Neo- Classical English Period

Neo-classical Literature Period 1660-1785 Introduction The Eighteenth Century English literature period is variously called as following: the Classical Age, the Augustan Age, Age of Good Sense, the Age of Reason, and the Age of Enlightenment. The Eighteenth Century is called the Classical Age in English literature because the term ‘classic’, refers in general, applies to writers of the highest rank in any nation. This term was first applied to the works of the great Greek and Roman writers, like Homer and Virgil. As the writers of the eighteenth century in England tried to follow the simple and noble methods of the great ancient writers, they began to be called Classical writers. Moreover, in every national literature, there is a period when a large number of writers produce works of great value; such a period is often called the Classical Period or Age. For example, the reign of Augustus is called the Classical Age of Rome; and the Age of Dante is called the Classical Age of Italian literature. As during the eighteenth century in England there was an abundance of literary productions, the critics named it the Classical Age in English literature. In addition to, during this period, the English writers rebelled against the exaggerated and fantastic style of writing common during the Elizabethan and Puritan ages, and they demanded that poetry, drama, and prose should follow exact rules. In this, they were influenced by French writers, especially by Boileau and Rapin, who insisted on precise methods of writing poetry, and who alleged to have discovered their rules in the classics of Horace and Aristotle. The eighteenth century is called the Classical Age, because the writers followed the ‘classicism’ of the ancient writers, which was taken in a narrow sense to imply fine polish and external elegance. Nevertheless, as the eighteenth century writers in England followed the ancient classical writers only in their external performance, and lacked their sublimity and grandeur, their classicism is called pseudo-classicism i.e., false or fraud classicism. Literature of that time-shared intellectual, linguistic, religious, and artistic influences. England in the 18th Century Encyclopaedia Americana, (1959) states that the principal European literatures were dominated in the 17th and 18th centuries by what may be called the neoclassical doctrine, which emphasized the theory and form, rather than the inspiring spirit, of ancient poetry. Poetry, in this school, was treated as a formal art, based on reason and on rules, which diminished emphasis on elements of emotion and imagination; its spirit is well presented by Nicolas Boolean's Art Poetique (1674) in France and Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711) in England. These poems exemplify the revival of the didactic types, now frequently equivalent to the prose essay. Satire, formal epic, and formal tragedy are again characteristic of this age, as of the Renaissance, while in lyric poetry the more sentimental types, like sonnet tend to disappear, and the more intellectual and elaborate, like the formal ode to become prominent. Evans (1995) states that the literary period called the Eighteenth Century dates in Britain from 1660, with the Restoration of Charles II, to 1798, with the publication of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and with the emergence of the Romantic Movement. Perhaps no other literary period has been called so many names: The Age of Reason, the Age of Satire, the Augustan Age, the Neo-Classical Period, The Enlightenment, The Restoration, and so on. Identifying the period's characteristics is even more problematic. Philosophy in the 18th Century Sanders, (2004) declares that a Latin inscription witnesses to Newton’s immortality triply safeguarded by Time, Nature and Heaven; a couplet in English, the sublime confidence of which has served to provoke later generations, unequivocally asserts that the systematized vision which he offered was divinely inspired. Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night. God said, Let Newton be! Newton declared that there was order, law, and indeed designs in creation and in heavens. For Locke, the mind was a tabula rasa at birth, a ‘white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas.’ When he rhetorically demanded how the mind acquired ‘all the materials of Reason and Knowledge,’ he answered succinctly, ‘From Experience.’ In “Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke compares the mind to a Newtonian camera obscura. At another he employs a palatial metaphor to suggest that ideas are admitted to the brain through an ordered enfilade of state rooms which lead steadily to the Royal Presence, the senses and the nerves acting as ‘Conduits’ to convey them from without to their Audience in the Brain, the mind’s Presence room.’ Locke’s influential explorations of a theory of government are related to this concept of social consent. Locke’s faith in the rights of the citizen enshrined in the rule of law, and in law as the product of consent, is in part reflected in the easier philosophical arguments of Shaftsbury. 'Shaftsbury's Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times (1711, revised 1714), a collection which includes moralists, is insistent in its expressions of the divine perfection of nature and interconnection of aspects of creation according to observable laws; it is also explicit in its arguments proposing the natural goodness of the human element in creation. Hogarth’s volume of aesthetic theory, The Analysis of Beauty (1753), had attempted to define an equally personal concept of beauty according to a three-dimensional twisting rhythm, arguing for principle of intricacy in art. Hogarth’s idea of ‘intricacy,’ linked as it is to ‘peculiarity’ and ‘wantonness’ in the chase, manages to suggest a freer and less strictly regulated response to observed nature. If Locke’s Two Treatises of Government proposes the ideal of a consenting civil society ruled by law, Hogarth’s four depictions of a corrupt provincial election of 1754 observe both an inherent ridiculousness in the political process and the untidy energy of humanity. The Main Features of the Age of Reason Evans, (1981) states that in the eighteenth century the subjects of study to which man applied himself became more numerous and more systematic, and it was the good fortune of England that prose in that age had become a plaint and serviceable medium. It was a century full of speculation and fierce questioning, a century with powerful minds that applied themselves to the problem of the nature of life, and set out solutions, which have been the basis of much later thought. It was a century, above all others, when England led Europe in philosophical speculation. The centre of interest was human experience, and what could be learned from it of the nature of life, and here the eighteenth century looked back to Locke, if not always for guidance, at least for its terms of reference. John Locke (1632-1704), developed system in which knowledge was based on experience, but experience itself was not so closely related to physical reactions. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) had a wide influence both on the continent and in England. It is one of the greatest works of English philosophy, and one of the most typical of the English temperament. The abstract is held in a nice compromise with the concrete, and all is related to the test of experience. According to Fletcher, (2005), the writers of reigns of Anne and George 1 called their period the Augustan Age; because they flattered themselves that with them, English life and literature had reached a culminating period of civilization and elegance corresponding to that, which existed at Rome under the Emperor Augustus. They believed that, both in the art of living and in literature, they had rediscovered and were practising the principles of the best periods of Greek and Roman life. In reality the men of the early eighteenth century, like those of the Restoration, largely misunderstood the qualities of the classical spirit, and thinking to reproduce them attained only superficial, pseudo-classical, imitation. The main characteristics of the period and its literature are as following: 1. Interest was largely centred in the practical well being either of society as a whole or of one’s own social class or set. The majority of writers, furthermore, belonged by birth or association to the upper social level and tended to stress its artificial conventions, which often looking with contempt on other classes. To them conservative good breeding, fine manners, the pleasures of the leisure class’ and the standards of ‘The Town’ (fashionable London society) were the only part of the life much worth regarding. 2. The men of this age carried still further the distrust and dislike felt by previous generation for emotion, passion, and strong individuality both in life and literature, and exalted Reason and Regularity as their guiding stars. The terms ‘decency’ and ‘neatness’ were forever in lips. They thought a conventional uniformity in manners, speech, and indeed in nearly everything else, and were uneasy if they deviated far from the approved, respectable standards of the body of their fellows. Great poetic imagination, therefore, could scarcely exist among them, or indeed supreme greatness of any sort. 3. They had little appreciation for external Nature or for beauty except that of formalized Art. A forest seemed to most of them merely wild and gloomy, and great mountains chiefly terrible, but they took delight in gardens of artificiality of trimmed trees and in regularly plotted and alternating beds of domestic flowers. The Elizabethans also, had had much more feeling for the terror than the grandeur of the sublime in Nature, but the Elizabethans had had nothing of the stylish stiffness of the Augustans. 4. In speech and especially in literature, most of all in poetry, they were given to abstractness of thought and expression, intended to secure elegance, but often serving largely to substitute superficiality for definiteness and significant meaning. They abounded in personifications of abstract qualities and ideas (‘Laughter, heavenly maid,’ Honour, Glory, Sorrow, and so on, with prominent capital letters), a sort of a pseudo-classical substitute for emotion. 5. They were still fully confirmed than the men of the Restoration in the conviction that the ancients had attained the highest possible perfection in literature, and some of them made absolute submission of judgement to ancients, especially to the Latin poets and the Greek, Latin, and also the seventeenth century classicising French critics. Some authors seemed timidly to desire to be under authority and to glory in surrendering their independence, individuality, and originality to foreign and long established leaders and principles. 6. Under these circumstances, the effort to attain the finished beauty of classical literature naturally resulted largely in a more or less shallow formal smoothness. 7. There was a strong tendency to moralizing, which also was not altogether free from conventionality and superficiality. Although the ‘Augustan Age’ must be considered to end before the middle of the century, the same spirit continued dominant among many writers until near its close, so that almost the whole of the century is pseudo classical. The Tendencies of the Writers of the Eighteenth-Century Sitter, (2001) believes that many of the eighteenth century poets did write with a “neo-classical” eye on the classical past, especially Latin models, as indeed did most Renaissance writers. Similarly, many seem to have considered the pressure of present political events one of poetry’s larger concerns, and thus wrote often on timely subjects. However, the more distinctive feature of the eighteenth-century poets, is that their sense of tendency to look toward the future. It is difficult to imagine serious poets today invoking posterity, making predictions, or addressing citizenry of the future. Precisely because we seem to have lost the future as a dimension of meaning in discourse and perhaps in poetry especially, the temporal expansiveness of eighteenth-century poetry can be alien and valuable. Valuable not because it is always optimistic about the future—many of its most powerful glimpses of futurity are darkened—but because it assumes a larger theatre of human action and significance. Most immediately, an appeal to the future makes a claim that one’s moment is of moment. More profoundly, it assumes that there will be a human future, whose inhabitants might understand the claimants and find their words and deeds interesting. Again, Sitter, (2001) states that early eighteenth-century writers were sometimes capable of making such claims while simultaneously regarding them ironically. Joseph Addison (1672-1719), for example, celebrates military victories over the French in The Campaign (1705) with earnest hope that his poem “may tell posterity the tale.” However, Addison also tells the still current joke about the man who balks when asked to contribute to the good of future generations, complaining, “We are always doing something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us” (Spectator 583). Jonathan Swift’s greatest poem, Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, seems addressed in large part to posterity, but the same Swift had earlier observed, “How free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. Future ages shall talk of this: This shall be famous to all posterity. Whereas, their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.” We might begin with a distinction between poems about the future and for the future, although the distinction often blurs. Into the first category fall most poems of praise and optimism, on the present, predicting the importance of the current events or at least the promising direction of the current events. Thus, Pope’s Windsor-Forest (1713) proceeds from the recent accession of Queen Anne- “And Peace and Plenty tell, a STUART reigns”- to the forthcoming signing of the Treaty of Utrecht (ending the divisive War of Spanish Succession on terms profitable for England) and on to the prediction of British imperial greatness. Speaking through the voice of Father Thames, Pope imagines Britain as the “World’s great Oracle in Times to come (line, 382). Such optimism often begins but does not end only in nationalism: Oh, stretch thy Reign, fair Peace! From shore to shore, Till Conquest cease and Slavery be no more: Till the freed Indians in their native Groves Reap their own Fruits, and woo their Sable Loves… (Lines 407-10) Predictions of British dominance usually assume British benevolence. Still Sitter, (2001) adds that optimistic predictions are less common than the warnings and in general less successful poetically, although William Collins (1721-1759), manages a vaguer, more pleasant political hopefulness in the two most political of his Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1746). The “Ode to Mercy” prophesies that: Thou, Thou shalt rule out Queen, and share our Monarch’s Throne! while at the close of the “Ode to Liberty” Our youth, enamour’d of the Fair, Play with the Tangles of her Hair, Till in one loud applauding Sound, The Nations shout to Her around, O, how supremely art thou blest? Thou, Lady, thou shalt rule the West! It is probably not accidental that Collin’s better poems such as “Ode to Evening” and “Ode on the Poetical Character”) are pessimistic or anxious regarding the future, although just why darker prophecies tend to brighten poetry is not an easy question. In any case, most of the more impressive accounts of the future envision darker days a head, even— as in the famous ending of Pope’s Dunciad— an imminent “universal darkness” that “buries all” Whether The Dunciad is seriously intended for the future or about the future as away of shaming the present, has often divided readers who regard it as arguably Pope’s greatest work or as the expense of poetic spirit in a waste of topicality. Nevertheless, it is striking how many major and minor eighteenth-century poems do at least partly attempt to speak beyond the immediate audience to an uncertain future readership. Thomas Gray as well as Swift writes a poem, Elegy Written in a Country Church yard (1751), in which the undervalued poet is memorialised for later ages. Verse on the Death of Dr. Swift is Swift’s complexly comic attempt to create his own elegy and eulogy in poetry and, especially through its numerous footnotes, to leave the “true history” of the times for posterity. In exile with a steady heart, He spent his life’s declining part…. His friendship still to few confin’d Were always of the middling kind…” (2001, p.4 ) Each couplet is footnoted. Swift annotates “exile” with his appointment to the deanship of Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral: “In Ireland. Swift had reason to call a place of exile; to which country nothing could have driven him, but the Queen’s death, who had determined to fix him in England, in spite of the Duchess of Somerset” The second couplet points to an explanation that “In Ireland the Dean was not acquainted with one single Lord Spiritual or Temporal. He only conversed with private gentlemen of the clergy or laity, and but a small number of either.” Information like this would have been of some rhetorical force for Swift's contemporaries but seems written as well for an imaginary time capsules. Charles Churchill’s (1731-1764) satire, The Farewell (1764), exemplifies an interesting mixture of prediction, warning, petition, and curse.” Churchill’s satire is not only omni-directional but also anticipatory: Should there be found such men in after-times, May Heav’n in mercy to our grievous crimes All to some milder vengeance, not to them, And to their rage this wretched land condemn. Such appeals to “after-times” are a way of criticising present times, of course, and frequently on two accounts. First, a “vision” of the future may work to show the danger or the degradation of a current condition. Thus at the close of Oliver Goldsmith’s (1730-1774) The Deserted Village (1770), the poet not only sees the effects of the current depopulation of the countryside but also foresees its results: Even now, methinks, a pondering here I stand, I see the rural virtues leave the land… Downward they move, a melancholy band, Pass from the shore, and darken the entire strand. Contented toil, and hospitable care, And kind connubial tenderness is there… And thou, sweet Poetry, thou loveliest maid… (Lines 399-400,403-6,409-10) While many, such as Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), dissented from Goldsmith’s conviction that urbanization and “luxury” would ruin the country, even Johnson was ready to predict the impermanence of commercial structures, contributing one of the closing lines of the poem, warning ”That trade’s proud empire hastens to swift decay.” A second way in which an appeal to the future may criticize the present is by announcing that the poet cannot tell all the truth here and now safely and fruitfully. “Publish the present age,” Pope declares“, but where my Text? Is Vice too high, reserve it for the next “(The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, lines 59-60), 1733. Alexander Pope appended a note to the two poems in dialogue now called Epilogue to the Satires. That dialogue like Swift’s notes; seems wholly directed to future readers, although hardly so: “This was the last poem of the kind printed by our author, with a resolution to publish no more; but to enter thus, in the most plain and solemn manner he could, a sort of PROTEST against that insuperable corruption and depravity of manners, which he had been so unhappy as to live to see…. Ridicule was become as unsafe as it was ineffectual.” Indeed all of the first dialogue seems transformed into a sort of letter to posterity by the poet’s closing turn from present vice to eventual vindication: “yet may this Verse (if such a verse remain) Show there was one who held it in disdain.” Readers of Alexander Pope generally associate his invocation of the future with growing pessimism that culminates in the poetic apocalypse of The Dunciad, a gloom in which neither Public fame, nor private, dares to shine; Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine! Lo! Thy dread Empire, CHAOS! Is restor’ d? Light dies before thy un creating words; Thy hand, great Anarch! Lets the curtain falls; And Universal Darkness buries All. Pope’s use of the future connects nearly all the poetic genres he attempted. In fact, a closing prediction or petition concerning the future of the subject at hand is Pope’s most characteristic way of concluding a poem, from the start of his career to the end. We have already looked at the prophetic close of Windsor-Forest. The Rape of the Lock ends with the declaration, gallant but predictive, that Belinda and her hair will be immortalized by the poem: This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame, And midst the Stars inscribe Belinda’s Name! Pope’s lesser poems also end with predictions. The Messiah (1712) is an explicitly prophetic poem, an account in Virgil’s manner of Isaiah “Rapt into future Times” (line 7) as he foretells the birth of Christ. The Epistle to Mr. Jarvis (1716) ends with a declaration that Jarvis's portraits of the Countess of Bridgewater “shall warm a future age,” even lasting “a thousand years,” and that “soft Belinda’s blush”—Jarvis painted pope’s comic heroine- “shall…forever glow.” Pope’s tragic hero, Eloisa, closes her dramatic struggle by predicting that some future Bard shall join In sad similitude of grieves to mine (Eloisa to Abelard, lines 359-60) It is a forecast from the twelfth century of Pope’s situation in 1717. In the same year, the speaker of the “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” looks forward to his own death: Ev’n he, whose soul now melts in mournful lays, Shall shortly want the generous tear he pays (Lines, 77-78). Shall is the operative word in all of these endings. The complimentary epistle “To Mr. Addison, Occasioned by his Dialogues on Medals” (1720) images a time when English commemorative coins will enshrine national heroes, like those of Rome. Then future ages with delight shall see How Plato’s, Bacon’s, Newton’s looks age (Lines 59-60) By the time, Pope wrote his great ethical and satiric poems in 1730s the turn toward future was deeply characteristic. Not only the dark cultural prophesies of the end of his career (the Epilogue to the Satires and final Dunciad) but also works such as An Essay on Man and most of the Epistles to Several Persons (1731-35) end with disclosures of what shall follow. William Cowper, a poet for whom the Holy Bible was a terrifying text, gives an interesting perspective from near the end of the century on poetic use of the future. Often convinced that final judgement could not be far off, “in these, the world’s last doting years” (Charity, line, 604), Cowper finds the role of the poetic prophet attractive— and fraught. In the long conversational poem Table Talk (1781), Cowper sees a corrupted England probably doomed to loose its grandeur- Nineveh, Babylon, and ancient Rome, Speak to the present times, and to come And its freedom, as tyranny Gives liberty the last, the moral shock; Slips the slave’s collar on, and snaps the lock. (Lines, 432, 33,476-77). At this point, the interlocutor breaks in to ask whither the now lofty” poet pretends to “prophesy” as well as “preach”. Cowper gives a complex answer. On the other hand, he claims a vatic role for the poet, reminding readers In a Roman mouth, the graceful name Of prophet and of poet was the same And that the inspired poetic mind is far seeing: When remote futurity is brought Before the keen inquiry of her thought, A terrible sagacity informs The poet’s heart; he looks to distant storms; He hears the thunder ere the tempest low’s; And, arm’d with strength surpassing human pow’rs, Seizes events as yet unknown to man And darts his soul into the dawning plan. Yet Cowper then insists that his own poetry lacks such prescience and abruptly disavows the role he has just described so energetically: But no prophetic fires to me belong; I play with syllables, and sport in song(Lines ,479,492-99,504-05). A similar ambivalence regarding visionary poetry dominates the end of The Task, the blank verse poem. Toward the end of the poem’s sixth and final book, Cowper warns to the subject of the Second Coming and then checks his flight: Sweet is the harp of prophesies. Too sweet Not to be Wrong’d by a mere moral touch; No can the wonders it records be sung To meaner music, and not suffer loss. (VI, lines 747-50) This time, Cowper forges ahead, if not with the “terrible sagacity” described in Table Talk, with conviction. But when a poet, or when one like me, Happy to rove among poetic flow’rs Though poor in skill to rear them, lights al last On some fair theme, some theme divinely fair, Such is the impulse and the spur he feels To give it praise proportion’d to its worth, That not t’attempt it, arduous as he deems The labour, were a task more arduous still (VI, lines 75158) Yet, the future now available to Cowper’s imagination is not political or cultural but heavenly, as he turns in most of the remaining 250 lines to contemplate apocalyptic harmony. It would take William Blake, in the 1790s and after, to try to bring the tasks of political and spiritual prophecy together in poetry. Whatever eighteenth-century poetry imagined of future, its actual relation to posterity has been problematic for much of the past two centuries. Since the rise of Romanticism, prevailing literary premises and habits have predisposed many readers to underestimate the poetic richness of many eighteenth-century works. It is common for the poetry of the period to wear its imagistic and metaphoric complexity lightly, so to speak, downplaying rather than advertising its potential intricacies. The miniature dramas are waiting to be produced by active readers, much as the script of a play is brought to life by imaginative interpretation, and the full realization of these effects often requires a readiness to go beneath the placid surfaces of eighteenth-century urbanity. When Swift writes, in Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, that “her end when Emulation misses/ She turns to Envy, Stings and Hisses”(lines 35-36) it is left to the alert reader to see as well as hear, to see the images as well as hear the jaunty epigram. If we take only the round jest or the flickering personification of Emulation contracting into Envy— something deeply characteristic of the period will be lost: its intuition of playfulness as part of poetic behaviour. “For he is a mixture of gravity and wiggery,” Christopher Smart(1722-1771), wrote in praising his cat Jeffrey in the astonishing Jubilate Ango (1758-63), adding shortly after, “For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.” The expressive ideals of poets in the Romantic –tradition- which to say most poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – have tended to value “gravity” or “wiggery” alternately rather than the mixture Smart found so arresting. When two farm labourers who were about to be married were killed during a sudden lightening storm Pope wrote two sentimental and somewhat heroic epitaphs for them. He also wrote, more privately, this couplet with a punning reference to venereal disease: Here lye poor Lovers, who had the mishap Tho very chaste people, to die of Clap. To one sort of sensibility such doubleness is ethical duplicity, and we still hear its irritation in some critical writing on Pope. A more fruitful approach recognizes psychic alternation as humanly interesting and hesitates to overestimate— or oversimplify- “sincerity” as a poetic virtue. This not to say that eighteenth-century poets themselves were indifferent to sincere expression; Samuel Johnson’s impatience with Milton’s Lycidas, for example and with much of the poetry of the witty “Metaphysical” poetry from Donne(1572-1631) to Cowley(1618-1667) was a complaint against inauthentic emotion. Nevertheless, it may be that the vantage point of postmodernism, which tends to regard the boundaries both of the self and the “poetic” as unfixed, permeable, and always artificial, now allows us a more open engagement with the multi-voiced poetry of the eighteenth-century. Restoration Period (c. 1660-1700) Restoration means the return of the British king (Charles II, the son of Charles I who had been beheaded,) came back to England from his exile in France, and became the King of the throne after a long period of Puritan domination in England. It is distinguished by the dominance of French and Classical influences on poetry and drama. The result was that the old Elizabethan spirit with its patriotism, its love of adventure and romance, its creative vigour, and the Puritan spirit with its moral discipline and love of liberty, became outdated. Main writers are John Dryden, John Lock, Sir William Temple, Samuel Pepys, and Aphra Behn in England. John Dryden (1631-1700). The Restoration poetry was mostly satirical, realistic, and written in the heroic couplet, of which Dryden was the supreme master. Dryden’s poetry can be divided under Political Satires, Doctrinal Poems, and The Fables. In Absolem and Achitophel, which is one of the greatest political satires in the English language, Dryden defended the King against the Earl of Shaftesbury who is represented as Achitophel. The Medal is another satirical poem full of criticism against Shaftesbury and MacFlecknoe. The two great doctrinal poems of Dryden are ReligioLaici and The Hind and the Panther. These poems are neither religious nor devotional, but theological and controversial. The first was written when Dryden was a Protestant, and it defends the Anglican Church. The second written when Dryden had become a Catholic, vehemently defends Catholicism. They, therefore, show Dryden’s power and skill of defending any position he took up, and his mastery in presenting an argument in verse. The Fables, which were written during the last years of Dryden’s life in the form of a narrative; they are The Palamon and Arcite, which is based on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, it compares the method and art of a 14th century poet with one belonging to the 17th century. Annus Mirabilis is a fine example of Dryden’s sustained narrative power. His Alexander’s Feast is one of the best odes in the English language. The Restoration drama, showed entirely new trends because of the long break with the past. Moreover, it was greatly affected by the spirit of the new age which was deficient in poetic feeling, imagination and emotional approach to life, but laid emphasis on prose as the medium of expression, and intellectual, realistic and critical approach to life and its problems. No comedy of pleasure but wit succeeds humour; laugh from self-complacency and triumph; instead of pleasure, malignity, sarcasm and contempt, succeed to sympathetic merriment; so no laughing, but we smiling. These new trends in comedy are seen in Dryden’s Wild Gallant (1663), Etherege’s (1635-1691) The Comical Revenge or Love in a Tub (1664), Wycherley’s The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer, and the plays of Vanbrugh and Farquhar. Nevertheless, the most talented among the entire Restoration dramatist was William Congreve (1670-1720) who wrote all his best plays when he was thirty years of age. His well-known comedies are Love for Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700). Congreve remarkable style puts at the head of the Restoration drama. He balances, polishes and sharpens his sentences that reflects his keen and brilliant wit. His plays reflect the fashions of the upper classes whose moral standards had become negligent, they do not have a universal appeal, but as social documents, their value is very great. Moreover, though his comedies were criticised by the Romantics like Shelley and Lamb, they are now again in great demand and there is a revival of interest in Restoration comedy. In tragedy, the Restoration period specialised in Heroic Tragedy, which dealt with themes of epic magnitude. The heroes and heroines possessed superhuman qualities. The purpose of this tragedy was didactic—to inculcate virtues in the shape of bravery and conjugal love. It was written in the ‘heroic couplet’ in accordance with the heroic convention derived from France that ‘heroic metre’ should be used in such plays. In it, declamation took the place of natural dialogue. Moreover, it was characterised by affectation, exaggeration, and sensational effects wherever possible. The chief protagonist and writer of heroic tragedy was Dryden. Under his leadership, the heroic tragedy dominated the stage from 1660 to 1678. His first experiment in this type of drama was his play Tyrannic love, and in The Conquest of Granada. Dryden’s altered attitude is in his play All for Love (1678). Thus, he writes in the preface “In my style I have professed to imitate Shakespeare; which that I might perform more freely, I have disencumbered myself from rhyme.” He shifts his ground from the typical heroic tragedy in this play, drops rhyme, and questions the validity of the unities of time, place, and action in the conditions of the English stage. He also gives up the literary rules observed by French dramatists and follows the laws of drama formulated by the great dramatists of England. Another important way, in which Dryden turns himself away from the conventions of the heroic tragedy, is that he does not give a successful conclusion to this play. Restoration Prose Restoration period that English prose was developed as a medium for expressing clearly and precisely average ideas and feelings about various matters for which prose is really meant. For the first time a prose style was evolved which could be used for plain narrative, argumentative exposition of intricate subjects, and the handling of practical business. As in the fields of poetry and drama, Dryden was the chief leader and expert of the new prose. In his greatest critical work Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden presented new prose, which was completely different from the prose of Bacon, Milton, and Browne. He wrote in a plain, simple, and exact style, free from all exaggerations. His Fables and the Preface to them are fine examples of the prose style that Dryden was introducing. This style is, in fact, the most admirably suited to strictly prosaic purposes—correct but not tame, easy but not careless, forcible but unnatural, eloquent but not theatrical, graceful but not lacking in vigour. Of course, it does not have charm and an atmosphere that associated with imaginative writing. Other writers, who wrote in a plain, simple, but precise style, were Sir William Temple, John Tillotson, and George Saville better known as Viscount Halifax. Another famous writer was Thomas Sprat who is better known for the clarity with which he put the demand for new prose than for his own writings. Being a man of science himself, he published his History of the Royal Society (1667) in which he expressed the public demand for a popularised style free from “this vicious abundance of phrase, this trick of metaphors, and this volubility of tongue.” The Society expected from all its members “a close, natural way of speaking—positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants before that of wits and scholars.” However, these writers to a certain extent, helped in the development of the new prose style by their own individual approach. That is why the prose of the Restoration period is free from repetitiveness. John Bunyan (1628-1688). Bunyan was the greatest prose-writer of the period. Like Milton, the spirit of Puritanism influenced him, and in fact, if Milton is the greatest poet of Puritanism, Bunyan is its greatest storyteller. His greatest work is The Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan’s aim in The Pilgrim’s Progress was to lead men and women into God’s way, the way of salvation, through a simple fable with homely characters and exciting events.” Bunyan was endowed with a highly developed imaginative faculty and artistic instinct. He was deeply religious, and though he distrusted fiction. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan has described the pilgrimage of the Christian to the Heavenly City, the trials, tribulations and temptations which he meets in the way in the form of events and characters, who abstract and help him, and his ultimately reaching the goal. It is written in the form of allegory. The style is brief, simple and vivid, and it appeals to the cultured as well as to the unlettered. As Dr. Johnson remarked: “This is the great merit of the book, that the most cultivated man cannot find anything to praise more highly, and the child knows nothing more amusing.” The Pilgrim’s Progress has all the basic requirements of the traditional type of English novel. It has a good story; the characters are interesting and possess individuality and freshness; the conversation is arresting; the descriptions are vivid; the narrative continuously moves towards a definite end, above all, it has a literary style through which the writer’s personality clearly shows. The Pilgrim’s Progress is a work of superb literary genius, and it is unsurpassed as an example of plain English. Bunyan’s other works are Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), which is a kind of spiritual autobiography. The Holy War, which like The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory, but the characters are less alive, and there is less variety; The Life and Death of Mr. Bad man (1680) written in the form of a realistic novel, gives a picture of low life, and it is second in value and literary significance to The Pilgrim’s Progress. The prose of Bunyan shows clearly the influence of the English translation of the Bible (The Authorized Version). He was neither a scholar, nor did he belong to any literary school; all that he knew and learned was derived straight from the English Bible. He was an unlettered country tinker believing in righteousness and in disgust with the corruption and degradation that prevailed all around him. What he wrote came straight from his heart, and he wrote in the language that came natural to him. Thus, his works born of moral seriousness and extreme sincerity have acquired true literary significance and wide and enduring popularity. It is quite true to call him the pioneer of the modern novel, because he had the qualities of the great story-teller, deep insight into character, humour, pathos, and the visualising imagination of a dramatic artist. The Augustan Age (c. 1700-1750) The Augustan Age in literature is also called the Age of Good Sense or the Age of Reason because the people adapted the Reason as the only criterion in all fields of life. This term was chosen by the writers of the eighteenth century themselves, who saw in Pope, Addison, Swift, Johnson and Burke the modern parallels to Horace, Virgil, Cicero, who made Roman literature famous during the reign of Emperor Augustus. However, as the eighteenth century writers in England followed the ancient classical writers only in their external performance, and lacked their sublimity and grandeur, their classicism is called pseudo-classicism i.e., a false or sham classicism. Great literary figures of the age were Pope and Dr. Johnson. It is divided into the Ages of Dryden, Pope, and Dr. Johnson. The first time in the history of English literature, that prose occupies the front position. As it was the age of social, political religious and literary controversies, in which the prominent writers took an active part and a large number of pamphlets, journals, and magazines were brought out in order to supply to the growing need of people, who had begun to read and take interest in these controversial matters. In fact the prose writers of this age surpass the poets in every respect. The graceful and elegant prose of Addison’s essays, the terse style of Swift’s satires, the artistic perfection of Fielding’s novels, the sonorous eloquence of Gibbon’s history, and the oratorical style of Burke, have no equal in the poetical works of the age. In fact, poetry also had become prosaic, because it was no longer used for lofty and sublime purposes, but, like prose, its subject-matter had become criticism, satire, controversy and it was also written in the form of the essay which was the common literary from. Poetry became polished, witty, and artificial. In fact, it became more interested in the portrayal of actual life, and distrusted inspiration and imagination. Main characteristics of the Neo-classical are Realism, Precision, it was only during the early part of it—the Age of Pope, that the classical rules and ideals reigned supreme. In the later part of it—the Age of Johnson—cracks began to appear in the edifice of classicism, in the form of revolts against its ideals, and a revival of the Romantic tendency. Above all, it was the origin and development of the novel. The great writers were Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollet, and others who laid its secure foundations. The realism of the age and the development of an excellent prose style greatly helped in the evolution of the novel during the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was poor in drama, because the old Puritanical prejudice against the theatre continued. Goldsmith and Sheridan were the only writers who produced plays having literary merit. The Age of Sensibility (or Age of Johnson) 1745-1785 This period marks the transition toward the upcoming Romanticism though the period is still largely Neoclassical. Major writers include Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, and Edward Gibbon who represent the neoclassical tendencies, while writers like Robert Burns, Thomas Gray, Cowper, and Crabbe show movement away from the Neoclassical ideal. The Enlightenment Period (c. 1660-1790) The Neoclassical Period is called the "Enlightenment" owing to the increased reverence for logic and disregard for superstition. The period is marked by the rise of Deism, intellectual reaction against earlier Puritanism. Reference: Suleiman Abualbasher (2017) ,The Transition from Rationalism to Sentimentalism in English Poetry, Noor publishing.com, Germany. The Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume 2 (1995) Norton and Company, New York. Perrine and Thomas R. Arp (1992): An Introduction to Poetry; Sound and Sense; Harcourt Brace College. Sanders, Andrew (2004): The Short Oxford History of English Literature, Oxford University press, Oxford. Sitter, John (2001): The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry; the Edinburgh Building; Cambridge. Smith and Parks (1967) The Great Critics, W. W. Norton & Company, New York.