The Augustan Age

When Charles II came to the throne, he reopened theatres (which had been closed by
Cromwell). For this reason, a new kind of play was written: the Comedy of Manners, which
was typical of Britain, but was also popular in France with Molière and in Italy with
Goldoni. It was a kind of comedy based on stereotypes.
In the field of poetry there was the rediscovery of the ideas of the poets who had lived and
worked under emperor Augustus in Ancient Rome. For this reason this period is called
‘Augustan Age’ (18th century). The major poets of that time were Ovide, Virgil and Horace.
In particular, Virgil had written the Georgics and Bucolics. One of the most important
inspirations of poets was the pastoral ideal, which they took from Virgil and adapted to
their society. Virgil celebrates the ideal of the shepherd, far from the corruption of the city
and able to find his/her inner peace living in contact and in harmony with nature. The
pastoral idea was born in Ancient Greece, in a region called Arcadia, which became the
representation of an idyllic world, the symbol of the simplicity of the shepherds’ lifestyle
and their attachment to nature.
The Augustan poets in Ancient Rome were known for their will to create a perfect poem,
not for what concerns the topic, but form-wise (un poema perfetto non nel contenuto ma
per quel che riguarda la forma). The work to achieve the perfection of the verse was called
‘labor limae’.
The most famous poet of the Augustan Age was Alexander Pope, who had the title of Poet
Laureate. One day a man of an upper class went to visit another family and while there, he
cut a lock of Miss Arabella Fermour’s hair. The consequent argument created a breach
between the two families. Pope wrote the poem ‘the Rape of the Lock’ at the request of
friends in an attempt to ‘merge the 2 worlds’, the heroic with the social and sedate the
quarrel (gli è stato chiesto di scrivere questo poema nel tentative di risolvere il conflitto tra
le due famiglie dovuto proprio al taglio della ciocca di capelli). He utilised the character
Belinda to represent Arabella and introduced an entire system of ‘sylphs’, which are the
parodised version of the gods and goddesses of conventional epic. Pope’s poem uses the
traditional high stature of classical epic poems to emphasise the triviliaty of the incident,
but at the same time the triviality of the topic exalts his mastery in writing (in sostanza
utilizza il tono Lirico e termini importanti per raccontare un evento banale, in questo modo
mette in evidenza sia la stupidità e la banalità dell’argomento, sia la sua grande bravura
nella scrittura, cioè la sua capacità di raccontare in modo aulico una cosa tanto banale->si
ricollega alla maggior importanza data allo stile e alla forma, piuttosto che al contenuto).
The humor of the poem comes from the exaggeration of the event mixed with the elaborate
formal structure of an epic poem.