10/20/06 late 18th C; Johnson, "The Vanity of Human Wishes"

questions on midterm? teaching notes and other links work OK? Drop question 37 - we didn't read that poem.

Today, going to the third section of the course, and moving backwards in time. Why are we doing this?

• Go back to first day: one main goal is to provide a conceptual map of English poetry for the three periods we're covering. That means, among other things, being able to hang a reasonably clear meaning on terms like "Augustan" and "Romantic." By choosing widely accepted "representative" Augustan and Romantic poems, and by skipping the messy in-between period, I've tried to give you relatively clear and coherent concepts of these terms.
• So why not just skip the mess altogether, given that we have to skip huge numbers of important poems anyway on account of the large period of time we're trying to cover?
• The whole point of thinking in terms of literary periods is to help one understand the literature. To do that, need two things:
  • need to be able to locate poems in historical context--and, given that most of us don't have time to study historical eras extensively, it is useful to be able to depend on the concepts of historical periods. If you see the word "nature" in a poem, it should mean something different to you depending on whether Wordsworth says it or Pope says it. For this, you need relatively unified and coherent concepts such as "Augustan" and "Romantic."
  • But you also need to be able to recognize where your concepts break down. Periods are abstractions, as we've seen in our discussion of Anna Barbauld; they are compilations of "representative" features abstracted from what may be many thousands of literary texts. As such they are necessarily falsifications, to one degree or another. There are plenty of poems from the neoclassical era which are not satires; if you read EVERY neoclassical poem as being ironic, you could easily end up misreading a poem.
  • A useful middle ground: establish the concepts by exaggerating similarities; then address some cases which are borderline or which in some other way challenge the concepts. Therefore we're moving backward in time.
• To make things more confusing: in this section, we're not JUST talking about the late 18th C; Johnson, Gray and Cowper fall into that period, but Blake is generally accepted to be a Romantic

About the late 18th C:

• difficult to generalize! Doesn't have the same kind of "core" as the Augustan era has in satire.
• Sometimes called Age of Johnson; that makes sense if you look at literature as a whole, but rather less sense if you look only at poetry; Johnson wrote some major poems, but he's better known as a prose stylist. Johnson has the authority he does in this era of English literature because of the totality of his contribution: poetry, yes, but also prose fiction, non-fiction essays, criticism, and of course the dictionary.
• Another term: Age of Sensibility. "Sensibility" has many meanings, but best is probably this one, from the OED:
  • 6. In the 18th and early 19th c. (afterwards somewhat rarely): Capacity for refined emotion; delicate sensitiveness of taste; also, readiness to feel compassion for suffering, and to be moved by the pathetic in literature or art.
• Useful:
  • shows a link with the neoClassical era, in its emphasis on taste (REFINED emotion): classical "rules" are less central than they were in the Augustan era, but the ideal of aspiring to something like classical elegance is still crucial.
    • more generally, many of the same critical values and beliefs remain: that art should represent nature, that pride blinds the critical intelligence, that there is no real conflict between imitation of the classics and originality, etc.
  • but the attention to emotion is new, and in some ways closer to the Romantic interest in mental states. In general, this is an era which explores kinds of emotion that hadn't had as much attention before: melancholy, anxiety, compassion (as an emotional state rather than only as a moral ideal).
    For example:There is a great deal of discussion of the difference between the sublime and the beautiful, and a lot more interest in the sublime: mountain or thunderstorm, rather than flower or landscape garden. An appreciation of a certain kind of nature, but also an appreciation of a certain kind of art: interest in moments of intensity and excess rather than balance and coherence. Leading to Romanticism.
• But "Age of Sensibility" also slightly off the mark as a description of 18th C POETRY, because most of the most direct and important explorations of sensibility are in prose--e.g. Tristram Shandy.
• therefore we'll just call it the late 18th C--keeping in mind that these other names are out there and do reflect something of the age.
• so what else has changed?
  • there are still satires, but there are also lots of other kinds of poetry, including some nature poetry, odes. It is not especially a period of poetic innovation, as the Romantic era is, but it is an era which explores a wide range of more or less traditional forms.
  • what satire there is tends to be of a different character: gloomier, not as funny (or not funny at all). "Vanity of Human Wishes" is a good example; it is a satire, but is it funny? It tends to be more sympathetic, too, in that the object of the satire--hope, fantasizing, etc.--is seen as being impossible to avoid.
    • Johnson, in Idler #58: "Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction."
  • correspondingly gloomier outlook. If the central concern of the Augustan era is pride, the central concern of the late 18th C, or at least of Johnson, is vanity.
    • element of pride; one meaning of vanity is "conceit." But it also means "worthlessness or futility." In Johnson, "vanity" tends to MEAN the second, denotatively, but have connotations of the former. "Vanity of human wishes" means primarily the futility of human wishes, but it implies that we flatter ourselves in wishing for what we wish for. "Vanus": empty.
    • if the problem is pride, there is some hope of correction; we can learn to be humble, at least somewhat; we can learn to move out of our usual self-congratulatory perspectives. Vanity, however, is intractable. Human wishes are vain FIRSTLY because the world simply isn't such as to satisfy our desires.
    • what follows morally: stoicism; curtailment of desire and expectation; resignation to the will of God. Avoidance of sloth--not just physical laziness but moral sluggishness, e.g. giving in to despair.
      

"Vanity of Human Wishes"

• first sentence: in brief, what?
  • note: parallelism, antithesis, balance of ideas; enormous, complex thought, in which logic of the thought is perfectly represented by the syntax of the sentence; appropriate to a point of view that can survey "mankind, from China to Peru"?
  • according to this sentence, what's the root cause of the problem?
    • hope and fear, desire and hate-->snares
    • venturous pride-->shuns fancied ills, or chases airy good
    • rarely Reason guides
    • Vengeance listens to fools request
• 2nd sentence: what's the result? Fate wings every wish, gift, grace
• Democritus-->l. 72, Search every state: thereafter, what precisely is vain?
  • preferment, power (73 ff.)
  • learning (135 ff.)
  • military glory (175 ff.)
  • long life (255 ff.)
  • benevolent and temperate old age (291 ff.)
  • beauty (319 ff.)
• example: scholarship
  • what dangers are there for the scholar?
• 2nd example: Swedish Charles (191 ff.)
  • how sympathetic is this portrayal?
  • why is the battle at Pultowa never described?
• last verse paragraph: the, uh, solution? What does it consist of, and why should we think it would work?