Write a short note on the impact of Neo-Classicism on Literary
Thought/ English literature.
The English Neoclassical movement, predicated upon and derived
from both classical and contemporary French models, embodied a group of
attitudes toward art and human existence — ideals of order, logic, restraint,
accuracy, "correctness," "restraint," decorum, and so on,
which would enable the practitioners of various arts to imitate or reproduce
the structures and themes of Greek or Roman originals. Though its origins were
much earlier (the Elizabethan Ben Jonson, for example, was as indebted to the
Roman poet Horace as Alexander
Pope would later be),
Neoclassicism dominated English literature from the Restoration in 1660 until
the end of the eighteenth century, when the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge marked the full emergence of
Romanticism.
For the sake of convenience the Neoclassic period can be divided
into three relatively coherent parts: the Restoration Age (1660-1700), in which
Milton, Bunyan, and Dryden were the dominant influences; the Augustan Age
(1700-1750), in which Pope was the central poetic figure, while Defoe,
Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett were presiding over the sophistication of
the novel; and the Age of Johnson(1750-1798), which, while it was dominated and
characterized by the mind and personality of the inimitable Dr. Samuel Johnson,
whose sympathies were with the fading Augustan past, saw the beginnings of a
new understanding and appreciation of the work of Shakespeare, the development,
by Sterne and others, of the novel of sensibility, and the emergence of the
Gothic school — attitudes which, in the context of the development of a cult of
Nature, the influence of German romantic thought, religious tendencies like the
rise of Methodism, and political
events like the American and French
revolutions — established the
intellectual and emotional foundations of English Romanticism.
To a certain extent Neoclassicism represented a reaction against the optimistic, exuberant, and enthusiastic Renaissance view of man as a being fundamentally good and possessed of an infinite potential for spiritual and intellectual growth. Neoclassical theorists, by contrast, saw man as an imperfect being, inherently sinful, whose potential was limited.
