The 17th Century English Literature

 English Revolution, Restoration, the “Glorious Revolution” –constitutional monarchy

 Literature of the Revolution:
Poetry: John Milton >> Metaphysical poetry

John Milton
o With the Restoration of Charles II, Milton was arrested and imprisoned. His books
were burnt. But he was saved, he probably owed his escape from death to his
blindness. A fire in London destroyed his house. He moved from place to place
until he settled down on the outskirts of London.
o His blindness forced him to depend on his daughters for an assistance with his
reading and writing. Every day, he dictated his epic Paradise Lost 10 or 20 lines
at a time.
o Regarded as the mirror of the English Revolution; his work reflects on the
Puritan ideology
 The 18th Century English Literature
Historical and Social Background
 A period of comparatively peaceful development in England. After the Glorious
Revolution, England entered the Golden Age. The state power passed from the king
gradually to the Parliament and the cabinet ministers; therefore, capitalist system
was established in England. (Monarchy restored, but power weakened- Britain becomes
more democratic.)
 A vast expansion abroad of British colonies in Asia, Africa and North America and Acts
of Enclosure at home caused the Industrial Revolution.

Cultural Background
 Aka the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason.
 The Enlightenment—the struggle of bourgeoisie (the middle class) against feudalism
 The Enlightenment Movement was a progressive intellectual movement which
flourished in France and swept through the whole Western Europe at the time.
 The movement was a furtherance of the Renaissance of the 15 th & 16th centuries.
 The development of the literature: the predominance of neoclassical poetry and prose
in the early decades of the 18th century; the rise and flourish of modern realistic novel
in the middle years of the 18th century; and the appearance of gothic novel and the
sentimental and pre-romantic poetry and fiction in the last few decades of the 18th
century.
o Neo-classicism: Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele
> Emulated Classic styles
> Frequent references to classics (myths, gods, and heroes)
> Tried to look at the world objectively
> Use of Aphorisms (One liners—the equivalent of the “sound byte”)
> Very fond of Satire
> “Neoclassical” literature was both “classical” and “new”: variety, fancy, humor
retained from Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, and Spenser, but blended with the
styles and forms of the classical Greek or Latin writers.
o Realistic novel: Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding
o Sentimentalism: Laurence Stern, Thomas Gray

Alexander Pope
 The first English poet to support himself solely by his writing
 Being Catholic prevented him from holding public office or getting a wealthy
patron
 First major work was An Essay on Criticism, which brought him to the attention of
the leading literary figures of the time
 Very frail in health—was less than five feet tall; was a sharp wit and was a
sought-after guest
 A brilliant satirist—one of his best-known works is The Rape of the Lock, one of
the greatest Mock Epics in English
 The Romantic Period English Literature
 Contrary to what you may think, the term Romanticism is not just about romantic love
(although love is sometimes the subject of romantic art).
 Romanticism is an international artistic and philosophical movement that re-defined the
ways in which humans in Western civilization thought about themselves and their world.
 Period of great change in England: agricultural society with powerful landholding
aristocracy was giving way to modern industrial nation of large-scale employers & a
growing, restless middle class.
 American & French Revolutions were hugely important elements of the political
landscape.
 Threats to existing social structure were being posed by new, revolutionary ideas.
 A time of harsh political repression in England, in spite of need for changes brought
about by the Industrial Revolution.
 Since the early Romantic period includes the American and the French revolutions, it
has been called the “age of revolutions” (changes). It was a time of massive energy
(intellectual, social, artistic). It set out to transform not only the theory and practice of all
art, but also the ways in which human beings perceived the world. Some of its ideas
survive even to our present day.
 The prevalence of lyric poetry
 Poets > William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Robert Southey; Byron, Shelley, Keats
 Imagination now replaced reason as the supreme faculty of the mind—hence the
flowering of creative activity in this period. For Romantic thinkers, the imagination was
the ultimate “shaping,” or creative power, the approximate human equivalent to divine
creative powers.
 As the poet Wordsworth would suggest, humans not only perceive and experience the
world around them; they also, in part, create it. The imagination unites reason and
feeling, enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites—this reconciliation is a
central ideal for Romantics. Finally, the imagination enables humans to “read “nature
as a system of symbols.
 Celebration of Nature
> Nature often presented as a work of art from the divine imagination
> Nature as a healing power
> Nature as a refuge from civilization
> Nature viewed as “organic,” (alive) rather than “mechanical” or “rationalist”
> Nature viewed as a source of refreshment and meditation
 Symbolism and Myth
> Valued as the human means for imitating nature in art
> Could simultaneously suggest many things in a creative way
> Based on a desire to “express the inexpressible” through the resources of language
 Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self
> Greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings
> Wordsworth’s definition of good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings” was a turning point in literary history.
> Ultimate source of poetry found in the individual artist and his/her traditions (present
and past)
 Value of Art
> Source of illumination of the world within the self
> Led to a prominence for first-person lyric poetry; the “speaker” became less a persona
and more the direct person of the poet. Ex. Wordsworth’s Prelude and Whitman’s
“Song of Myself”
> Also, a wealth of autobiographical verse described as poetry about someone else:
Byron, Childe Harold
 Contrasts with Neoclassicism (the Age of Reason)
> Shift in focus from rationalism to the imagination
Shift toward a more expressive orientation toward the literary art
> Freedom of expression
> Freedom of the individual
 Spread of the Romantic Spirit
> All of the arts—from music, to painting; from sculpture to architecture—were affected
by and continue to be affected by the revolutionary energy underlying the Romantic
movement. Strains of Romanticism infuse every age and every generation.
 Individualism & Alienation
> Freedom from social laws: the poet as a loner striving for the impossible ideal
> Alienation from industrial achievements and civilizations: the poet as a loner finding
pleasure in the natural scene

Coleridge
 part of the “first wave” of Romantic poets
 a close friend of William Wordsworth
 added lines to Wordsworth’s poetry, and came up with the idea for the albatross
in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
 wrote the essay Biographia Literaria, which outlined some of the central
formulations of Romantic literary theory
 was addicted to opium during the peak of his literary career
 The 20th Century English Literature
 WWII
 New ideas and new theories
 Realistic writing: early 20th century
 Modernism—a movement of experiments in techniques.
 Poets: W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot
 T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock