L I T E RAT URE A- PROF .

CE CI L I A KE NNE DY
POETRY IN THE AGE OF
REASON
AUGUSTAN AGE
Trade flourished
Growing empire
No more conflict between King and Parliament
Firmly established middle class
Whig party dominated the century
Age of balance, not conflict
Spirit of the age in art: classical
social conventions more important than individual
convictions, reason is more important than emotion,
form is more important than content

AUGUSTAN AGE
Dissociation of sensibility: reason and emotion no
longer work together. Emotion is kept down, made
into an inferior
Emotion gives us works of sentimentality, produces
the Gothic novels
ALEXANDER POPE
Greatest poet of the period
Singer of order in the universe and of order in
society
Preaches correctness in literary composition, filing
and polishing of phrases until perfection is reached
Influenced other poets
Works: Essay on Man : sums up rational notions of
the day
Rape of the Lock
Epistles and Satires
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Works: The Traveller, The Deserted Village
Turns away from the town to the country
In his attempt to express the romantic pleasures of
rural life and in generosity of feeling looks forward to
a later period
DR SAMUEL JOHNSON
Another follower of Pope
Works: London and The Vanity of Human Wishes
THOMAS GRAY
1716-71
Best known for Elegy in a country churchyard
Same concern with perfection of form as Pope
Other works: The Bard
Ode on a Distant prospect of Eton
College
WILLIAM COWPER
Poet of nature
In long blank-verse work The Task comes close to
Wordsworth in his insistence that Nature is the great
friend and healer, and that the town is
fundamentally wicked
Works: On the Receipt of My Mothers Picture
My Mary
ROBERT BURNS
Scottish
Works: Ode to a Mouse
Tam OShanter
Revolted against restraints of conventional morality
and repressive Presbyterian religion of Scotland
WILLIAM BLAKE
1757-1827
Perhaps one of the greatest English poets
Wished, through poetry and drawing, to build up a
huge mythology of his own, to portray symbolically
the forces at war with each other in the soul of man
Rejects reason and law and conventional religion
Wants human beings to cultivate imagination so
that it will be capable of perceiving ultimate truth
without any help from reason.

WILLIAM BLAKE
Works:
Songs of Innocence
Songs of Experience
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
Epics: Milton, Jerusalem
Marriage of Heaven and Hell