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Augustan poetry

Style of 18th century British poetry

  • 15 min read
  • 4 chapters

Related on Lably

Through English literature, Pastoral and Max Weber

Lab · Class 6–12Sociology: Individual & Society

Overview

In the British literary period known as the 'Augustan era,' poets were more conversant with each other's writings than were the contemporary novelists (see Augustan prose). They wrote in counterpoint, directly expanding each other's works, and using satire to heighten their oppositional voices. In the early part of the century, there was a great struggle over the nature and role of the pastoral, primarily between Ambrose Philips and Alexander Pope, and then between their followers, but such a controversy was only possible because of two simultaneous literary movements. The general movement, carried forward only with the struggle between poets, was the same as in the novel: the invention of the subjective self as a worthy topic, the emergence of a priority on individual psychology, against the insistence that all acts of art are a performance and a public gesture meant for the benefit of society at large. Beneath that large banner raged individual battles. The other development, one seemingly agreed upon by both sides, was a gradual expropriation and reinvention of all the Classical forms of poetry. Every genre of poetry was recast, reconsidered, and used to serve new functions. The ode, the ballad, the elegy, and satire, parody, song and lyric poetry, would be adapted from their older, initial literary uses. Odes would cease to be encomia, ballads would cease to be narratives, elegies would cease to be sincere memorials, satires no longer would be specific entertainments, parodies no longer would consist of bravura, stylised performances, songs no longer would be personal lyrics, and the lyric would celebrate the individual man and woman, and not the lover's complaint.

These two developments (the emphasis on the person and the writer's willingness to reinvent genre) can be seen as extensions of Protestantism, as Max Weber argued, for they represent a gradual increase in the implications of Martin Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and the Calvinist emphasis on individual revelation of the divine (and therefore the competence and worth of the individual). It can be seen as a growth of the power and assertiveness of the bourgeoisie and an echo of the displacement of the worker from the home in growing industrialization, as Marxists such as E. P. Thompson has argued, for people were no longer allowed to remain in their families and communities when they had to travel to a factory or mill, and therefore they grew accustomed to thinking of themselves as isolated. It can be argued that the development of the subjective individual against the social individual was a natural reaction to trade over other methods of economic production, or as a reflection of a breakdown in social cohesion unconsciously set in motion by enclosure and the migration of the poor to the cities. There are many other plausible and coherent explanations of the causes of the rise of the subjective self, but whatever the prime cause, poets showed the strains of the development as a largely conservative set of voices argued for a social person and largely emergent voices argued for the person.

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