1/13/09 Intro to the Neoclassical period; Swift, "A Description of a City Shower"

CHECK VCR SET-UP

looking ahead:

• tomorrow evening, 7 PM, here: Ridicule. Will discuss it on Thursday. If you can't make it tomorrow, the film is on reserve in the library.
• think we probably won't need the whole hour and a quarter to discuss the film, so I'd like to get ahead if we can--there are stretches coming up where we will certainly get behind. So please read "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" for Thursday as well. HANDED OUT? Longish, so give yourself time.

Last time, handed out a traditional representation of English literary periods; as we'll see, there may be other ways to slice things up. For now, though, we'll accept the divisions, and point out that in this class we're doing the Neoclassical, Romantic and Victorian eras.

Today: an introduction to the neo-classical era and a discussion of a poem that I am calling representative of the era.

[On notes: will post my teaching notes and all materials I show in class on the web site, to help you study for the exams. Decide for yourself how many notes to take. CAUTION: my notes of mini-lectures are likely to be pretty close to what actually happens in class, but our discussions of particular poems may well veer dramatically away from what I've planned for the day. Also: they are teaching notes designed to help me remember, not handouts for you edification. Some of them may be abbreviated.]

A way into talking about the characteristics of the era: Why the name?

• reverence for classical authors and ideas
• imitation of classical forms--epic, ode, epistle, georgic, etc. (but in a complicated way--more on this in a moment)
• use and refinement of aesthetic and critical principles taken from classical authors such as Horace.

This sounds like, and in many ways is, a highly ordered, conservative, somewhat tradition-bound view. When it comes to poetry at least, most of the major authors of the period are conservatives (though that doesn't necessarily have much relation to what "conservative" means today.) But what I'd like to suggest is that the WAY the neo-classical authors used the ancient authors is really pretty complicated. In particular I'd like to suggest how complicated neoclassical views of AUTHORITY are. You would expect that people who revere and imitate authors a millenium and a half old would have a pretty healthy respect for authority. And so they do. Sort of.

Let's start with the ways in which they do:

view of the world:

• world is a heirarchy, a Great Chain of Being, with God at the top, angels just below in ranked hierarchies, kings below them, then nobles, commoners, animals, and on down to the lowly worm. Everything ordered, and should maintain its place. This is a medieval and Renaissance view, and by the beginnings of the neoclassical it is already under challenge, not least by changes in the scientific view of the universe. But that sense of an ordered heirarchy persists, and Alexander Pope, for one, explicitly refers to this view.
• Humans are in the middle of the chain, or high middle. by implication, humans are fallen creatures (although some writers take a more pessimistic view than others)
  • In this view, knowing one's place is crucial, so pride is an especially tempting and dangerous sin--believing that one is higher in the Chain of Being than one actually is.

View of poetry:

• emphasis on craft. Poetry is not some kind of overflowing of original genius or expression of deep emotion--this modern view of poetry, which came out of the Romantic era, would have seemed utterly alien to neoclassical authors. The best poetry is not about coming up with some wild new idea, but rather about showing "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed," as Pope says. What makes poetry good is careful choice of language, and close adherence to the rules of good poetry. On word for this is decorum: adherence to more or less well defined rules for what is appropriate to a certain genre of poetry.
  • For example, tragedy should depict characters of high status--kings and/or nobles, ideally, and at the very least people of better than average moral character--and should be written, correspondingly, in a formal, elevated style. Comedy, conversely, depicts characters of low status, and can be written in a coarser style. The two should never be mixed. This principle, needless to say, comes straight out of classical poetics (Aristotle in particular).
• related to this: poetry is or ought to be mimesis--that is, representation of the world as it is--not expression of some inner state of the poet's being. Correspondingly, poetry has a public function--generally speaking, the inculcation of virtue, wisdom, knowledge, and so on--rather than a personal function of "expressing oneself."
• what poets represent is "nature"--which doesn't mean "wilderness," as it does for us, but rather something like "that which is permanently true." The most central part of nature to represent is human nature.
• --> poetry tends to deal with generalities and abstractions, not particulars.

If you think about it, you'll see that all of this principles tend towards a kind of conservatism. The world is as God made it, a hierarchy--and the heirarchy should be maintained; the poet should uncover the deepest truths of human nature, and express them according to long-established principles for good writing. Can't get much more authority-loving than that. Granted, I'm oversimplifying quite a bit.

The Renaissance had plenty of respect for the ancients too, and also saw the world as a heirarchical chain of being. It's worth asking how similar all this is to Renaissance poetry and the Renaissance world view. As a world view, it is quite similar--Pope, for one, might well have seen himself as a Renaissance poet. But there are a number of differences.

• new forms brought to prominence. E.g. sonnet less common, ode more so.
• prosody: renaissance writers favored blank verse, or else complex verse forms like the sonnet; the dominant verse form of the neoclassical writers is the heroic couplet.
• and especially: dominant mode of neoclassical poetry is satire.
  • temporary definition: a work that ridicules human folly with irony and wit

Satire is where things get complicated!

In one sense, the centrality of satire fits perfectly with the worldview I've portrayed. If PRIDE is an especially problematic vice, then of course, you're going to want an art form that punctures pride. But on the other hand, the way satire works also tends to undercut everything I've said. Take a form like the mock epic, a form of satire that we'll run into later in the class.

• An epic is supposed to be a long narrative poem, very serious and formal in style, about the exploits of a heroic character. It has various conventions that we'll get to later in the course. A mock epic, on the other hand, uses the conventions of the epic, but applies then to a character or situation which is not worthy of such treatment.
• Uh-oh! That appears to violate rules of decorum--mixes tragedy and comedy in one poem, and treats low subjects in a high form.
• Well, no, not exactly, because satire is a genre unto itself. But at the very least, it shows a complex attitude towards authority.
  • what's being made fun of? contemporary subject, or epic itself? Easy to say that it's the subject of the poem, and surely that's true. But mock epic also tends to suggest that the "heroic" is not possible--so the irony cuts both ways.
• Irony is central to satire, and it usually does have this "cuts both ways" quality. Irony requires the reader to discriminate between what is said and what is meant. As such, it implies that there is some ground of certitude—there is such a thing as "what's right." But irony also undercuts certitude, because it's hard to be completely sure what an ironic statement means, given that by definition an ironic statement doesn't say what it means, or even whether or not a statement is ironic.
• this is quite in keeping with the world view that I described earlier, however. If humans are somewhere in the middle of the Great Chain of Being, then 1) right exists, because God exists, and 2) humans, occupying the middle of the chain, are necessarily fallible, and therefore may not know "what's right."

[why this kind of art at this particular time? 2 examples:

• Civil War, execution of Charles I 1649, restoration of Charles II 1660
  • what becomes of your view of authority when a king, the closest human in the chain to God, can be executed? Even after a king is restored, there's going to be a period of doubt. (It probably didn't help that the particular king who was restored, Charles II, was a notorious libertine.)
  • the name often given to the middle period of the neoclassical era, the Augustan Age, captures some of complexities of the era's politics:
    • Augustus gained power after period of chaos
    • era of Virgil, Horace, Ovid
    • BUT Augustus was a tyrant; England torn by strife throughout the age
• science
  • Charles II chartered Royal Society for Improvement of Natural Knowledge: "nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri" ("I am not obliged to swear in the name of any master")
  • Pope and Swift generally not friends with "new knowledge" (Swift’s Battle of the Books pits classical authors such as Homer and Aristotle against Moderns such as Descartes and Hobbes)

Will begin each section except for the late 18th C with a representative poem. "Description of a City Shower"

• prosody: heroic couplets (iambic pentameter, couplets; occasional triplet (cf. end); in some cases, as here, a hexameter at the end of a section or the whole).
• satire: for now, just define as a work which ridicules human vice or folly with irony and wit.
• originally called "A Description of a Shower in London"--why the change, do you think? (Say the new title three times fast).
• mock form: imitation of Virgil's Georgics--even called that in one manuscript.
  • Georgics: poems by Virgil which praise rural life. They are explicitly didactic: they give lessons on farming and various moral concerns.
    o sample: part of a description in the first Georgic describing a shower. Note the parts that tell what signs to look for of coming rain--Swift imitates this quite directly.
    
• —> in Virgil, the signs of an impending shower are things like winds, thunder, waves, flying birds, shooting stars, flying straw and leaves, sniffing cows, etc. what are the signs in Swift?
  • cat
  • stinking sewer
  • painful corns, toothaches, etc.
  • complaining "Dulman"
    —> why?
• georgic is not a high form, so the comparison is somewhat different from, say, a mock epic; not consistently an (over)inflation of the low with a high form.
  • however: lines 13-14. What does dabbled mean? (Splashed or spattered.) What color is sable? (Black--and by association especially serious black: it is a common color in heraldry and funeral garments.) What's a welkin? (The vault of heaven.) What KIND of language is this? THEN: 15-16.
  • what's being made fun of?
• in GENERAL, who or what is being made fun of in this poem?
• 31 ff: several targets; each in turn. What does this moment in time tell us about the customary life of people in the city?
• what view of the world is espoused in the poem? Is this a world in which moral order prevails?