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COMPARISON = Augustan / Early
Romantic poetry
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AUGUSTAN POETRY
·
Impersonal material
·
Loud noble eloquence
·
Intellectual
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EARLY ROMANTIC POETRY
·
Subjective material
·
Lyrical experience of life
·
Emotional
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Main characteristics of Early
Romantic Poetry
·
Poetry
is essentially reflective.
·
The
experiences it dealt with were presented for the sake of generalized
reflections.
·
Early
Romantic poets reacted to the social changes taking place in the country with a
re-evaluation of rural origins and a sense of melancholy and sadness.
re-evaluation of rural origins and a sense of melancholy and sadness.
PASTORAL POETRY
Celebrated and praised country life for its simplicity and
domesticity, free from the corruption of urban life.
·
Main
representative:
William Cowper
(1731-1800) with his main work The Task (1785).
“God made the country,
man made the town”
NATURE POETRY
Nature seen in its
physical, rather than abstract, details, no longer as static but in motion.
The observation of
nature included wild sceneries and led to reflections on the character of
primitive man who was contrasted with civilized man.
·
Main
representative:
James Thomson
(1700-1748).
·
His
treatment of nature broke with the neoclassic view.
OSSIANIC POETRY
James Macpherson
(1736-1796) collected and published some of Ossian’s works in Fragments of
Ancient Poetry (1760). The authenticity of the work was controversial.
·
A
cycle of poems by a legendary Irish warrior, called Ossian, who lived in the
3rd century.
·
Wild,
gloomy landscapes.
·
Sense
of melancholy and suffering produced by war or contrasted love.
GRAVEYARD POETRY
The most important work of this school was Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written
in a Country Churchyard.
The vogue began with Edward Young (1683-1765) and his Night Thoughts on
Life, Death, and Immortality (1742-1745).
· Melancholy tone.
· Choice of cemeteries, ruins, stormy
landscapes as the setting of poems.
· The tomb as a symbol eliciting
contemplation of death and immortality.
