18th Century Poetry

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18th Century Poetry Neo-Classicism

• Sound and Sense from
• Essay on Criticism

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Outline

• 18th Century -- The Age of Satire/Reason
• Sound and Sense
• Fast forward in time Orlando

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Do you go for moderation or passion?
Reason Emotion
Restraint Liberation
Order Symmetry Excess
Common Sense Imagination and Invention
Pragmatism Idealism
Public/Social Concerns Personal
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The Age of Satire and Reason

• Shakespeare (1564-1616) -- John Donne
  (1572-1631)
• The Neo-Classicism (1660 end of the 18th
  century)
• Restoration Drama -- Poetry (1704 1744-45)
  Novel of Sensibility
• Jonathan Swift Gullivers Travels
• Alexander Pope
• "Essay on Criticism" (1711) as critical
  statements of Neoclassical principles (source)
• ? values order, logic, restraint, accuracy,
  "correctness," "restraint," decorum
• Lyrical Ballads (1798) Romanticism (French
  Revolution 1789-99)

Heroic couplet
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Alexander Pope

• Deformed, a Catholic in an age dominated by
  Protestant
• The one that defines the Augustan Poetry

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Sound and Sense
Wisdom from thy lips? O trespass sweetly
urged!

• Find the sounds that match the sense!!!

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Sound and Sense

• The excerpt from Pope's poem points out and then
  gives examples of common errors in writing.  What
  are some of the problems that Pope addresses?
• This excerpt is a good example of the importance
  of sounds in poetry. In line 365 Pope says "The
  sound must seem an echo to the sense. What does
  that mean?  Can you find examples and
  counter-examples in this excerpt?
• e.g. Lines 370-73 -- the Greek hero and heroines
  of the Trojan War. As you read these lines
  outloud, do you notice that they are difficult to
  say and they feel "heavy"? Or any lines swift
  and light? Can you identify the rhythm?

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Heroic Couplet

• lines in iambic pentameter rhymed in pairs
• What does the poem have to say about
  alliteration, assonance, rhyme or heroic couplet?
  

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Problems --

• Poems which are too mechanical, too much
  concerned with its sound effects (meter and
  rhyme)
• Open vowels tiring (345)
• Expletives weak aid (346)
• predictable rhymes (350-53)
• Alexandrines as long slow lines (357)

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Sound and Sense (heroes and music)

1. 370-71 Ajax
2. 372-73 Camilla
3. 374 383 Timotheus ? Dryden

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Orlandoin Different Power Positions

• from Renaissance
• To the 18th century (Politics and Society) and
  then
• to the Victorian society in the 19th century