was a hungry, and
then I cried again: then I came away in despair, crying and roaring like a little
boy that had been whipped, then I went back again to the tree, and up the
tree again, and thus I did several times.
Here Defoe offers his readers an example of a learning experience: the

little boys feelings are concentrated entirely upon the pleasure and
pain which govern his appetites and desires. The money has brought
unpleasant feelings of guilt, but the need for money is a consequence of
a need for food. As the older man measures the distance between his
present self and the urchin he remembers, he is also analysing the
morality and psychology of theft, with the boys experience of guilt,
hunger and puzzlement at the unpredictability of the natural world
creating the image of a rescuable human soul. And the point of the
novel is to trace how the rescue was effected.
5.3. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) and the Epistolary Novel
In the next generation of novelists, Samuel Richardson devised a
different formula for achieving authenticity in his fictional works,
namely to allow it to be understood that the author was simply the
editor of a bundle of letters from various hands which threw light on an
interesting human situation.
Novels in the form of letters had been popular for several decades
(Aphra Behn had published Love Letters between a Nobleman and his
Sister as early as 1683). Richardsons Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded
(1740) raises the tone of the novel from the level of this kind of subjectmatter. In the letters that Pamela Andrews sends to her honest and
poverty-stricken parents, the novel presents a breathless account of
how the poor but virtuous teenage maidservant resists the sexual
harassment of her master until the man learns to appreciate and respect
her nature and proposes marriage in earnest. However, the story does
not end here, and the second part of the novel focuses on Pamelas
acclimatisation to the new social position and the dignified way with
which she conducts her marriage, in accordance to Richardsons
didactic purpose to prove that worth depends on individual effort
rather than social status.
Clarissa (1748) marks a major step forward. A longer and more
elaborate novel, it tells the story of the title heroine, the virtuous,
beautiful and talented young daughter of the wealthy Harlowes, who
falls in love with a profligate aristocrat, Robert Lovelace, rejecting an
older suitor, Mr. Solmes, whom the family have chosen for her.
Lovelace abducts Clarissa, then plays with her emotions in devious
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ways and finally rapes the young woman while she is under the
influence of drugs. Filled with remorse, he then wants to marry her, but
Clarissa refuses and, very slowly, dies a martyr to the combined cruelty
of her lover and her family. The novel handles the interplay of its
characters psychology with more subtlety and complexity than the
previous Pamela, mainly due to a development of Richardsons
epistolary technique which employs two main sets of correspondents:
Clarissa and her friend, Anna Howe, and Lovelace and his friend,
Belford. This arrangement allows Richardson to take the readers into
the inner thoughts of the main characters. It also allows him to present
the action of the novel through the eyes of each of them, and while one
of them is explaining what is happening, to keep the reader in suspense
about what the other is thinking and feeling.
The excerpt, taken from one of Clarissas letters in which she describes
how her sister Bella broke the news that the family decided that the
heroine must marry Mr. Solmes, proves that the novel is essentially
dramatic in form:
Obedience without reserve is required of you, Clary. My papa is
justly incensed that you should presume to dispute his will, and to
make conditions with him. He knows what is best for you; and as your
own matters are gone a great way between his hated Lovelace and
you, they will believe nothing you say; except you will give the one
only instance, that will put them out of doubt of the sincerity of your
promises.
What, child, are you surprised? Cannot you speak? Then, it seems,
you had expected a different issue, had you? Strange that you could!
With all your acknowledgements and confessions, so creditable to
your noted prudence!
I was indeed speechless for some time: my eyes were even fixed, and
ceased to flow. But, upon the hard-hearted Bellas proceeding with her
airs of insult, indeed I was mistaken, said I; indeed I was! For in you,
Bella, I expected, I hoped for, a sister What! Interrupted she, with all your mannerly flings, and your
despising airs, did you expect that I was capable of telling stories for
you? Did you think that when I was asked my own opinion of the
sincerity of your declarations, I could not tell them how far matters had
gone between you and your fellow [Lovelace]? When the intention is to
bend that stubborn will of yours to your duty, do you think I would
deceive them? Do you think I would encourage them to call you down,
to contradict all that I should have invented in your favour?
Well, well, Bella; I am the less obliged to you; thats all. I was willing
to think that I had still a brother and a sister. But I find I am mistaken.
Pretty Mopsa-eyed soul, was her expression! And was it willing to
think it had still a brother and sister? And why dont you go on, Clary?
(mocking my half-weeping accent) I thought too I had a father and
mother, two uncles and an aunt: but I am mis-taken thats all - come, Clary,
say this, and it will be in part true, because you have thrown off their
authority, and because you respect one vile wretch more than them all.
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How have I deserved this at your hands, sister? But I will only say, I
pity you.
And with that disdainful air, too, Clary! None of that bridled neck!
None of your scornful pity, girl! I beseech you!
This sort of behaviour is natural to you, surely, Bella! What new
talents does it discover in you! But proceed - if it be a pleasure to you,
proceed, Bella. And since I must not pity you, I will pity myself: for
nobody else will.
Because you dont, said she Hush, Bella, interrupting her, because I dont deserve it - I know you
were going to say so. I will say as you say in everything; and thats the
way to please you.
Then say, Lovelace is a villain.
So I will, when I think him so.
Then you dont think him so?
Indeed, I dont. You did not always, Bella.
And what, Clary, mean you by that? (bristling up to me) Tell me
what you mean by that reflection?
Tell me why you call it a reflection? What did I say?
Thou art a provoking creature - but what say you to two or three
duels of that wetchs?
I cant tell what to say, unless I knew the occasions.
Do you justify duelling at all?
I do not: neither can I help this duelling.
Will you go down and humble that stubborn spirit of yours to your
mamma?
I said nothing.
Shall I conduct your ladyship sown? (offering to take my declined
hand)
What! Not vouchsafe to answer me?
I turned from her in silence.
While the novelist is much less obviously in control of the presentation

of the scene with no narrator to stage-manage its development it is
the dialogue alone which carries on the story, as well as indicating
emotion and attitude, and differentiating between the two sisters. The
novel itself may be read as a play of voices, at times communing, at
other times, conflicting, in which Clarissas tones are often contradicted
or qualified, but in the end, for most readers, thoroughly vindicated.
At the end of the 18th century the epistolary novel had a brief but
intense European vogue. Jean-Jacques Rousseau employed in his Julie
ou la nouvelle Hloise (1761), J. W. Goethe used it in The Sorrows of
Young Werther (1774), and Choderlos de Laclos brilliantly exploited the
dramatic possibilities of the form in his only novel, Les Liaisons
Dangereuses (1782). Though the artificiality it imposed on the writer
brought about its disappearance during the next century, 20 th century
authors, like Iris Murdoch in An Accidental Man (1971), Saul Bellow in
Herzog (1964) and John Barth in the suggestively entitled Letters (1979)
have witnessed to its continuing appeal.
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5.4. Henry Fielding (1707-54) and the omniscient narrator

Henry Fielding was the other dominant figure of the mid-eighteenth
century English novel. Until the introduction of censorship with the
Licensing Act of 1737, Fielding turned to the stage for a living, writing a
series of successful satirical plays like Tom Thumb (1730), Pasquin
(1736) and The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (1737), dense with
contemporary allusions directed chiefly at Horace Walpole. After the
blocking of that avenue, Fielding resumed his legal studies and also
turned to political journalism (becoming, in turn, the editor of The
Champion, 1739-41, The True Patriot, 1745-46, and the burlesque
Jacobites Journal, 1747-48) as another outlet for his witty inventiveness.
An adept at literary parody and a good stylistic mimic, Fielding was
prompted into novel-writing by the furore caused by the publication of
Richardsons Pamela in 1740. A year later he replied with a skilful
pastiche entitled Shamela (1741), which makes the innocent virtue
displayed by Richardsons original heroine appear calculating and
conniving. Fielding followed up the same idea with his first novel,
Joseph Andrews (1742), which was also intended as a kind of parody of
Richardson. Supposedly the story of Pamelas brother, the novel
intends to make fun of chastity (male) as a heavy moral issue. Thus it
begins by ridiculing the view that innocence is possible would a
young man-servant reject the advances of his mistress? However, under
Fieldings hand, the novel develops quite differently: its simple tale - in
which the chaste young hero is unjustly dismissed for resisting the lures
of his employer, Lady Booby, and travels homewards, accompanied by
Abraham Adams, a poor clergyman, and Fanny, Josephs sweetheart ends by asserting the opposing view. The episodic narrative, which
traces the mishaps of the trio on their way home, constantly opposes
their unaffected goodness and innocence with the greed, arrogance,
aggression and deceit that characterise the predatory world of Georgian
England.
But Joseph Andrews is not only an enquiry into the character of a
virtuous man, but also an enquiry into the form of a novel, on which
Fielding theorizes in its Preface. Appealing to Homer and Aristotle as
authorities for the new genre, Fielding considers the novel to be a
comic romance or a comic epic poem in prose, with a more
extended and comprehensive action, which includes a much larger
circle of incidents and introduces a greater variety of characters.
This comic epic would take its subjects from life and would follow
Nature, and though the subjects would be treated in a comic way, they
would not be distorted. Moreover, events and characters should be
presented not as examples of life, but as comments on it, in order to
provide the readers with models of ethical behaviour. As such, the
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novelist becomes not simply a chronicler, still less an entertainer, but a

moralist who believes that through fiction (a fabricated tale which
resembles the historians narrative, but goes beyond it to trace
permanent features of human nature) can make recommendations
about how people should behave:
It is therefore doing him [the novelist] little honour, to imagine
he endeavours to mimic some obscure little fellow, because he
happens to resemble him in one particular feature, or perhaps
in his profession; whereas his [the novelists] appearance in the
world is calculated for much more general and noble purposes;
not to expose one pitiful wretch to the small and contemptible
circle of his acquaintance; but to hold the glass to thousands in
their closets, that they may contemplate their deformity, and
endeavour to reduce it, and thus by suffering private
mortification may avoid public shame.
In order to achieve this end, the novelist becomes an active shaper and
manipulator of the narrative, an omniscient and intrusive narrator who
not only controls the lives and destinies of his characters, but can
intervene, explain, move away from the detail of the story to the general
truths which it was intended to illustrate. As such, Fielding places his
novel before the reader, as if inviting him to engage in a deeply serious
game, where the distance between its three participants (the narrator,
the narrative, and the reader) is often altered: now the actions of the
characters completely occupy the readers attention, now the narrator
acts as commentator, quietly describing what is going on, now narrator
and reader confront one another talking about the game and its
implications, like in the following fragment where the reader is
challenged to visualise Lady Boobys surprise at Josephs recoil from
her advances by following the narrators instructions:
You have heard, reader, poets talk of the statue of Surprise; you
have heard likewise, or else you have heard very little, how
Surprise made one of the sons of Croesus speak, though he was
dumb. You have seen the faces, in the eighteen-penny gallery,
when, through the trap-door, to soft or no music, Mr
Bridgewater, Mr William Mills, or some other of ghostly
appearance, hath ascended, with a face all pale with powder,
and a shirt all bloody with ribbons - but from none of these, nor
from Phidias or Praxiteles, if they should return to life - no, not
from the inimitable pencil of my friend Hogarth, could you
receive such an idea of surprise as would have entered in at
your eyes had they beheld the Lady Booby when those last
words issued out from the lips of Joseph. Your virtue! said the
lady, recovering after a silence of two minutes; I shall never
survive it!
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In 1743 Fielding published the three volumes of his Miscellanies; part

three comprised The life of Jonathan Wild the Great, an ironical
contemporary fable that pretends to equate goodness with greatness
and concerns the heroic character of the centurys most notorious
criminal and scoundrel (hanged in 1725), while pouring scorn on the
innocent Heartfree.
As can be seen from the above examples, Fielding focuses more on male
characters and manners than Richardson, intending his heroes to be
types representative of their sex. The same holds true for The History of
Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749), where the title character is the model
of the male rake reduced to good looks, ready instincts and an inability
to say no. Tom Jones is thus both a vital and fallible hero, both
generous and imprudent, enjoying his freedom in various ways:
hunting, travelling, having relationships with women. But in the course
of the journey that he is forced to undertake from the security of Mr
Allworthys country home to the rickety of London is also a journey
from innocence to experience, from freedom to responsibility, during
which the hero matures and learns prudence. As such Tom is
eventually rewarded with a happy marriage to Sophia Western, the
woman he has always loved and with financial security, for his true
origins as Mr Allworthys proper heir are promptly discovered. The
novel, structured in eighteen books, is also distinguished by the way in
which the fortunes of the hero are described by a separate narrator,
who is virtually a character in his own right, playing a great part in
directing the spicing the course of the story. These omniscient and
frequently intrusive authorial utterances invite the reader to sympathise
with the hero, despite his faults or yieldings to temptation:
Though she behaved at last with all decent reluctance, yet I
rather choose to attribute the triumph to her, since, in fact, it
was her design which succeeded.
Fieldings last novel, Amelia (1751), is a domestic novel which mirrors

its authors own grim experience of social hardships in the metropolis.
The story of William Booth, the young army officer who has married
the virtuous and beautiful Amelia against her mothers wishes is less
exuberant than Fieldings other fiction, and in its depiction of social evil
and legal injustice is generally gloomy, although some minor characters
like Dr Harrison, an honest clergyman, or the brave Colonel Bath
enliven the representations of human behaviour.
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5.5. Tobias Smollett (1721 - 71) and the picaresque tradition

Tobias Smollett followed Fielding in writing life-stories of high-spirited
young men, like Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), The
Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), or The Life and
Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762). These novels partly belong
to the tradition of picaresque fiction, which deals with the lives of
thieves and vagabonds, and which originated in 16th century Spain, the
earliest example being the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1553).
Alain Ren Le Sage adapted the tradition of the picaresque novel in his
Gil Blas (1715), a much more ambitious narrative in which the story of
the title hero, a respectable young man who falls among thieves, serves
as a frame for the life histories of many of the men and women he meets
on his travels. This is the formula which Smollett himself drew upon, as
the novelist was careful to acknowledge in his preface to Roderick
Random:
I have attempted to represent modest merit struggling with
every difficulty to which a friendless orphan is exposed, from
his own want of experience, as well as from the selfishness,
envy, malice, and base indifference to mankind. To secure a
favourable prepossession, I have allowed him the advantage of
birth and education, which, in the series of his misfortunes,
will, I hope, engage the ingenious more warmly in his behalf;
and though I foresee that some people will be offended at the
mean scenes in which he is involved, I persuade myself the
judicious will not only perceive the necessity of describing
those situations, to which he must of course be confined, in his
low state, but also find entertainment in viewing those parts of
life, where the humours and passions are undisguised by
affectation, ceremony, or education; and the whimsical
peculiarities of disposition appear as nature has implanted
them.
Nevertheless, Smollett also aimed to charge it with a human warmth

that he found lacking in his admired Gil Blas, appealing to a much
wider range of interests than Le Sage did. As such, Smolletts expects
his reader to be sympathetic rather than merely curious, but openminded enough to look dispassionately on the raw scenes of low life in
which his chosen form of the picaresque novel compels him to place his
hero. Though his heros surname (Random) hints at the chances to
which he will be subject, Smollett has taken a decisive step away from
the picaresque tradition by making him a man of good birth, while the
circumstances in which Roderick finds himself are due to the ill-will of
his grandfather as much as to chance. And like Tom Jones, Roderick
will be saved from his surroundings and an incredible series of
adventures - during which he is press-ganged in London, sails to the
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64
West Indies, is kidnapped and taken to France by smugglers -, by his

innate good breeding, and will finally be rewarded by a happy
marriage to the beautiful Narcissa. Though the plot lacks in plausibility,
the Smolletts realism finds expression in the slices of documentary or
non-fictional matter which are roughly inserted, like the following
description of a storm at sea which the novelist could have experienced
first-hand while a surgeons mate in the navy:
[ . . . ] I was wakened by a most terrible din, occasioned by the
play of the gun-carriages upon the deck above, the cracking of
cabins, the howling of the wind through the shrouds, the
confused noise of the ships crew, the pipes of the boatswain
and his mates, the trumpets of the lieutenants, and the clanking
of the chain pumps. [. . .] The sea was swelled into billows
mountain high, on the top of which our ship sometimes hung
as if it was about to be precipitated to the abyss below!
Sometimes we sunk between two waves that rose on each side
higher than our top-mast head, and threatened, by dashing
together, to overwhelm us in a moment! Of all our fleet,
consisting of a hundred and fifty sail, scarce twelve appeared,
and these driving under their bare poles, at the mercy of the
tempest. At length the mast of one of them gave way, and
tumbled overboard with a hideous crash! Nor was the prospect
in our own ship much more agreeable; a number of officers and
sailors ran backward and forward with distraction in their
looks, halloing to one another, and undetermined what they
should attend to first. Some clung to the yards, endeavouring to
unbend the sails that were split into a thousand pieces flapping
in the wind; other tried to furl those who which were yet
whole, while the masts, at every pitch, bent and quivered like
twigs, as if they would have shivered into innumerable
splinters! [. . .]
Smolletts last novel, Humphry Clinker (1771) differs from the rambling
narratives of his other fictions by adopting the old-fashioned form of
the epistolary novel. Through the interplay of several letter-writers
outlook, the readers find out the story of the Brambles, a family who
tries to achieve health and social harmony as they travel round Britain.
It also bears witness to the cult of sensibility, which had already entered
fiction several decades earlier, and had brought about an interest in the
analysis, indulgence and display of the emotional life, prompting a real
flowering and display of humanitarian ideals and philanthropic action.
As such, the health in question is not just the health of the principal
character, Matthew Bramble, a benevolent elderly hypochondriac, but
of the nation and of all society, from the semi-literate servant Win to the
frustrated spinster aunt Tabitha, from the young Oxford student Jery to
the young and impressionable Lydia. And, significantly, the farthest
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point of the journey - where the family finally reach a kind of utopia - is
a Scottish paradise at Loch Lomond, not far from Smolletts own
birthplace, at Dumbarton.
5.6. Laurence Sterne (1713-68) and the anti-novel
The tradition of the English novel, after less than a century of existence,
started to lend itself to subversive experimentation once Laurence
Sternes Tristram Shandy made its entrance onto the literary scene,
upsetting previous notions of time, place and action and extending thus
the boundaries of what fiction meant, beyond a mere observation of
human actions with moral overtones.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a highly original 8-volume
novel published between 1760 and 1767, is the first to parody the
existing conventions of the form. If plot was supposed to follow the
natural order of things, having thus a beginning, a middle and an end,
Sterne was addressing his readers even at the outset of his work
pointing up the absurdities, contradictions and impossibilities of
relating time-space-reality relationship in a linear form:
Nothing which has touched me will be thought trifling in its nature, or
tedious in its telling. Therefore, my dear friend and companion, if you
should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my first setting
out bear with me, - and let me go on, and tell my own story my own
way: - Or, if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road, -r
should sometimes put on a fools cap with a bell to it, for a moment or
two as we pass along, - dont fly off, - but rather courteously give me
credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside; and as
we jog on, either laugh with me, or laugh at me, or in short, do
anything, only keep your temper.
As such, the novel, which is narrated in the first person, begins on the
night of Tristrams conception, but does not allow its character to be
born until the fourth volume, to finally end some four years before his
birth, becoming thus a parody of the autobiographical novel, with the
story of Tristrams life never getting told. The author deliberately
hinders all movement, for his narrators thoughts ramble forward,
backward, sideways, describing a wide range of characters and their
peculiarities, covering every subject under the sun, but never able to
carry a story to its end.
Influenced by John Lockes Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690) - which viewed mental life as a stream of ideas, linked together
by chance and flowing on beyond the control of the human being which
were its hosts - the novel attempts to imitate what passes in a mans
own mind, with the narrator being led from one topic to another in an
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apparently random way, interrupting the narrative with frequent

digressions, i.e. episodes going off at a tangent from the main line of
the plot. For example, the accident on Tristrams nose (flattened with
the forceps by Dr. Slop when delivering the baby) prompts the narrator
intervene with a long digression on noses. Other digressions are
provided by a sermon delivered by Yorrick, the local clergyman named
after the jester in Hamlet, a solemn and extensive oath of
excommunication in Latin, with the translation given on the opposite
page, or an unfinished tale of the King of Bohemia. The same effect is
achieved by Sternes use of graphological means, such as a blank sheet,
a page with a marbled design on it, a collection of asteriks, lines and
curves to display the difficulty of keeping to one single line of his story.
The characters themselves are further illustrations of Lockes theory,
proving that each man lives in a world of his own, with his private
obsessions, or hobby-horses, as the consciousness of every individual
is conditioned by his private train of associations. Thus, if the obsession
of Tristrams father, Walter Shandy, is the theory of names, which leads
to the accidental mis-naming of the child, corrupting the Greek name of
the Egyptian god of wisdom, Trismegistus, his uncle Tobys hobby
horse is the theory and practice of fortification and siege warfare, and
the retired military man who has fought on the Continental wars
spends much of his time attempting to reconstruct the battle of Namur
on the bowling green.
With no declared ideological or moral position other than to be a
unique, civil, non-sensical and good-humoured Shandean book,
much of the appeal of Tristram Shandy is to be sought for in its selfconscious narrator, who proves fully aware of the artificiality of his
form and the fact that he is engaging in an intricate game with the
reader, in a conversational manner that rustles on headlong, with no
regard for consistency or coherence, such as illustrated by the following
excerpt in which the narrator enters into a direct dialogue with his
imaginary audience, explaining the problems he confronts as an author:
. . . to understand how my Uncle Toby could mistake the bridge - I
fear I must give you an exact account of the road which led to it; - or to
drop my metaphor, (for there is nothing more dishonest in an historian
than the use of one,) - in order to conceive the probability of this error
in my Uncle Toby aright, I must give you some account of an
adventure of Trims, though much against my will. I say much against
my will, only because the story, in one sense, is certainly out of its
place here; for by right it should come in, either among the anecdotes
of my uncle Tobys amours with widow Wadman, in which Corporal
Trim was no mean actor, - or else in the middle of his and my uncle
Tobys campaigns on the bowling-green, - for it will do very well in
either place; but then if I reserve it for either of those parts of my story,
- I ruin the story Im upon; - and if I tell it here - I anticipate matters,
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and ruin it there. - What would your worships have me to do in this

case? - Tell it, Mr. Shandy, by all means. - You are a fool, Tristram, if
you do.
O ye POWERS! (for powers ye are, and great ones too) - which enable
mortal man to tell a story worth hearing - that kindly shew him, where
he is to begin it - what he is to put into it - and what he is to leave out how much of it he is to cast into the shade, - and whereabouts he is to
throw his light! - Ye, who preside over this vast empire of biographical
freebooters, and see how many scrapes and plunges your subjects
hourly fall into; - will you do one thing?
I beg and beseech you (in case you will do nothing better for us) that
wherever in any part of your dominions it so falls out, that three
several roads meet in one point, as they have done just here - that at
least you set up a guide-post in the centre of them, in mere charity to
direct an uncertain devil which of the three he is to take.
The first truly experimental English novel, Laurence Sternes Tristram

Shandy has become the model for the 20th-century anti-novel,
exemplified by authors like Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov or John
Fowles.
5.7. Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74) and the sentimental novel
During the second half of the 18th century, in reaction to the ideas of the
Enlightment placing their emphasis on reason and order, there became
more and more prevalent the belief that sentiment could influence
social development more powerfully. As such, the literary atmosphere
started to witness the replacement of the neoclassical calm detachment
and mocking attitude by the compassionate note meant to rouse the
readers sympathy for their fellow men, which eventually, under the
influence of Jean Jacques Rousseaus philosophy, came to be associated
with emotions.
Oliver Goldsmith, successful as a poet and comic dramatist, published
his Rousseauisque fable on the antithesis between the goodness and
innocence of mans natural emotions and the corrupting power of
society, law and civilisation, The Vicar of Wakefield, in 1766. The novel
is an improbable fairy-tale about Dr. Primrose (the vicar of the title and
a person who combines learning with innocence, finding his greatest
happiness by the domestic hearth with his wife and children) who is led
by the activities of the wordly and the vicious, as well as a number of
accidents, from one misfortune to another: his fortune is lost, his elder
daughter is apparently seduced and ruined by the local squire; himself
is cheated and deceived in numerous ways until he finds himself in the
local jail; his eldest son becomes a fellow prisoner, accused of severely
injuring a man in a duel. Nevertheless, to all these the vicar responds
with gentle resignation and fortitude, and, by implausible contrivance,
the novel is finally huddled to a happy ending, where the lost fortune is
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restored, the ruined daughter is discovered alive and married to her

seducer, the son is freed and able thus to marry his first love.
In spite of the deliberate naivities of the story and the moralising and
sentimental exhibitions of feeling, the real achievements of Goldsiths
novel are to be found in the way in which the tale is told in the firstperson point of view, in the slight but effective differentiations in
character between the various members of the family, and the
comprehensive picture of provincial, family life that it provides:
[ . . .] My children, the offspring of temperance, as they were educated
without softness, so they were at once well-formed and healthy; my
sons hardy and active, my daughters beautiful and blooming. When I
stood in the midst of the little circle, which promised to be the
supports of my declining age, I could not avoid repeating the famous
story of Count Abensberg, who, in Henry the Seconds progress
through Germany, when other countries came with their treasures,
brought his thirty-two children, and presented them to his sovereign,
as the most valuable offering he had to bestow. In this manner, though
I had but six, I considered them as a very valuable present made to my
country, and consequently looked upon it as my debtor. Our eldest son
was named George, after his uncle, who left us ten thousand pounds.
Our second child, a girl, I intended to call after her aunt Grissel; but
my wife, who had been reading romances, insisted upon her being
called Olivia. In less than another year we had another daughter, and
now I was determined that Grissel should be her name; but a rich
relation taking a fancy to stand god-mother, the girl was by her
direction called Sophia: so that we had two romantic names in the
family; but I solemnly protest I had no hand in it. Moses was our next;
and, after an interval of twelve years, we had two sons more. [. . . ] a
family likeness prevailed through all, and properly speaking, they had
but one character, that of being all equally generous, credulous, simple
and inoffensive
5.8. The Gothic novel

In the last decades of the century, a new shift in sensibility occurred
toward what came to be called the sublime, a concept from classical
Greek which entered English thought through the French of Boileau
and found its definitive explanation in Edmund Burkes Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.
Published between 1757-9, Burkes essay was to become a key text of
the times, displaying an emphasis on feelings and on imagination, in
stark contrast to the neoclassicist insistence on form and reason.
Nevertheless, Burkes idea of the sublime goes beyond natural beauty
into the realms of awe, or terror, because, for him, the sublime is
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productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of

feeling. Linking it thus with terror, emotion and feeling.
The link between the sublime and terror is most clearly seen in the
Gothic novel, a form which concentrated on the fantastic, the
macabre and the supernatural. The term Gothic has medieval and
architectural connotations, being generally held to refer to the kind of
European building characterised by its use of pointed arches which had
flourished in the Middle Ages. But in a series of novels written from the
1760s to the 1790s, which featured haunted castles, spectres rising from
the grave and wild landscapes, the term came to be associated with
mystery, romance, ivy-covered and owl-haunted ruins, acquiring the
generic meaning of horror fantasy.
The Castle of Otranto, the novel published by Horace Walpole (1717-97)
in 1764 is the first of this kind, initiating this sub-genre in English
literature. It is a story of medieval times, set in south Italy, with castles,
vaults, ghosts, statues which come to life, sudden violent death, forest
caves, and the whole paraphernalia of horror. Passion, grief and terror
are the mainstrays of the plot, which moves between the unlikely and
the totally incredible. Manfred, the actual prince of Otranto, is in fact
the offspring of a usurper who had poisoned the rightful heir, Alonso.
Haunted by the prophecy foretelling the end of his male line and the
return of the rightful heir, Manfred engineers the marriage of Conrad,
his son, to the beautiful Isabella and then attempts to enforce himself on
the maiden once his son gets mysteriously killed. But his plans are
thwarted by a peasant boy, Theodore, who helps Isabella escape and
who, at the end of the novel, is proclaimed the true price of Otranto by
a suddenly enlivened statue of Alonso, which grows enormous and
overthrows the castle burring a terrified Manfred with it.
The immediate widespread popularity of the Gothic novel was also
helped at the hands of several accomplished women writers, such as
Ann Radcliffe and Clara Reeve, who combined Gothic sensationalism
with the cult of feeling.
The novels of Ann Radcliffee (1764-1822) are typical in this respect.
Though they still employ standard Gothic properties, such as secret
passages, vaults, sliding panels, old manuscripts unexpectedly
discovered, their emphasis falls on romance, and the supernatural
incidents, after allowing the novelist extract maximum of suspense and
excitement, are always explained in the end as produced by natural
causes. For example, in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Radciffes
most successful novel, the young heroine, Emily, is forced to follow her
tyrannical aunt, Madame Cheron, to the castle of her new husband, the
cruel Montoni. But the series of sinister and frightening occurrences
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which the two face at Udolpho and which eventually lead to the aunts
death are proven to have been engineered by Montoni himself, who
has, in the meantime, turned his attentions to Emily. Nevertheless, in
the nick of time the heroine manages to escape and the resolution seals
the triumph of good, with Emilys return to her native Gascony where
she is happily reunited with the Chevalier de Valancour, her first and
faithful lover.
Frankenstein, the novel published by Mary Shelley (1797-1851) in 1818,
is not properly Gothic if compared to The Castle of Otranto and The
Mysteries of Udolpho, where the virginal female victim is subjected to
increasingly exaggerated horrors. Here the horror element of the story
is related to the unsuccessful experiment of the hero, the young doctor
Victor Frankenstein, who, instead of creating a perfect human being,
gives birth to a monster, an eight-foot hideous creature who will
become responsible for the death of his family, fiancee, as well as his
own eventual destruction. During the 20th century, mostly due to the
Hollywood film industry, the subject of Mary Shelleys novel was
raised to the level of universal myth, while its title is liable of giving a
new word to the language. Nevertheless, many modern readings have
reacted against the cinematic image of the monster, preferring to read
the tale as a psychological exploration of creation, childbirth and
responsibility, with a corresponding emphasis on the creature as an
outcast - an innocent who has had human life thrust upon him and who
is destined to roam the icy waters (a vision of 20 th-century wastelands)
in solitude.
To support this view, one may often cite the creatures own point of
view, which is given full voice in the epistolary form of the novel,
balancing with pathos the horror which other narrative voices describe,
such as is the case in the following fragment in which the monster
utters his first words to another human being:
My heart beat quick; this was the hour and moment of trial which
would decide my hopes or realise my fears. The servants were gone to
a neighbouring fair. All was silent in and around the cottage; it was an
excellent opportunity; yet, when I proceeded to execute my plan, my
limbs failed me, and I sunk to the ground. Again I rose; and, exerting
all the firmness of which I was master, removed the planks which I
had placed before my hovel to conceal my retreat. The fresh air revived
me, and, with renewed determination I approached the door of their
cottage.
I knocked. Who is there? said the old man - Come in.
I entered; Pardon this intrusion, said I, I am a traveller in want of a
little rest; you would greatly oblige, if you would allow me to remain a
few minutes before the fire.
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5.9. Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) and the regional novel

Maria Edgeworth, or the great Maria as she came to be known -, was
one of the best-known literary figures of the time, writing of the Irish
social scene at the time when the Act of Union passed in 1801 had
brought Ireland fully into he United Kingdom, in both a political and
legal sense.
Her fictional work established Edgeworth as a writer of small-scale,
provincial novels, where the particular detail and the humour and
sense of character enlists the sympathetic participation of the reader. At
the same time, these novels proved to become an acknowledged
influence on Walter Scott, who praised Edgeworths innovations in his
praface to Waverley (1814) and followed their model in his own
depictions of the Scottish provincial scene.
Castle Reckrent, published in 1800, is the first of these. The novel is set
in 1782, aiming to provide a vivid picture of the Irish social conditions
preceding the Union. It focuses on the history of a family of Irish
landlords, whose path to ruin is narrated by Thady Quirk, their
steward, who has witnessed their excesses and improvidence for the
past three generations. Thadys narrative starts with the story of the
lavish entertainer Sir Patrick Rackrent, who drinks himself to death.
Then it goes on to that of Sir Patricks eldest son, Sir Murtagh, who dies
in a rage against the enemies whom he continually sues. Sir Kit, the
next Rackrent, is a gambler who fares no better, being killed in a duel.
The present landlord, Sir Condy, eventually loses the estate by loans
and litigations to Thaddys own son, Jason, and the Rackrents line is
ended when Condy himself dies trying to emulate one of his
grandfathers drinking feats.
The novel displays a lively awareness of the Irish scene as well as that
of the moral and psychological problems arising out of an impinging
new social order, for Thaddys son, Jason, who educated himself and
managed to become a lawyer, is intended as a representative of a rising,
predatory middle-class. In the same order of ideas, the retainers selfprofessed loyalty to the Reckrents becomes ambiguous, especially in
view of his sons eventual possession of the estate.
The addition to the text of a preface, footnotes and a glossary introduces
s;s,emts of antiquarian and sociological commentary, while the use of
Hiberno-English (a term applied to those varieties of English spoken
and sometimes written in Ireland) in Thaddys narrative, reveals an
interest in regional varieties of language, such as the following
fragment illustrates:
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Then we were all bustle in the house, which made me keep out of the way,
for I walk slow and hate a bustle, but the house was all hurry-skurry,
preparing for my new master. - Sir Murtagh, I forgot to notice, had no
children, so the Rackrent estate went to his younger brother - a young
dashing officer - who came amongst us before I knew for the life of me
whereabouts I was, in a gig or some of them things, with another spark
along with him, and led horses, and servants, and dogs, and scarce a place
to put any Christian of them into; for my late lady had sent all the featherbeds off before her, and blankets, and household linen, down to the very
knife cloths, on the cars to Dublin, which were all her own, lawfully plaid
for out of her own money. -So the house was quite bare, and my young
master, the moment ever he set foot in it out of his gig, thought all those
things must come of themselves, I believe, for he never looked after any
thing at all, but harum-scarum called for every thing as if we were
conjurers, or he in a public-house. For my part, I could not bestir myself
any how; I had been so used to my late master and mistress, all was upside
down with me, and the new servants in the servants hall were quite out of
my way; I had nobody to talk to, and if it had not been for my pipe and
tobacco should, I verily believe, have broke my heart for poor Sir Murtagh.
Castle Reckrent was followed by Belinda (1810), a satiric novel in which

the wicked Lady Delacour, whose tortured life has elements of gothic
mystery, is reformed by the title-character. The Absentee (1812) deals
with the ill-effects of landlord absenteeism in Ireland, while Ormond
(1817) is innovative in its exploration of the effect of reading on the titlehero. Of her later novels, Helen (1834) presents a depressing view of the
prospects for Irish society. Edgeworths keen, but disillusioned love of
Ireland which her work records is also acknowledged in a letter dated
the same year, 1834, in which the novelist declared it impossible to
write fiction about the post-Union Ireland: The people would only
break the glass and curse the fool who held the mirror up to nature
distorted nature, in a fever.
5.10. The novel of social and domestic life
If women took an active part in producing the gothic novel, they
proved even more active in producing a different type of novel, at the
other end of the scale, namely the one of contemporary social and
domestic life. Here the chief interest lies in the delineation of manners
and the detail and intimacy with which the behaviour of characters in a
specific and limited social environment is described.
5.10.1. Fanny Burney (1752-1840) is the author of a series of novels
which portray how a young woman grows up and develops as she
enters and experiences the society of her day.
The first of them and the one which established her reputation is
Evelina; or, The History of a Young Ladys Entrance into the World,
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published in 1778. Employing an epistolary form, the novel traces the

story of the title-heroine, a girl of humble education, brought up in
rural seclusion until the age of 17 when she is sent to see the world and
also enters the world of fashion. There she suffers a series of
frustrations and humiliations until she meets the right people, in the
persons of the aristocratic Lady Howard and Lord Orville, who, in
seven months (and three volumes) tutor her education in selfknowledge, prudence and discretion and eventually turn her into a
right match for Lord Orville himself. Her second novel, Cecilia; or,
Memoirs of an Heiress, published in 1782, concerns the fortunes of
Cecilia Beverley, who is victimised by her three unscrupulous
guardians, Harrel, Briggs and the Hon. Compton Delville until she is
eventually allowed to find a modicum of happiness with her lover
Mortimer Delville.
In both of them the tone is gently satirical, blended with vivid
observation, while society and the aspirations to be part of it are their
main concerns. Their strength lies in comedy and the comedy of
domestic life, developed around innocent heroines like Evelina and
Cecilia. As a novelist, Burney inherited the form from Richardson and
Fielding, but handled it in such a way that would prove useful to Jane
Austen, herself.
5.10.2. Jane Austen (1775-1817) ranks as the greatest of these women
novelists, the one who raised the genre to a new level of art by applying
the techniques of the novel to the acute observation of the provincial
society of her time.
Austens novels portray small groups of people in a limited, perhaps
confining environment. Her characters, who are middle-class and
provincial, have as their most urgent preoccupations courtship, while
their greatest ambition proves to be marriage. The apparently trivial
incidents of their life are moulded by the author into a poised comedyof-manners, where a gentle irony is deployed in order to point to the
underlying moral commentary. Though one finds no exhibitionist
critical apparatus, like in Fielding, nor any pretentiously announced
didactic purpose, like in Richardson, Austens novels remain arresting
because she managed to apply the microscope to human motivation
and character, turning her fictions into representations of universal
patterns of behaviour, which display the vision of man as a social
animal, as well as the ironic awareness of the tensions between
spontaneity and convention, or between the claims of personal morality
and those of social and economic propriety.
Northanger Abbey, published in 1818, but completed in 1798, is
probably the first. The novel gently satirises the 1790s enthusiasm for
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74
the gothic sub-genre, by contrasting day-to-day life with the imagined

horrors of Ann Radcliffes novels. These have had a considerable effect
on the impressionable heroine, Catherine Morland, who humiliates
herself in the eyes of her fiancs father when she misconstrues the
atmosphere and events occurring at the Tilneys home (the rebuilt old
abbey of the title) as part of a gothic novel situation:
Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffes works, and charming even as
were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that
human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be
looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their
vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland,
and the South of France, might be as fruitful in horrors as they were
there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country,
and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and
western extremities.
The authors distanced and slightly ironic observation of the heroine

and of the love-intrigues in fashionable Bath already displays the tone
and point of view which Austen was to refine in her later works, less
obviously intended to ridicule and more concerned with the acute
depiction of character and interaction.
In the novels which followed, Austen continues to focus on young
heroines. Sisters are often contrasted, like in Sense and Sensibility,
published in 1811, in which Elinor represents sense and self-control,
while Marianne stands for sensibility and impulsive emotions. Their
closely worked out plots usually involve the twists and turns of
emotion in search for love, marriage, happiness and social status, like in
Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, where Elizabeth Bennett and
Darcy have first to discover themselves and then each other in their loss
of pride and prejudice. It is this development which allows them a
happy marriage, while the other characters, who remain quite the same
throughout the novel, settle back at the end into their accustomed
modes of behaviour.
Austens use of point of view also becomes more sophisticated. Though
she employs the omniscient point of view, the explicit manipulation of
the reader which characterised Fieldings narrators dissapears, and
irony determines something of the point of view shared between an
invisible third person narrator and the reader. Consider, for example,
the opening of Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth generally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of
a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may
be on this first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in
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75
the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the

rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
My dear Mr. Bennet, said his lady to him one day, have you
heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?
The first sentence, without explicitely interpellating the reader with the
address dear reader, like in Fielding, manages, nevertheless, to
effectively give him the premise on which the author will work. The
reader is invited to share it before proceeding with the reading of what
subsequently happens to the members of the Bennett family once their
interest in the new tenants at Netherfield is aroused, and thus colludes
with the author/narrator in the telling of the tale.
At other times, Austen uses free indirect speech or adjectives that
represent her characters own opinions and attitudes rather than those
of the author/narrator. In this case the reader is silently manipulated
into a situation of plural points of view, represented by the interplay of
that of the author/narrator and character, or an explicit and implicit
one.
The following excerpt represents the beginning of Emma, the novel
published in 1816 which tells the story of a rich and clever girl, whose
confidence in her own understanding of people and her well-meaning
desire to manipulate the lives of her social inferiors as well as some of
her equals will involve her in a number of delusions:
.
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable
home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best
blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the
world with very little to distress or vex her.
She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate,
indulgent father, and had, in consequence of her sisters marriage,
been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had
died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance
of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an excellent
woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in
affection.
Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr Woodhouses family,
less as a governess than a friend, very fond of both daughters, but
particularly fond of Emma. Between them it was more the intimacy of
sisters. Even before Miss Taylor had ceased to hold the nominal office
of governess, the mildness of her temper had hardly allowed her to
impose any restraint; and the shadow of authority being now long
passed away, they had been living together as friend and friend
mutually attached, and Emma doing just what she liked; highly
esteeming Miss Taylors judgement, but directed chiefly by her own.
The real evils indeed of Emmas situation were the power of
having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little
too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened ally to
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76
her many projects. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived,

that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.
Sorrow came - a gentle sorrow - but not at all in the shape of
any disagreeable consciousness. - Miss Taylor married.
After subtly setting the heroine for a fall in the first sentence by means
of the series of three epithets which encapsulate the deceptiveness of
Emmas seeming contentment, the narrator rapidly summarises the
circumstances likely to breed her arrogance: deprived of her mothers
guidance at an early age, she had assumed the role of mistress of the
house due to an indulgent father and a governess who had supplied her
with a mothers affection and not discipline. In the third paragraph, the
exact nature of Emmas relationship with Miss Taylor, the governess, is
rendered more emphatic by means of a shift of point of view between
the author/narrator and the heroine herself, though the latter is not
allowed to appear entirely in the light of her own point of view because
the reports of her thinking are still in the third person.
This narrative strategy, in which the narrative is carried by author and
character together, is the one which Jane Austen refined, enabling her to
reveal a characters feelings more directly, while still providing readers
with her own (often ironic) view of character.
Task
1. The 18th - century novel
Definition of the novel
Conditions for the rise of the novel in the 18th
century
Characteristics of the 18th-century novel
Representative authors and narrative techniques
2. Women writers of the 17th-, 18th and early 19th
centuries
Playwrights: Aphra Behn, Susannah Centlivre and
the comedy-of-manners
Novelists: Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley and the
Gothic novel, Maria Edgeworth and the regional
novel, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen and the novel of
manners.
Choose a text for illustration and analysis
3. Pre-romantic attitudes in prose
Cultural context: the Age of Sensibility
The sentimental novel;
The Gothic novel.
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Chapter 6 The Movement from Neo-Classicism to

Romanticism in Poetry
6.1. Neoclassical Vs. Romantic Paradigms
6.2. Between Reason and Sensibility
6.3. Between Sensibility and Romanticism
6.4. Proto-Romantics
6.5. Romantic Poetry: William Blake
6.1. Neoclassical Vs. Romantic Paradigms
During the second half of the eighteenth century, paralleling
developments in the novel, poetry began to explore new themes,
handled in more low-key language and forms which often lacked the
bite of satire, reacting thus against the formal, self-consciously
heightened, and satirically self-referential poetry of the Augustans.
While some voices, like that of Dr. Samuel Johnson, still pay tribute to
the waning neo-classical ideals, others, like those of John Thomson,
Thomas Gray, or Robert Burns become pointers to the English Romantic
age, the beginnings of which are marked by the publication of
Wordsworth and Coleridges Lyrical Ballads in 1798.
The following comparison between the Classical/Augustan Age and
Romanticism might reveal that the two periods refer not only to two
different attitudes to literature, but to distinct ways of seeing and
experiencing life:
The Augustans stressed the importance of reason and order.

Strong feelings and flights of imagination had to be controlled,
because they trusted intellect and the head. In contradistinction,
the Romantics are attracted by the irrational, mystical and the
supernatural.
The Augustans looked outward to society, celebrating a social

order in which everyone knew his or her place. In their turn, the
Romantics look inward, to their own soul and the life of the
imagination, celebrating the freedom of nature and of individual
experience, and being critical of society and what they consider
to be its injustices.
The Augustans developed a formal and ordered way of writing,

characterised by the balance and symmetry of the heroic couplet
(in poetry) and by an adherence to the conventions of a special
poetic diction. The Romantics employ a different kind of writing,
which attempts to capture the ebb and flow of individual
experience in forms and language intended to be closer to
everyday speech.
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The transition between the two aesthetic matrices is linked to the

specific historical contexts of the agrarian and industrial revolutions
which occurred at that same time. As the small towns and villages were
replaced by s more impersonal, mechanised society where individuals
lost their identity, the writers often sought to correct this imbalance by
giving greater value to the countryside, nature and individual
sensibility, consciousness and freedom.
6.2. Between Reason and Sensibility
6.2.1. Dr. Samuel Johnson (1704-84) is the major author of the period
who is still strongly anchored in the neoclassical tradition. Best
remembered as a lexicographer (author of the Dictionary of the English
Language, 1755) and literary critic (The Lives of the Poets, 1779-81),
Johnson was also a poet who used the heroic couplet mainly for
moralising purposes. In the two verse satires that he wrote, London
(1739) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) he tried to modernise the
Roman poet Juvenal in order to attack various evils of the thoughtless
age he lived in: from courtiers, flattery and fashion to the dangers of
wishful thinking.
6.2.2. Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774), though not primarily a poet,
exemplifies the transition between neo-classical and romantic writing
with two long poems written in heroic couplets, The Traveller (1764) and
The Deserted Village (1770). The latter is the most famous of the two,
taking the form of a pastoral elegy which contrasts an idyllic rural past
with the harsh reality of the present, represented by the Enclosure Acts
and the depopulation of agrarian communities triggered by the
Industrial Revolotion. The Deserted Village is the imaginary and
idealised Auburn, recreated in part from his childhood memories of the
Irish Westmeath, where Goldsmith had grown up, and the poem
laments the vanishing of traditions and that of the romantic pleasures
of rural life brought by the fact that money and progress have become
more important than human destinies, leading to the decay of such a
previously happy place:
Along thy glades, a solitary guest,
The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest;
Amidst thy desert walks the lapwing flies,
And tires their echoes with unvaried cries.
Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,
And the long grass oertops the mouldring wall.
[. . .]
How often have I blessed the coming day,
When toil remitting lent its turn to play,
And all the village train, from labour free,
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Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree,

While many a pastime circled in the shade,
The young contending as the old surveyed;
And many a gambol frolicked oer the ground,
And sleights of art and feats of strength went round.
6.2.3. George Crabbe (1754 - 1832) in The Village (1783) reacted against
the view of rurality as that of a lost golden age, attempting to show that
country life was not idyllic, not a romantic dream, but a continual trial.
By vividly painting the squalor and poverty of the lives of humble
farmers, fishermen, agricultural laborious, Crabbe was attacking both
the Arcadian ideal as well as the complacency with which towndwellers viewed their lot:
Ye gentle souls, who dream of rural ease,
Whom the smooth stream and smoother sonnet please;
Go! If the peaceful cot your praises share,
Go, look within, and ask if peace be there:
If peace be his - that drooping weary sire,
Or theirs, that offspring round their feeble fire,
Or hers, that matron pale, whose trmbling hand
Turns on the wretched hearth thexpiring brand.
Nor yet can time itself obtain for these
Lifes latest comforts, due respect and ease;
For yonder see that hoary swain, whose age
Can with no cares except its own engage;
Who, propped on that rude staff, looks up to see
The bare arms broken from the withering tree,
On which, a boy, he climbed the loftiest bough,
Then his first joy, but his sad emblem now.
Almost a quarter of a century later, Crabbe continued his bleak

descriptions of country life in The Borough (1810), a poem in 24 letters
sent to a friend, in which the writer offered a precise and detailed view
of his native Aldeburgh in Suffolk, as Truth will paint it, and as Bards
will not, rejecting thus both the idealisation of rural life and the oversentimental identification with it (in which city fashion often indulged).
6.3.
Between Sensibility And Romanticism
6.3.1. James Thomson (1700 - 1748) is the first poet of the age who chose
to reject the heroic couplet and use, instead, a quasi-Miltonian blank
verse in his four long poems, published season by season between 1726
and 1730. The Seasons aim to describe the countryside at different times
of the year, often interlarding the descriptive passages with meditations
on man. Thomsons vision of nature as harsh, especially in winter, but
bountiful, stresses the pure pleasures of rural life, with no denial of the
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pain these pleasures can involve. His celebration of nature is thus

closely allied with a sense of desolation, of hard work and harsh
landscapes, so that the tone of his Seasons is far removed from that of
the classical idyll:
These, as they change, Almighty Father, these
Are but the varied God! The rolling year
Is full of Thee. Forth in the pleasing Spring
Thy beauty walks, Thy tenderness and love.
Wide flush the fields; the softening air is balm;
Echo the mountains round; the forest smiles;
And every sense, and every heart, is joy.
Then comes Thy glory in the Summer months,
With light and heat refulgent . . . .
Thy bounty shines in Autumn unconfined,
And spreads a common feast for all that lives.
In Winter awful Thou! With clouds and storms
Around Thee thrown, tempest oer tempest rolled,
Majestic darkness! . . .
Mysterious round! What skill, what force divine,
Deep felt in these appear! A simple train,
Yet so delightful mixed, with such kind art,
Such beauty and beneficence combines,
Shade, unperceived, so softening into shade,
And all so forming an harmonious whole
That, as they still succeed, they ravish still.
In his treatment of nature, Thomson diverged thus from the neoclassical

writers in many important ways: through sweeping vistas and specific
details in contrast to circumscribed, generalised landscapes, exuberance
instead of balance, and a hailing of philosophic melancholy.
6. 3.2. The last of these was also the major concern of the so-called poets
of the Graveyard School, exemplifying the strain of descriptive and
meditative poetry, developing throughout the 18th century, where
natural description prompted moral reflections on the human situation.
The foremost of them was Edward Young (1683 - 1765), whose early
verses were in the Augustan tradition. Nevertheless, in his The
Complaint; or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742-46), the
melancholy meditations against a backdrop of tombs and death indicate
a major departure from the conventions and convictions of the
preceding generation. While the neoclassical authors regarded
melancholia as a weakness, the pervasive mood of the Complaint is a
sentimental and pensive contemplation of loss, as the speaker, in
carefully wrought gloomy context of night, broods over his sorrow,
meditating on mortality and immortality:
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Night, sable goddess! From her ebon throne,

In rayless majesty now stretches forth
Her leaden sceptre oer a slumbering world.
Silence, how dead! And darkness, how profound!
Nor eye nor listening ear an object finds;
Creation sleeps.
Thomas Grays (1716 - 1771) Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

(1751) is often considered the central text in this tradition, though the
poem is considerably different in emphasis, becoming, in some senses, a
life-affirming reconsideration of rural values. Grays Elegy opens with a
contemplation of the landscape, which is gradually emptied of both
sights and sounds as dusk descends and the meditative tone is thus set:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly oer the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such, as wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew trees shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a moldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell forever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
Having thus introduced the poets considerations of the rude

forefathers of the village and the short and simple annals of the
poor, the poem alternates then between generalised abstractions and
individual examples that turn it into an affirmation of simple lives and
their values. The elegiac element, however, concerns the consideration
of loss in the villages lack of ambition, and the passing of the poets
own life, for The Elegy is given an unexpected turn at the end, revealing
the poets own epitaph:
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy marked him for her own.
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Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,

Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery all he had, a tear,
He gained from Heaven (twas all he wished) a friend.
6.4. Proto-Romantics
6.4.1. William Collins (1721 - 1759) foreshadows the concerns of the
Romantic poets in his Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects
(1746), which are visionary and intensely lyrical. Among these, Collins
Ode on the Poetical Character ranks as an early dramatic engagement with
one of the central topics of the Romantic age, i.e. the origin and role of
the creative imagination, which is the poet himself:
The band, as fairy legends say,
Was wove on that creating day,
When He, who called with thought to birth
Yon tented sky, this laughing earth,
And dressed with springs, and forests tall,
And poured the main engirting all,
Long by the loved Enthusiast wooed,
Himself in some diviner mood,
Retiring, sate with her alone,
And placed her on his sapphire throne;
The whiles, the vaulted shrine around,
Seraphic wires were heard to sound,
Now sublimest trimph swelling,
Now on love and mercy dwelling;
And she, from out the veiling cloud,
Breathed her magic notes aloud:
And thou, thou rich-haired Youth of Morn,
And all thy subject life was born!
6.4.2. Another poetical movement heralding Romanticism found

expression in a yearning for the unknown, the strange and the
mysterious, often connected to a remoter and more magical world
related to the mythical past. James Macpherson (1736-96) and Thomas
Chatterton (1752-70) are noteworthy for two literary fabrications,
Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and
Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language (1760) and Poems, Supposed to
Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley and Others, in the Fifteenth
Century (1778). The first of them purported to be Macphersons
recovery (through translation) of the poems written by the legendary
Ossian, a Gaelic warrior and poet appearing in the old Irish tales
included in the Cycle of Leinster. Though critics like Samuel Johnson
challenged the authenticity of Macphersons Ossianic poems and, after
the poets death, a committee of inquiry concluded that he had treated
the Gaelic material in a free and selective fashion, adding much verse of
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his own inventions, their popularity and success was immense,

spreading beyond Britain to include Napoleon, Herder and Goethe
among their admirers. By turning attention to wild nature, the mythic
past and folk culture, Macphersons poems played a crucial role in the
emergence of Romanticism, as well as providing an interesting
comment on the way in which certain minds were trying to escape the
hard sunlight of the Age of Reason.
6.4.3. Robert Burns (1759 1796) (also known as Rabbie Burns,
Scotland's Favourite Son, the Ploughman Poet, the Bard of Ayrshire
and, in Scotland, as simply the Bard) is widely regarded as the national
poet of Scotland. His poetry blends influences from classical, biblical,
and English literature with the Scottish Makar tradition 1. Burns wrote
both in Scots and in English and some of his works, such as Love and
Liberty (also known as the Jolly Beggars), are written in both languages
for various effects. Included in his Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
(1786), To a Louse is a humorous dramatic poem written in Scots:
To a Louse
Ha! Whare ye gaun, ye crowlan ferlie!
Your impudence protects you sairly:
I canna say but ye strunt rarely,
Owre gauze and lace;
Tho faith, I fear ye dine but sparely,
On sic a place.
Ye ugly, creepan, blastit wonner,
Detested, shunnd, by saunt an sinner,
How daur ye set your fit upon her,
Sae fine a Lady!
Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner,
On some poor body.
Swith! in some beggar's hauffet squattle:
There you may creep, and sprawl, and spr
Wi' ither kindred, jumping cattle,
In shoals and nations;
Whare horn nor bane ne'er daur unsettle
Your thick plantations.
Now haud you there! ye're out o' sight,
Below the fatt'rils, snug an' tight;
Na, faith ye yet! ye'll no be right,
Till ye've got on it --The vera tapmost, tow'ring height
O' miss's bonnet.
1
15th century poets writing in Scots and combining skilful artifice with natural
diction, concision and "quickness" of expression.
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My sooth! right bauld ye set your nose ou

As plump an' grey as onie grozet:
O for some rank, mercurial rozet,
Or fell, red smeddum,
I'd gie ye sic a hearty dose o't,
Wad dress your droddum!
I wad na been surpris'd to spy
You on an auld wife's flainen toy:
Or aiblins some bit duddie boy,
On's wyliecoat;
But Miss's fine Lunardi! fye!
How daur ye do't.
O Jenny, dinna toss your head,
An' set your beauties a' abread!
You little ken what cursed speed
The blastie's makin!
Thae winks an' finger-ends, I dread,
Are notice takin'!
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!
6.4.
Romantic Poetry: William Blake (1757 - 1832)
Almost completely unknown in his age (he was discovered 50 years

after his death), Blake was trained to be and made his living as an
engraver. Though he had no systematic schooling, his impressive
erudition is evident in the poetry he wrote, where he created an
idiosyncratic visionary universe, consciously repudiating the major
ideas of the Enlightenment. His main collections of poetry consist of:
Poetical Sketches (1783)
The Book of Thel (1789-91); Visions of the Daughters of Albion
(1791-93); The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93)
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794)
The Four Zoas; Milton; Jerusalmen (1804-20)
In his Songs of Innocence and Experience, the two states are not opposites
but contrasts which complement each other. Hence parallel,
complementary and contrastive poems appear in the two series: e.g.
"Introduction", "Holy Thursday", "The Divine Image", "Lamb" and
"Tyger", "The Echoing Green" and "Nurse's Song". Despite its horrors,
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the maturity of experience is needed to come to consciousness, nave

Innocence must pass through and assimilate Experience, to achieve, by
an act of Imagination, a "Higher Innocence", a transcendental state
which is a marriage of the former two.
The Lamb
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream & oer the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb Ill tell thee,
Little Lamb, Ill tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb;
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child;
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
The Tiger
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
[. . . ]
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Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright

In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Task
Consider the following topic to defend in oral or written form:
1. The Movement from Neo-classicism to Romanticism in
Poetry
Cultural context: the Age of Sensibility
Samuel Johnson and the Neoclassical legacy
Nature poetry: Oliver Goldsmith and John Thomson
Graveyard poetry: Edward Young, Thomas Gray, James
MacPherson.
Regional poetry: Robert Burns
Romantic poetry: William Blake.
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APPENDIX 1
THE NOVEL
DEFINITION: An extended fictional prose narrative, often including
the psychological development of the central characters and of their
relationship with a broader world. The modern novel took its name and
inspiration from the Italian novella, the short tale of varied character
which became popular in the late 13th century. As the main form of
narrative fiction in the 20th century, the novel is frequently classified
according to genres and subgenres such as the historical novel,
detective fiction, fantasy, and science fiction.
DEVELOPMENT: A major period of the novel's development came
during the late Italian Renaissance, when the stimulus of foreign travel,
increased wealth, and changing social patterns produced a greater
interest in the events of everyday life, as opposed to religious teaching,
legends of the past, or fictional fantasy. The works of the Italian writers
Boccaccio and Matteo Bandello (1485-1561) were translated into English
in such collections as William Painter's Palace of Pleasure 1566-67, and
inspired the Elizabethan novelists, including John Lyly, Philip Sidney,
Thomas Nash, and Thomas Lodge. In Spain, Cervantes' Don Quixote
1604 contributed to the development of the novel through its translation
into other European languages, but the 17th century was dominated by
the French romances of Gauthier de Costes de la Calprende (16141663) and Madelaine de Scudry (1607-1691), although William
Congreve and Aphra Behn continued the English tradition. With the
growth of literacy, the novel rapidly developed from the 18 th century to
become, in the 20th century, the major literary form.
INTRODUCTION TO NARRATOLOGY
NARRATOLOGY: a term used since 1969 to denote the branch of
literary study devoted to the analysis of narration, and, more
specifically, of forms of narration and varieties of narrator.
NARRATIVE: a telling of some true or fictitious event or connected
sequence of events, recounted by a narrator to a narratee. It consists of
a set of events (the story) recounted in the process of narration
(discourse); the events are selected and arranged in a particular order
(Plot).
NARRATOR: one who tells, or is assumed to be telling the story in a
given narrative, i.e. the imagined voice transmitting the story.
NARATEE: the imagined person whom the narrator is assumed to be
addressing in a given narrative.
ELEMENTS OF ANALYSIS: PLOT; SETTING/SPACE; TIME;
CHARACTER; FOCALISATION/POINT OF VIEW.
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1. PLOT
The pattern of events and situations in a narrative, as selected and
arranged both to emphasise relationships (usually cause and effect)
between incidents and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader
(through surprise or suspense.) A simpler definition would be: the
authors design for a novel, in which the story plays a part, as well as
the authors choice of language and imagery.
The concept of plot was first developed by the Greek
philosopher, Aristotle, to describe the properties of drama. His
formulation introduced concepts such as the protagonist, or hero, whose
fate is the focus of the audiences attention. The hero may be in conflict
with an antagonist in the form of a human opponent or of some abstract
concept such as fate; or the conflict may be in his own mind.
As the plot progresses, it arouses expectations in the reader
about the future course of events and how characters will respond to
them. A concerned uncertainty about what is going to happen is known
as suspense. If what in fact happens violates the readers expectations, it
is known as surprise.
A plot has unity of action if it is perceived by the reader as a
complete and ordered structure of actions, directed towards the
intended effect, in which none of the component part (incidents) is
unnecessary. Aristotle claimed that it does not constitute a unified plot
to present a series of episodes which are strung together because they
happen to a single character. Many picaresque narratives, nevertheless,
such as Defoes Moll Flanders, have held the interest of the readers for
centuries with such an episodic plot structure.
A successful development which Aristotle did not foresee is the
type of structural unity that can be achieved with double plots, where a
subplot - a second story that is complete and interesting in its own right
- is introduced to broaden our perspective on the main plot and to
enhance rather than diffuse the overall effect. The subplot may have
either the relationship of analogy to the main plot, or of counterpoint
against it.
The order of a unified plot, as Aristotle pointed out, is a
continuous sequence of beginning, middle, and end, and develops
through the stages of exposition, amplification, climax, denouement. In
many plots the denouement involves a reversal in the heros fortunes,
which frequently depends on a discovery, i.e. the recognition by the
protagonist of something of great importance hitherto unknown to him
or to her.
Novelists in particular have at times tried to subvert or ignore
the reader's expectation of a causally linked story with a clear
beginning, middle, and end, with no loose ends. James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf wrote novels that explore the minutiae of a character's
experience, rather than telling a tale. However, the tradition that the
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novel must tell a story, whatever else it may do, survives for the most
part intact.
English novelist E M Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, defined it
thus: The king died and then the queen died. The king died and then the queen
died of grief at the king's death. The first is the beginning of a series of
events; the second is the beginning of a plot.
2. SETTING/SPACE
Setting refers to the part which may be played by location or milieu
or historical time in the design of the novel. This is most commonly a
reflective or supporting role; it underlines or enhances the nature of the
action or the qualities of the characters which form the substance of the
novels. Setting may be a means of placing a character in society which
allows scope for the action his nature is capable of, or it may generate
an atmosphere which has a significant function in the plot.
In simple terms, the relations between setting on the one hand
and character and events on the other, may be causal, or analogical:
features of the setting may be either cause and effect of how characters
are and behave; or, more by way of reinforcement and symbolic
congruence, a setting may be like a character or characters in some
respects. While the examples above tend towards the broadly
personifactory, the more conventional, undramatised settings play an
important part in promoting verisimilitude and indirect
characterization.
3. TIME
The amount of time which is allotted in the narrative to the various
elements of the story is determined with respect to the amount of time
which these elements take up in the story.
One must distinguish here between the moment in history when
the story is supposed to take place, and the time-span covered by the
story, i.e. the fictional time taken up by the action (e.g. a whole
generation, a single day.)
The most influential theorist of fictional time is Gerard Genette,
who isolates three aspects of temporal manipulation or articulation in
the movement from story to narrative/text:
a) order (refers to the relations between the assumed sequence of events
in the story and their actual order of presentation in the text.) Any
departures in the order of presentation in the text from the order in
which events evidently occurred in the story are termed anachronies, i.e.
any chunk of text that is told at a point which is earlier or later than its
natural or logical position in the event sequence. They naturally divide
into flashbacks and flashforwards. The first (called analepses by Genette) is
an achronological movement back in time, so that a chronologically
earlier incident is related later in the text; the second (prolepses)is an
achronological movement forward in time so that a future event is
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related textually before its time. The two types of anachrony entailed by
them are called correspondingly: retroversions and anticipations.
b) Duration (concerns the relations between the extent of time that
events are supposed to have actually taken up, and the amount of text
devoted to presenting those same events.) Maximum speed is said to
constitute ellipsis (no text space is spent on a piece of story duration);
the opposite situation is a descriptive pause (text without story duration.)
Related terms are summary and scene. In summary the pace is
accelerated through a textual compression of a given story period into a
relatively short statement of its main features. In scene, story and text
duration are conventionally considered identical (e.g. purely dialogue
passages.)
c) Frequency (how often something happens in story compared with
how often it is narrated in text.)it may be: singulative (telling n times
what happened n times); repetitive (telling n times what happened
once); iterative (telling once what happened n times.)
4. CHARACTER
A personage in a narrative (or dramatic work): it is normally expected
of a novel that it should have at least one character, and preferable
several characters shown in processes of change and social relationship.
CHARACTERIZATION: the representation of persons in narrative and
dramatic works. It may include direct methods (narrative), like the
attribution of qualities in description or commentary, and indirect (or
dramatic) methods inviting the reader to infer qualities from
characters actions, speech or appearance. A distinction was made by
Forster made between FLAT and TWO-DIMENSIONAL characters
(which are simple and unchanging) and ROUND characters which are
complex, dynamic (i.e. subject to development) and less predictable.
Another classification was advanced by W.J. Harvey (Character and the
Novel), including protagonists, background figures, intermediate figures.
5. POINT OF VIEW/ FOCALISATION
POINT OF VIEW: The way a story gets told - the mode or perspective
established by the author by means of which the reader is presented
with the characters, actions, setting, and events that constitute the
narrative in a work of fiction.
A broad division is established between THIRD-PERSON and
FIRST-PERSON narratives. In a third-person narrative, the narrator is
someone outside the story proper, who refers to all the characters in the
story by name, or as he, she, they. In a first person narrative, the
narrator speaks as I, and is himself a participant in the story.
a) Third-person points of view:
1) the OMNISCIENT point of view: the convention in a work of
fiction that the narrator knows everything that needs to be known
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about the agents and the events; is free to move at will in time and
place, to shift from character to character, and to report (or
conceal) their speech and actions; and also that the narrator has
privileged access to the characters thoughts and feelings and
motives, as well as to their overt speech and actions. Within this
mode, the narrator may be INTRUSIVE (not only reports, but
freely comments on and evaluates the actions and motives of the
characters, and sometimes expresses personal views about human
life in general: e.g. Dickens and Hardy), or UNINTRUSIVE
(IMPERSONAL or OBJECTIVE) (i.e. describes, reports, or shows
the action in dramatic scenes without introducing his own
comments or judgements, e.g. Hemingway.)
2) the LIMITED point of view: the narrator tells the story in the
third-person, but within the confines of what is experienced,
thought, felt by a single character (or at the most by very few
characters) within the story. Henry James, who refined this mode,
described such a selected character as his focus or mirror, or
centre of consciousness. In a number of Jamess later works all
the events and actions are represented as they unfold before and
filter to the reader through the particular awareness of one of his
characters. Later writers developed this technique into STREAMOF-CONSCIOUSNESS narration, in which we are presented with
outer observations only as they impinge on the current of thought,
memory, feelings, and associations which constitute the observers
awareness (e.g. Joyce, Virgina Woolf.)
b) First-person points of view: This mode naturally limits the point of
view to what the first-person narrator knows, experience, infers, or
can find out by talking to other characters. We distinguish between
the narrative I who is a fortuitous witness of the matters he relates,
or who is a minor or peripheral participant in the story, or who is
himself or herself the central character in the story (e.g. Mark Twain,
Salinger.)
FOCALISATION: Term used in narratology, covering broadly the
same semantic sphere as point of view (i.e. the interpretation of the text
as grounded, or anchored, coming from a particular speaker at a
particular place at a particular time.)The basic contrast is established
between external/internal focalisation. External focalisation occurs
when the focalisation is from an orientation outside the story (i.e. the
orientation is not associable with that of any character within the text.)
Internal focalisation occurs inside the represented events, and involves
a character-focaliser.
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APPENDIX 2
POETRY: GENERAL CONCEPTS
(ADAPTED from www.ucea.courses/outlines/introd.poetry)
Poems often try to capture a feeling (love, death, fear, joy etc.).
Poems often try to express the inexpressible: what the mind can't
rationalize.
Poems often try to make abstract concepts concrete.
Poems often deal with contradictions and uncertainties.
Poems often try to answer the deepest questions about the
human experience.
Poems often try to express their anger, pessimism, criticism, or
hope about a moment in time (especially historical events) and
how that impacts the human condition.
Poems often try to make the seemingly unimportant experience,
important. (John Donne even wrote a poem entitled, "The Flea"!)
Keep in mind that paraphrasing or summarizing a poem will not

capture its full meaning since that rests in the words and HOW the
author manipulates those words. Here, form (HOW) creates meaning
as much as the content.
Furthermore, although poems often deal with feelings, our analyses of
them must remain objective and thoughtful (not "touchy feely"). To
analyze a poem objectively, you must learn to ask "HOW DOES THIS
POEM CREATE MEANING?" To do so, you can use any of the
following poetic techniques discussed below.
The Editors of the Norton Introduction to Literature state the
following about poetry:
10. Assume there is a reason for everything. Poets do make mistakes, but in
poems that show some degree of verbal control it is usually safest to
assume that the poet chose each word carefully; if the choice seems
peculiar to us, it is usually we who are missing something.
Craftsmanship obliges us to try to account for the specific choices and
only settle for conclusions of ineptitude if no hypothetical explanation
will make sense. (390)
The Speaker as a Poetic HOW
The poem's speaker is NOT necessarily the poet! So, please do not
confuse the two.
What to consider when trying to analyze HOW the poet manipulates
the speaker to arrive at meaning:
describe the human voice.
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What does the speaker say?

How does the speaker say it?
What type of person is s/he?
o likable? dislikeable? despicable? lovable? vengeful?
funny? honest? dishonest? cruel? shocked? dismissive?
angry? sorry? grieving? aloof? etc.
o What evidence in the poem helps you to identify the
speaker's personality?
o Read this poem aloud in that person's "voice." How does
it sound?
How does the speaker speak about him (her) self? What selfportait does s/he create?
Do you believe the speaker? Is s/he reliable? If not, what makes
you doubt him/her?
In understanding the speaker, what else do you understand in
the poem (in terms of the message, theme, conflict, etc.)?
Situation and Setting
Where: setting may influence meaning.
Does the speaker choose a setting appropriate for the poem?

If not, what might the inappropriateness in itself reveal?
When:
time of day (dusk, sunrise, sunset etc. = usually have symbolic

connotations)
seasons are often significant
a historical moment/ event
a specific year.
Why does the event take place? What prompts the speaker to make the
poetic statement? love; memory; death etc.
Who does the speaker address?
Word Choice as Poetic HOW
Since poems often have so few words, every word contains meaning.
Does the poet use any unusual words? Why?

Does the poet disrupt expected word order? For example, we
expect S-V-DO. Why might a poet have in mind with the nonstandard order?
Does the poet use a series of abstract words? Why?
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
What's the general "level" of the poetic diction? (high:

sophisticated, "SAT" language; middle: standard English; low:
informal, colloquial, slang )
Metaphors & Similes as Poetic HOW

Metaphor: compare 2 unlike things; the comparison is implicit
(unstated; the reader has to THINK to make the connection!)
implied metaphor
extended metaphor= ranges over part or whole of poem
controlling metaphor
Simile: explicit comparison that uses like / as
usually the 2 things are very different

"My love is like a red, red, rose"
Allusions & Symbols as Poetic HOW
Allusion: reference that enriches
shorthand for meaning

you must understand (or look it up!) the allusion for it to mean
anything.
Symbol: person, object, image, word
economic device to compress a complex idea

usually the poet uses a conventional image that has wife-range
recognition (cross = suffering; flag = patriotism)
Form as Poetic HOW
The Sonnet:
structure : 14 lines
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
Italian / Petrarchan:
1 octave : abbaabba
1 sestet: cdecde OR cdcdcd OR
cdccdc
English / Shakespearean
3 quatrains: abab cdcd efef
1 couplet: gg
quatrain: 4 line stanza
94
95
sestet: 6 line stanza

octave: 8 line stanza
o structure and purpose
octave- often presents the problem, situation,
conflict
sestet- comments on or resolves the problem
Blank verse
unrhymed iambic pentameter (natural speech)

5 iambic feet / line: U / U / U / U / U /
regular rhythm
Free verse (open form)
reject poetic meter, rhyme, and stanza

irregular feet, line length, lack rhyme or is sporadic
rejects the formal elements of traditional poetry in an attempt to
express different elements/ issues
Sound (Rhyme) as Poetic How
Why do poets use rhyme/ sounds? How does it add to meaning?

end rhyme / near rhyme (some ways to create it)
alliteration: lovely lashes
repetition of same CONSONANT sound in a sequence of
words
o usually at the beginning of the word
o
assonance
o
repetition of internal VOWEL sounds (they do not have to

rhyme)
consonance
o
identical consonant sounds preceded by different vowel

sounds
other ways to create rhyme / rhythm and therefore, MEANING

parallelism
o
o
parallel structure (grammatical structure)

repetition of words
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onomatopoeia
o
o
word resembles the sound it makes

sound helps to convey meaning
Sight as a Poetic HOW
enjambment
1 line runs into the next to create meaning

o (Influences how one reads the poem. PAY ATTENTION
TO PUNCTUATION!)
end stopped
period at the end

one complete unit of thought (Shakespeare, etc.)
pay attention when a poem starts out as "end stopped" but then
switches to enjambment (or vice versa).
o Why does the poet break with expectations?
punctuation
punctuation can also shape how one reads a poem and therefore,
shape its meaning.
Many commas may suggest parallelism or equality
Dashed suggest rupture, long pauses
spacing
Does the poet leave space between stanzas to mark units of

thought or meaning?
What happens when the meaning in the subsequent stanza
directly hinges upon the last line of a previous stanza?
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APPENDIX 3
The Movement from Neo-classicism to Romanticism in Poetry (2)
PRE-ROMANTIC POETRY: Robert Burns and William Blake
(excerpted from Eugenia Gavriliu, A Course in English Literature
Galati, 1999)
The significant transition through which the Age of Reason
modulated gradually into the Age of Sensibility continued throughout
the last decades of the eighteenth century.
The feeling for nature, the haunting love of ruins and the past,
the melancholy and musing attitudes and, above all, the need to reveal
the inner self, became the prevailing features in the poetry of the preRomantics in which tradition and the new trends are closely
intermingled.
ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796). Generally placed among the
English pre-Romantic poets, Burns holds a place apart. Revered as a
national poet by the Scottish nation, he is a considerable lyric poet
whose talents were largely based on a native ballad tradition. He came
in the wake of remarkable predecessors (Allan Ramsay and Robert
Fergusson) who gave him a lesson in realism, humour and lyricism
which never loses sight of reality. On the other hand, his debt also
extends to the literature south of the Border. Far from being an
unlettered peasant, he was well read not only in the Bible, Shakespeare
and Pope, but also in the SPECTATOR essays, Richardson and Sterne,
while Thomson, Gray and Young taught him the discipline necessary to
check and direct the spontaneous expression of his poetry. In Burns the
influence of a half-foreign nationality and the vigour of a son of the
Scottish soil quickened the germ of originality.
The poet was born at Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland as the eldest
among the seven children of a poor Scottish cotter. Educated by his
father and the local schoolmaster, he received little schooling but he
reaped the benefit of the literary traditions of his country, and of
England. He worked on his fathers farm from an early age becoming a
skilled ploughman by the age of fifteen. His inclination for literature
developed early and at sixteen he wrote his first song and embarked
upon his first love affair. His father dying from tuberculosis in 1784,
Robert and his brother Gilbert salvaged what they could to buy the
farm of Mossgiel. His affair with Jean Armour resulted in a child but, at
her familys insistence, the two separated and Robert turned to Mary
Campbell. During this period he wrote some of his best work: THE
COTTERS SATURDAYS NIGHT, THE TWA DOGS, HALLOWEEN,
THE JOLLY BEGGARS, TO A MOUSE, TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY. The
work on the farm being meagrely successful, Burns decided to emigrate
to Jamaica with Mary Campbell, and in order to get the necessary
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98
money he printed the first edition of his poems in 1786. Thus, the socalled Kilmarnock edition made him famous and took him to
Edinburgh where his modesty and conviviality made him very popular.
The appreciation of literary Edinburgh helped Burns forget the
death of his dear Mary while the second edition of his poems brought
him 500, enabled him to settle down on a small farm at Ellisland and
to marry Jean Armour. Farming proving unsuccessful again, he secured
the office of excise man at the Dumfries customs in 1791. His
enthusiasm with the French Revolution brought him in conflict with the
authorities and nearly cost him his place when he brought two cannons
and sent them as a present to the French Republic.
Meanwhile he contributed some 200 songs to James Johnsons
SCOTS MUSICAL MUSEUM, among which the famous AULD LANG
SYNE, SCOTS WHO HAE, A RED, RED ROSE. No other single poet in
literature produced so many lyrics that compulsively sing themselves.
Burns died at the age of thirty-seven broken in health and fortune,
leaving behind him a literary work of unique value.
All the elements of Romanticism: sensibility, personal effusion,
love of nature, wealth of imagination, sympathetic interest in the
humblest things in nature are to be found in the work of Burns.
However, he has none of the romantic pangs of the mind and soul. His
strong, robust self renders him immune from any excesses either of
melancholy or ecstasy.
Most of Burnss verse appeared in POEMS, CHIEFLY IN THE
SCOTTISH DIALECT, of which three gradually expanding editions
appeared successively in 1786, 1787 and 1793.
Any attempt at analysing Burnss poetry has to face the
abundance and variety of his poetic achievements. A classification
according to the major themes adopted here for didactic purposes
causes the poetry of Burns to fall into the following divisions:
a) Social poetry. A sense of liberty is the animating force of his
poetic genius which ranks Burns in the same line with such proletarian
writers as William Langland and John Bunyan5. Burns is deeply aware
of the dignity and equality of men and voices the conviction that social
rank does not determine mans real worth. The poets attitude varies
from the glorification of the simple and humble life in THE COTTERS
SATURDAY NIGHT, through the vivacious mock-heroic animal tale in
THE TWA DOGS, to the wild bravado song in THE JOLLY BEGGARS,
to culminate in the pathetic cry for equality in FOR ATHAT AND
ATHAT.
THE COTTERS SATURDAY NIGHT follows the current taste
for sentimentalism in its pictures of rural simplicity, homely virtues and
praise of unaffected rural life. Burns reveals himself as a rustic poet
who wrote when Scotland was on the verge of the Industrial
Revolution, hence the irresistible temptation to sentimentalise over an
idealised country-life. The principle that inherent worth determines the
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rank of man is voiced in the often quoted line: An honest mans the
noblest work of God.
THE TWA DOGS relates, in the manner of a beast mediaeval
fable, a conversation between Caesar, a gentlemans Newfoundland
dog, and Luath, a poor mans mongrel, on the social inequality in the
country. This dogs eye view of mans world is carefully handled so as
to make the latter appear the more contemptuous and abusive. The two
dogs part in the end rejoicd they were na men, but dogs.
THE JOLLY BEGGARS, published after the poets death in 1799,
depicts the sturdy independence and courageous defiance of all social
conventions of a group of beggars carousing in an ale-house. Brief
descriptive moments are linked together in challenging songs
resounding with revolutionary motifs. All institutions, all conventions,
anything that limits the freely chosen human intercourse, are
abandoned in roaring professions of anarchist independence.
FOR ATHAT AND ATHAT voices the equalitarian cry of the
French Revolution, looking forward to the days when class
discriminations will end and all men will be brothers.
b) Satirical poems. Burnss poetry breathes a spirit of irreverence
which spares neither church nor clergy. With peculiar verve he pokes
fun at the devil, makes free with the theme of eternal damnation and
laughs at the secret troubles which haunt the Puritan conscience.
ADDRESS TO THE DEIL reduces Miltons Satan to the folklore
devil in an attack against the rigid Calvinism of the Scottish church. The
poem is a fine example of Burnss technique of criticising theological
dogmas by translating them into the realities of daily, ordinary
experience.
HOLY WILLIES PRAYER, one of Burnss greatest satirical
poems, is a monologue in which Willie, a parish elder, is overheard at
his prayers. Willie is convinced that he is one of Gods elect and that his
salvation is assured regardless of his moral conduct. Willies filthy soul
and his hypocritical religion are laid bare in solemn, biblical rhythms6.
The target of Burnss satire here is again the Calvinist doctrine of
predestination and of salvation of predestined grace regardless of
mans behaviour but, as the poem proceeds, it acquires generalising
force, Willie standing for universal religious hypocrisy and selfishness.
TO A LOUSE, ON SEEING ONE ON A LADYS BONNET AT
CHURCH is another satirical approach to the old theme of social
inequity. The ladys aristocratic airs are confronted with the vulgar
louse which reveals pretence and hypocrisy in their true light. Her airs
and graces are stripped away in a tone of kind amusement and the
poem concludes with a simple, epigrammatic note: O wad some lowr
the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as others see us!/ It wad frae monie a blunder
free us/ An foolish notion;/ Wat airs in dress an gait wad laee us,/ An een
Devotion!
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c) Patriotic lyrics. Burnss love for his native land calls forth
various responses on the part of the poet.
MY HEARTS IN THE HIGHLANDS voices a Scots intense love
for his native hills though Burns was a native of the Lowlands.
SCOTS WHA HAE also known as BRUCES ADDRESS BEFORE
BANNOCKBURN celebrates the Scottish victory over the English at
Bannockburn in the 14th century. Burnss hostility at contemporary
reactionary forces is obvious in the prose conclusion to the poem: So
may God defend the cause of Truth and Liberty as he did that day!
THE TREE OF LIBERTY echoes the ideals of the French
Revolution which are contrasted with the life of the oppressed people:
A scene o sorrow mixed wi strife.
Burnss devotion to the Stuart pretenders expressed in such
poems as CHARLIE, HES MY DARLING should be interpreted as a
longing for the national independence of the by-gone patriarchal days
rather, than an attachment to monarchy, which was so alien to his
spirit.
d) Nature poems. The poetry of Burns is in close touch with all
the human element in life. The keen love of nature intermingles with a
sympathetic interest in the humblest things in it.
TO A FIELD MOUSE bridges the gap between the world of men
and that of the animal in the similar unexpected misfortune befalling
both. The poet expresses his regret to the mouse, the wee, sleekit,
cowrin, timirous beastie, on turning her up with the plough, and muses
over the hostile forces that thwart the ideals of both animal and man.
This fellow-feeling is conveyed in well-controlled, proverbial lines: The
best laid schemes o mice an men/ Gang aft a-glay,/ An leae us nought but
grief an pain/ For promisd joy.
TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY displays a similar disposition
towards a flower. The poets crushing of the blossom with his plough
becomes symbolic of mans fate in a hostile environment. The poem
bears the stamp of Burnss complying to the new sensibility since he
was here posturing as a man of feeling, one that Melancholy has marked
for her own as Gray whom he thought highly of, had described in his
ELEGY.
THE AULD FARMERS NEW-YEAR MORNING SALUTATION
TO HIS AULD MARE MAGGIE recounts a farmers thoughts as he
brings the traditional extra food to his animal at the start of the new
year. The poem displays a realistic unsentimental sense of the shared
labour of animal and man which remained unequalled in Romantic
poetry.
e) Lyrical songs. The poet of good-natured frankness, Burns has
made of his poetry a full and open confession of himself. His private
life, his friendships, his love affairs, his marriage and his paternal
feelings are all reflected in his lyrical poetry.
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A huge amount of love lyrics which have rendered Burns the

worlds supreme love lyricist from courting in GREEN GROW THE
RUSHES to a happy requited love in I LOVE MY HEAN and OF A
THE AIRTS THE WIND CAN BLOW up to the ecstasies in A RED, RED
ROSE and COMING THROUGH THE RYE.
AE FOND KISS is a sad lyric of a lost romance, while TO MARY
IN HEAVEN is an elegy upon the death of Mary Campbell JOHN
ANDERSON MY JO is a touching piece of loyalty and tenderness in a
husband and wife in their old age. WILLIE BREWD A PECK O MAUT
has remained the favourite drinking song of Britain since the days of
Burns, while AULD LANG SYNE has become the reunion and parting
song of the entire English-speaking world.
Thus Burns took the whole corpus of Scottish folk song and
reshaped it, providing suitable words for song and dance tunes, making
new songs out of fragmentary remains, reworking old ones with an
assurance and a poetic splendour never matched by any other poet.
f) Narrative poems of folk inspiration. Burns, who had been
born and bred among the Scottish legends and folk tales, had a
sympathy for rustic superstition which he treated in a mock-serious
tone combining the realistic with the imaginary.
TAM OSHANTER, the famous narrative of folklore inspiration
relates how Tam, having drunk heavily before riding home from Ayr,
comes upon a witches dance in the ruins of Alloway Kirk. Found out,
Tom is given a wild chase until his mare reaches the middle of the
Bridge of Doon beyond which no evil spirit can pass. A witch snatches
off the mares tail, but Meg, the mare, and her master escape the
infernal powers. The variations of speed and tone of the octosyllabic
couplets, the skill in creating the proper atmosphere for each part as the
poem develops, reveal Burns as a master of narrative poetry.
JOHN BARLEYCORN has all the sterling strength and frankness
of folk poetry cast into the ballad form.
The poet seizes upon the personification of barley as the grain
from which malt liquor is made, to symbolise the invincible spirit of the
people which the three mighty kings cannot subdue.
To the foreign and even to the uninitiated Englishman the
language of Burnss Lowland Scots poems offers some difficulty. The
reader finds a glossary indispensable; but once the linguistic obstacles
surmounted, the use of dialect is discovered to lend greater charm to
the work bringing forth a peasant-like atmosphere of shrewd
observation and genial good nature.
His language conveys a conscious sense of the complexity of life,
a humorous knowledge of human nature, an old, timeless wisdom. His
poems are poetry made out of the spoken language free from poetic
diction and from poetical subject-matter. Like Chaucers
CANTERBURY TALES, Burnss comic and satiric poetry creates,
through rhythm and imagery, a world of particular characters, behaving,
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talking in particular scenes.7 We listen not only to dialogues or

monologues, to the characters talking, but to the poet himself talking as
eye-witness and commentator on the life he is presenting and of which
he is himself a part.
With the notable exception of Byrons DON JUAN, Burnss
realistic and satiric vein had but little effect on the English poetry in the
19th century. It was his lyrical songs, felt to be Scottish counterparts of
Thomas Moores IRISH MELODIES, that the romantic taste appreciated
and that lyric was what was chiefly needed to melt the eighteenth-century
frost8.
WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827). Born and bred in London, William
Blake was early apprenticed to an engraver and earned his livelihood
by continuing this trade for himself with the help of his wife, an
illiterate woman, but about the most perfect wife on record, as
Swineburne put it. In 1783 he published his LYRICAL SKETCHES, a
collection of poems which impress through their freshness of feeling,
freedom of metre and delicate harmony.
The SONGS OF
INNOCENCE appeared in 1789, the SONGS OF EXPERIENCE were
published in 1794, and the later years the so-called prophetic books
were printed. Except for his first volume of poems, Blakes poems and
prophetic books were etched by himself on copper plates, with
decorative designs. An engraver by profession, his work as a poet was
little known in his lifetime. Besides his own poems, Blake made and
engraved designs and illustrations of many works, notably Youngs
NIGHT THOUGHTS, Blairs GRAVE, the Biblical BOOK OF JOB,
Miltons PARADISE LOST, and the DIVINA COMEDIA. The designs
reveal his greatness as an artist.
The extreme originality of his work kept him apart from public
recognition. His own age dismissed him as a competent engraver with a
bent for eccentric verse. His reputation increased by the turn of the 19 th
century and William Butler Yeats, while admitting the enigmatic
character of his work, highly praised it. James Joyce has explored the
vistas opened by Blake until, at last, our age has conferred him great
reputation, Blake being a highly discussed poet in the 20 th century.
What follows is an oversimplified attempt at analysing the work
of this difficult poet9.
Blakes intellectual background broke violently from the cultural
pattern of his age. Blake immersed himself in readings such as the
HEBREW CABBALA*, alchemical and astrological writings. The
mystical writing of William Law asserting the fundamental unity of all
existence and the concept of good and evil as representations of
Gods power and love were also influential upon Blakes vision. He
turned to account ideas derived from the Swedish visionary and
*
Cabbala = a mediaeval system of Jewish theosophy, mysticism and magic (the origination of the world
by a series of hierarchically descending radiations from the Godhead through intermediate stages to
matter) marked by belief in creation through emanation and a cipher method of interpreting Scripture.
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religious thinker Swedenborg and from the German mystic Boehme.

The potent influence of OSSIAN can easily be traced in the similarity of
the melodious, sonorous names. But whatever influence may have been
at work in shaping Blakes universe, they bear the hall-mark of the
strong originality and the innate power of myth-making with which he
recreated everything that he set his hand to. All Blakes vast mythology
is talking exclusively about the tumultuous forces within the individual
human being symbolised as Albion, the sleeping giant. Blake observes
four functions in each human being which he personifies as Los
(Intuition), Urizen (Reason), Luvah (Emotion) and Tharmas (Sensation).
Four Mighty Ones are in every Man, says Blake and, anticipating much
of Freuds theory on the danger of repression, advocates a release of all
inhibition imposed by Reason (Urizen). Every restraint means
deformation to Blake while the unchained spirit will achieve true
balance and creative harmony.
We can find in his prose aphorisms, a form of which he was
master, sudden flashes like the following in THE MARRIAGE OF
HEAVEN AND HELL, that takes us directly to the heart of his doctrine:
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be
restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the
unwilling.
The dream world was also explored by Blake. In his vision it
consists of an upper part, Beulah, the realm of sweet dream-nymphs of
the idyllic slumber. Underneath lies Ulro, the barren waste of the
repressed functions which appear like dream-ghosts. Mans way to
psychic salvation plunges him into the depths of the unconscious life in
order to release and develop the repressed elements. Blake represents
this idea symbolically through a great wheel that descends through
Beulah, Generation (the physical world in which we live) and Ulro, to
surge upward to Eden, the state of the purified and harmonious psyche.
In applying his vision to the universe Blake analyses such events
of his day as the American War of Independence or the French
Revolution in terms of his own mythology, conveying an image of a
world shaken by the momentous conflict between oppressing authority
(Urizen) and rebelling, uninhibited forces.
Blakes literary beginning, however, displayed but little of the
ecstatic and weird fantasy of the prophetic books.
POETICAL SKETCHES (1783) was Blakes first work consisting
of poems written between the ages of twelve and twenty and
representing his apprenticeship. Reminiscences from Shakespeare (MY
SILKS AND FINE ARRAY) intermingle with echoes from the
Graveyard School (FAIR ELEANOR; TO THE EVENING STAR).
GWIN, KING OF NORWAY follows the Scandinavian verse of Gray.
There is an Elizabethan freshness and a lyrical touch in such lines
as these: My silks and fine array,/ My smiles and languished air,/ By love are
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drivn away;/ And mournful lean Despair;/ Brings me yew to deck my grave:/
Such end true lovers have.
SONGS OF INNOCENCE (1789) represents a poet who is wholly
himself seeking his own visions of life. The poems in SONGS OF
INNOCENCE deal with childhood as the symbol of untarnished
innocence that ought to be, but which in modern civilisation cannot be,
part of the adult response the world. There is a sense of everything in
its proper place, of content and order and spontaneity ruling together
enhanced by the elemental simplicity of the language, by the regular
rhythmic patterns. The poems display an imaginative picture of the
state of innocence derived from the Bible, pastoral tradition and the
growing Romantic fascination with childhood and a supposed
primitive condition of human perfection in innocence.
The universe in SONGS OF INNOCENCE is seen through the
eyes of a child, felt through his senses, judged through his mind; and
this child is the symbol of the most delicate and courageous intuition of
the human mind, just like the soul of a peasant in those moments of
sober exaltation which will be with Wordsworth the very source of
poetry.
THE LAMB sees the innocence in the child as kindred to that of
the lamb of Christ.
NURSES SONG praises the happiness of the uninhibited
childhood freely playing. The final lines in THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER:
So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm, far from being versified
moral platitudes, are a half-ironic, half-yearning vision of a world in
which all men behave as Blake would have them behave.
The SONGS OF EXPERIENCE (1794) are in a marked contrast
with the precious collection. The theme in these poems is the notion
that the conventions of civilisation represented intolerable restrictions
on the individual personality and produced every kind of corruption
and evil. There is no road back to innocence, since innocence, by its
very nature, is easily led astray, only a road forward, through
experience, to a comprehensive vision. SONGS OF EXPERIENCE are
clearly the product of disillusion and present a sad picture of what man
has made of man10. The brightness of the earlier work gives place to a
sense of gloom and mystery and of the power of evil. They depict the
actual world of suffering mankind by means of concrete, evocative
symbols. Many of these poems are deliberate responses to the similar
pieces in SONGS OF INNOCENCE.
NURSES SONG counters the identical poems in SONGS OF
INNOCENCE. The nurse contemplates her own ruined life and
concludes with the idea that the innocence of childhood is followed by
the hypocrisy of mature age.
THE TIGER counters THE LAMB. The tiger is a symbol to the
fierce forces in the human soul and in the universe. Blake sees in the
apparent evil and malevolence of the tiger another manifestation of the
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unity of God displayed here in its power and energy. Power and energy
are necessary to achieve final fulfilment.
There is both beauty and terror in the elemental forces of nature
as later works of Blake proclaim. That section of THE MARRIAGE OF
HEAVEN AND HELL entitled PROVERBS OF HELL in which Hell is
the symbol of liberty and spontaneous energy provides a clue to the
meaning of the symbol of the tiger:
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy
sea, and the destructive sword,
Are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man.
These first poems contain such elements of Romanticism as the sense of

wonder, the contemplation of nature through fresh eyes, intimate
sympathy with the varieties of existence, the absorbing sense of the self.
Alongside these traditional trends Blake introduces for the first time the
concept of his universe torn between Inspiration and Reason.
Inspiration is surrounded by humanitarianism, personal and political
freedom, emotion, creative activity. Reason is surrounded by opposing
attitudes, selfishness, political and individual restraint, cold calculation,
static rigidity. Blake will continue the conflict in terms of his own
mythology in the prophetic books.
Though the form is still simple and the images often familiar,
symbolic and visionary elements are more frequent while the change of
rhythms in the last line often provides a note both haunting and
sinister.
D. H. Harding11 has warned about the danger of missing much
of the meaning in those apparently comprehensible poems by ignoring
their relation to the obviously esoteric writing in the prophetic books.
Most of the writings in the prophetic books reflect Blakes
struggles to establish order among apparently conflicting aspects of his
own personality expressed as symbolic figures and situations. The
personal issues with which he wrestled seemed to him to be also salient
problems of human life. They included questions of the proper place of
intellectual control in the total economy of the personality, the place of
impulse, the relations between authority and those it controls, the
relation of the sexes, the poison of jealousy and the overwhelming
importance of forgiveness. As pointed out by the same D. H. Harding,
one can draw a parallel between the prophetic books and Blakes
struggle to understand and harmonise the features of his own
personality.
TIRIEL was the first prophetic book which remained in
manuscript until printed by William M. Rossetti in 1874. The poem has
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a full story line and contains Blakes proclamation that an old age is
dying and a new one is coming to birth.
THE BOOK OF THEL (1789) presents for the first time the theme
that will prevail in all Blakes subsequent works: the soul is eternal but
must pass through the wheel of Destiny, through Generation (Blakes
symbol for the physical world we live in) to surge up to Eden, i.e. the
state of imaginative power and balanced harmony.
THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL (probably printed c.
1790-95) considers good and evil as synonymous for passivity
and energy, both of which must be fully developed to achieve life.
Analysing PARADISE LOST in terms of his concepts,
Blake sees Miltons God as Urizen, the great forbidder, and Miltons
Satan as Los, energy, inspiration and revolt. Self-restraint is considered
not strength of will, but weakness of desire.
VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION (1793)
insists that everyone is entitled to the most ideal union that he or she
can secure despite such frequent obstacles as jealousy, hypocrisy,
abusive authority. Blakes Albion is the sleeping self composed of the
harmonious balance of all elements. The indebtedness to Macphersons
OSSIAN can be easily traced in the similarity of names.
Though Blake was a visionary influenced by the main
undergrounds of European mystical thought, he was also a man of his
time who responded characteristically and sometimes violently to the
main political and social events of his age, notably the French
Revolution and the American War of Independence.
A SONG OF LIBERTY (c. 1793) considers the current unrest
throughout Western Europe, the prelude to the momentous toppling
over of all repression by the powers of innate energy.
AMERICA (1793) represents Blakes vision of the American
Revolution as the wild upsurge of Orc (another name for Luvah, Blakes
personification of Emotion) against Albions Angel (the repressive
George III.)
EUROPE (1794) figures Orc as the spirit of the French Revolution
freeing himself from Asia, the symbol of oppression.
THE BOOK OF URIZEN (1794) is Blakes first attempt at an
overall explanation of mans total psychic problems. Blake personified
the four functions which he identified in each human being as: Los
(Intuition), Urizen (Reason), Luvah (Emotion) and Tharmas (Sensation).
Blake sees the struggle between Urizen and Los as taking place
simultaneously within the individual soul and within the entire spirit of
mankind. Reason usurps the world of inspiration (Los) and his lack of
imaginative power results in terrible errors imposing superstitions and
restraint in order to maintain his dominance. Los establishes an
evolutionary cycle through Revolt personified as Fuzon that will
eventually bring the new age of perfection.
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THE BOOK OF AHANIA (1789) continues the narrative thread

from Urizen, hence the title of THE SECOND BOOK OF URIZEN.
Fuzon, another name for Orc, i.e. Revolt, is the leader of the revolt
against his father Urizen. Fuzon is crucified upon the Tree of
Mystery, a symbol of youthful energy fettered by the restrictive
powers of the laws of Reason.
THE BOOK OF LOS (1795) recounts much of the previous two
books from the point of view of Los. The personification of light in the
dark world of Urizen, Los, the spirit of poetry, starts the constructive
process that will carry man to perfection.
THE SONG OF LOS (1795) consists of two parts: AFRICA and
ASIA, which together with AMERICA and EUROPE form Blakes
tetralogy upon the four continents. Africa is a symbol of Beulah, the
realm of primitive innocence and freedom which is invaded by Urizen
who tries to impose wisdom and happiness through reason. But a new
liberating spirit is in the air and, significantly, AFRICA concludes with
the opening line in AMERICA.
Asia is the equivalent of Ulro, Blakes symbol for a nightmarish
wasteland where the repressed functions of man erupt in terrifying
dream ghosts. Ors is rising against Urizen and the poem concludes with
the ecstatic contemplation of the revolutionary explosion.
In the last prophetic books Blake attempted to see all four
functions at work through complete development and final harmony.
THE FOUR ZOAS, probably written between 1797 and 1804,
remained in manuscript form until Yeats printed a revised edition in
1893.
The work consists of nine Night, a counterpart to Edward
Youngs NIGHT THOUGHT for which Blake is known to have
prepared the illustrations in 1797. The word Zoa is taken from Greek
in the meaning of living creature. Blake sees each Zoa engaged in
fearful battle with the other three. The total personality appears as
Albion, the sleeper. The work is essentially the dream of Albion
revealing the theme of the fall of man in the fearful contest of each
function for dominance, the redemption of Man through Christ, and
Mans final integration in an apocalyptic vision in which the four Zoas
assume their rightful position and responsibility.
Though full appreciation of Blakes prophetic books is possible only
to these who have worked out in detail his intricate system of myth and
symbol, the less specialised reader can respond to his unusual combinations
of the exotic and the everyday, and the beat and surge of his prophetic
eloquence as in the following lines from THE FOUR ZOAS:
But loss and Enitharmon delighted in the moony spaces of Eno,
Nine times they livd among the forests, feeding on sweet fruits,
And nine bright spaces wanderd, weaving mazes of delight,
Snaring the wild goats for their milk, they eat the flesh of lambs
And male and female, naked and ruddy as the pride of summer.
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MILTON (1808) was meant to parallel PARADISE LOST, Blake

producing the exquisite illustration for Miltons poem in the same year.
The poem, consisting in two books, portrays Milton in Eternity who
realises his error of having worshipped Jehovah-Urizen (Reason and
Repression). In punishment he is separated from his Sixfold Emanation
(his three wives and three daughters) with whom he will eventually be
reunited when he rejects his Selfhood. Blake introduces the concept of
Selfhood in the meaning of what we believe ourselves to be and what
we persuade other people that we are. The plea for casting off the
selfhood urges the individual to reveal his genuine personality
previously concealed and repressed.
The opening hymn, And did these feet in ancient time, associating
a primitive pastoral past with the liberated future, was the only part of
Blakes prophetic books to become popular. It was sung by the crowds
in the London streets during the enthusiasm over the 1945 victory of the
Labour party.
JERUSALEM, THE EMANATION OF THE GIANT ALBION,
written probably in 1804, was not engraved earlier than 1818. The
Romantic plea for imagination which made up the concluding lines in
MILTON is paid full tribute to in JERUSALEM. The theme of the poem
is the Fall of Man and his regeneration through following the
Inspiration. The concluding lines praise the perfect man with the four
Zoas properly restored in the human psyche.
Blake points forward to Shelley in PROMETHEUS UNBOUND
in his insistence on the fact that Mans weakness and baseness are an
illusion produced by hate and selfishness. Since mans nature is
essentially good he has only to assert the fullness of his true nature to
achieve immortality.
In the prophetic books Blake conforms to no conventional means
of artistic expression. His style has often a Biblical grandeur. The
rhythm of the verse is ample, free, irregular, instinct with unequalled
majesty, the kind of which was to be used by Walt Whitman. His
rhythms are at the same time forceful and supple, some based on ballad
metres, some metrically free and influenced by the Bible, but all
returning again and again to the rhythm of speech. His language, full of
symbolism and specialised terms, demands a reader long training in
deciphering it, but once the veil of mystery removed, he will be
rewarded with some of the most exquisite lyrics in English.
Blakes unique and exceptional creation links him with the
Romantics through his urging plea for Imagination. There also runs
through his work a strain of protest against tyranny and repression of
all kinds and a plea for social and intellectual freedom, shared by all the
Romantic poets. In the poetry of Blake, the Romantic Movement is
imaginatively and energetically foreshadowed.
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
109
APPENDIX 4
Topics for Final Assessment
1. The Lyric Mode during the 17th century:

Metaphysical poetry
Cavalier
vs
2. John Miltons Pre-Restoration Verse (odes, pastoral poems and

sonnets)
3. The Epic vs the Mock-epic: John Milton, John Dryden, Alexander
Pope
4. Neoclassical Satire: John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonathan
Swift
5. Restoration Drama: the heroic tragedy vs. the comedy-of
manners.
6. The Essay during the 17th- and 18th- centuries: John Dryden,
Alexander Pope, Addison and Steele.
7. The 18th - century Novel: themes, narrative techniques and pointof view (Defoe and Richardson)
8. The 18th - century Novel: themes, narrative techniques and pointof view (Fielding and Sterne)
9. The 18th - century Novel: themes, narrative techniques and pointof view (Edgeworth, Burney and Austen)
10. Women Writers of the 17th - and 18th centuries: Aphra Behn,
Susannah Centlivre, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, Fanny
Burney, Jane Austen.
11. Pre-romantic attitudes in prose: the sentimental and the Gothic
novel
12. The Movement from Neo-classicism to Romanticism in Poetry.
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
110
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary:
Ioana Mohor-Ivan, English Literature in the 17th and 18th
Centuries: Texts, Contexts and Critical Readings, Galati
University Press, Galati, 2011.
Ioana
Mohor-Ivan, English Literature: from the Late

Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism, D.I.D.F.R.,
Universitatea Dunarea de Jos, Galati, 2006.
Ioana Mohor-Ivan, From Theory to Text: Criticism, Critics and

Readings of Late Renaissance to Romantic English
Literature, Editura Evrika, Braila, 2002.
Secondary:
M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th edition,
Holt, Rhineheart, Winston, New York, 2002.
Brackett, Virginia, British Poetry: 17th and 18th Centuries,
Facts on File, New York, 2008.
Ronald Carter and John McRae, The Routledge History of
Literature in English, Routledge, London and New
York, 1997.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol.1, 5th
edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 1986.
Ian Ousby (ed.), The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in
English, Wordsworth Editions Ltd., Hare, 1994.
Andrew Sanders, The Short Oxford History of English
Literature, Clarendon Press, London, 1994.
Stephen N. Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
English Literature: 1650-1740, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2004.
Wall, Cynthia (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Restoration
and the Eighteenth Century, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005.
Ioana Mohor-Ivan

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ENGLISH LITERATURE:

A Course for Second Year Students in English

Tutor: dr. Ioana Mohor-Ivan

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

familiarizarea studenilor cu direciile i personalitile literare marcante

nsuirea conceptelor teoretice i a metodologiilor de analiz a

aplicarea acestora n analiza de text.

Tipuri si modalitati de activitate didactica:

Poetry of the Later Renaissance

The Augustan Age

18th Century Variants of the Novel

The Movement from Neo-Classicism to Romanticism in Poetry

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

Chapter 1 Poetry of the Late Renaissance

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

The Cavalier Poets

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

1.2.2. Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

Corinna's Going A-Maying

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

Come, we'll abroad ; and let's obey

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

1. 3. The Metaphysical Poets

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

It is sharply opposed to the intricate, allusive, highly decorative

It adopts a diction and meter modelled on the rhythms of actual speech;

It is usually organised in the dramatic or rhetorical form of an urgent

It is marked by realism, irony, and often cynicism in its treatment of

It puts to use a subtle and often outrageous logic

It reveals a persistent wittiness, making use of paradox, puns, and

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

1. 3. 2. Andrew Marvell (1621-78)

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

And Opposition of the Stars.

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

1.3. 3. Henry Vaughan (1593-1633)

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

1.4. John Milton (1608-74)

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

And mooned Ashtaroth,

b) The works of the 1630s may be included in Miltons so-called

Comus (1634) is a masque written at the request of his friend, the

the Lady finds no difficulty in rejecting his false rules:

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

Her words set off by some superior power;

Lycidas (1637) is a pastoral elegy published to the memory of Edward

Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills,

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

When I consider how my light is spent,

d) After the Restoration, having been imprisoned but released after a

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (1671), both published four

The poem becomes a journey from darkness to light, from defeat to

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

Revives, reflourishes, then virtuous most

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

Chapter 2 The Restoration

e) increased urbanization triggering a shift in the balance of

English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism

c. a concern for social reality, and the communal commonplaces of

b) In the 1680s, Dryden moved on to writing formal verse satires, as