Eighteenth Century English Poetry

Introduction Neoclassical PoetryAlexander Pope Sentimentalist PoetryThomas Gray Romantic Poetry- Robert Burns & William Blake

Introduction
In the early 18th century, neoclassical poetry was in its full swing and Alexander Pope was the most prominent poet. In the middle of the 18th century, however, sentimentalism made its appearance. Thomas Gray established his reputation as the spokesman of Graveyard School.

William Cowper, Edward Young, William Collins and James Thompson are the other sentimentalist poets that are worth mentioning. In late 18th century, Romanticism took shape. William Blake and Robert Burns are the two outstanding Romantic poets.
The other Romantic poets that are worth mentioning include: Thomas Percy, James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton.

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was born in 1688, the very year of the Glorious Revolution. He was weak and deformed. His father was a Roman Catholic merchant. He got little school education. He taught himself by reading and translating Latin, French Italian and Greek poets with the aids of grammar and dictionaries.

Pope had wide associations with literary men of his time. In 1714, he formed a club with his friends to satirize all sorts of false learning and pedantry in literature, philosophy, science and other branches of knowledge.
He was respected by his friends and severely criticized by his enemies. He was in constant verbal battles with his enemies, in which he developed a style of biting satire.

Popes Major Works & Translations

An Essay On Criticism, 1711 The Rape Of The Lock, 1712-14 Dunciad, 1728 - Widened in 1742 An Essay On Man, 1733-34 Translations: Homer's Iliad, 1715-20 Homer's Odyssey, 1726

An Essay on Criticism

It is a didactic poem in heroic couplet. It consists of 714 lines. It sums up the art of poetry from the ancients such as Aristotle, Horace and Boileau to the eighteenth century European classicists. Pope laments the dearth of true taste in poetic criticism of his own day and calls upon people to turn to the Greek and Roman writers for guidance.

Ancient Greek and Roman poets are better than contemporary poets.
French poets are better than English poets. The grass is greener in other fence. In his most quoted stanza on John Donne, Pope advises not to stress too much on the artificial use of conceits or the external beauty of language but to pay special attention to TRUE WIT that is best set in a plain style.

Brief Comments

Pope was the greatest poet in the early 18th century England. He advocated neoclassicism and emphasized order, reason, logic, restrained emotion, good taste and decorum. He worked painstakingly on his poems, developed a satiric, concise, smooth, graceful and wellbalanced style and made best use of the heroic couplet.

His poems are full of proverbial maxims (popular sayings), which can be seen from the following quotations:
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread. To err is human, to forgive, divine. A little learning is a dangerous thing. ( from An Essay on Criticism) Once truth is clear, what ever is, is right. (from An Essay on Man)

Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray was born in London into a brokers family. He got very good school education, first at Eton and then at Cambridge. He left Cambridge without taking a degree.

He toured around Europe with Horace Walpole, author of the world famous Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto. In 1768 he was made Professor of History and Modern Languages at Cambridge. In his lifetime, he was known as one of the most learned persons and a very successful poet. He was not sociable. He declined the Poet Laureateship in 1657 and led a peaceful life as a scholar.

Comments on Gray
Grays literary output was small. He wrote slowly and carefully. His poems are characterized by an exquisite sense of form. His masterpiece Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard once and for all established his fame as the leader of sentimentalist poetry and the spokesman of the Graveyard School.

Burns was the eldest son of a poor Scottish peasant family. From childhood he had to struggle with poverty and toil in the fields. He got little education.
Burns had a great passion for Scottish folk songs. When he was 27, he resolved to go abroad. He gathered together some of his early poems and published them under the title Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect.

The book was a great success and took all Scotland by storm. Encouraged by the success of his collection of poems, Burns decided to give up his journey and went to Edinburgh.
He was welcomed and feasted by the Scottish aristocrats. But none of the aristocrats would help him publish another book of poetry. He found himself an alien. Then he left the city in disappointment.

The last few years of the poets life was more miserable. Though he was appointed the collector of liquor revenue, he could only get a small salary.
He lived in poverty. His support for the French Revolution brought him much trouble. In 1796, he died at the age of 37.

Classification of his poems

Lyrics of Love and Friendship Burns fame is established on his lyrics on love and friendship. His best known lyrics of this category include A Red,Red Rose, John Anderson, My Jo and A Fond Kiss, of which A Red, Red Rose is the most popular among Chinese students of English.

Patriotic Poems

Burns wrote some patriotic poems, in which he expresses his deep love for his motherland. The best-known piece is My Heart is in the Highlands.

Scottish Ballads
Burns wrote some ballads on the basis of old Scottish legends. He expressed his love for freedom and sang of the heroic spirit of the Scottish people. The best-known poem is A Mans A Man for AThat.

Comments

Burns was nurtured by the Scottish cultural tradition. The majority of his poems were written in the Scottish dialect. According to G. Leech (1969:9), Burns is the only greatest English poet who writes outside the standard/London dialect.
In the history of English literature since the Middle Ages, only one poet of unquestioned greatness, Robert Burns, has chosen to write his best work outside the standard dialect

Comments 2

Burnss reputation lies chiefly in his love poems and songs. They express tender feelings that came from the bottom of his heart, which can be best illustrated by A Red, Red Rose and Auld Lang Syne.

William Blake
Blake was into a hosiers (a handicraftsman) family in London. He showed a precocious talent for painting. He was sent to a drawing school and was later apprenticed to an engraver. In 1779, he began his career as an engraver, drawing book illustrations and making engravings for other painters pictures.

Blake (2)
Throughout his life, Blake served as both a poet and an engraver. He live in solitude and poverty. He never tried to adapt himself to worldly affairs. He was a rebel all his life. He cherished great enthusiasm for the French Revolution, which advocated equality, liberty and fraternity.

Blake (3)
He severely criticized the society of his time and had controversy with modern science, especially the theory of Issac Newton. Literarily he was a Romantic poet, treasuring individuals imagination while opposing the neoclassical rule of reason.

His Major Works

Poetical Sketches

Collection of youthful poems, the keynote of which is joy, laughter, love and harmony. A lovely volume of poems presenting a happy and innocent world.

Songs of Innocence

Songs of Experience Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Songs of Experience

It presents a world of misery, poverty, disease, war and repression with a melancholy tone. England becomes a land of poverty fed with cold and usurous hand (Holy Thursday) and London is chartered by the rich and the metropolis is blighted with plagues with the youthful harlots curse (London). The tame Lamb becomes the dreadful Tyger.

Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The poem is written at the climax of French Revolution. It explores the relationship of the contraries. According to Blake, life is a combination of opposites, of good and evil, of innocence and experience, of body and soul. The word marriage means the reconciliation of the contraries, not the subordination of one side to the other.

Comments

Blake is an imaginative poet. His world is a world of imagination and vision. From childhood he has a visual mind ( . He can see whatever he imagines. He claims that he can see a tree full of angels and the ancient kings in Westminster Abbey. His poetry is full of imagination.

Comment 2
Blake writes his poems in plain and direct language. Symbolism is a distinctive feature of his poetry. Blake paves the way for the English Romanticism in early 19th century.