Augustan poetry

Therefore, the British poets picked up that term as a way of referring to their endeavours, for it fit in another respect: 18th-century English poetry was political, satirical, and marked by the central philosophical problem of whether the individual or society took precedence as the subject of the verse.

In the early part of the century, there was a great struggle over the nature and role of the pastoral, primarily between Ambrose Philips and Alexander Pope, and then between their followers, but such a controversy was only possible because of two simultaneous literary movements.

The general movement, carried forward only with the struggle between poets, was the same as in the novel: the invention of the subjective self as a worthy topic, the emergence of a priority on individual psychology, against the insistence that all acts of art are a performance and a public gesture meant for the benefit of society at large.

The ode, the ballad, the elegy, and satire, parody, song and lyric poetry, would be adapted from their older, initial literary uses.

It can be seen as a growth of the power and assertiveness of the bourgeoisie and an echo of the displacement of the worker from the home in growing industrialization, as Marxists such as E. P. Thompson has argued, for people were no longer allowed to remain in their families and communities when they had to travel to a factory or mill, and therefore they grew accustomed to thinking of themselves as isolated.

Indeed, seldom has a poet been as publicly acknowledged as a leader for as long as was Pope, and, unlike the case with figures such as John Dryden or William Wordsworth, a second generation did not emerge to eclipse his position.

From a technical point of view, few poets have ever approached Alexander Pope's perfection at the iambic pentameter closed couplet ("heroic verse"), and his lines were repeated often enough to lend quite a few clichés and proverbs to modern English usage.

When they appeared, Thomas Tickell, a member of the "Little Senate" of Addison's (see above) at Button's coffee shop wrote an evaluation in Guardian that praised Ambrose Philips's pastorals above Pope's.

[citation needed] In 1724, Philips would update poetry again by writing a series of odes dedicated to "all ages and characters, from Walpole, the steerer of the realm, to Miss Pulteney in the nursery".

Pope's insistence upon a Golden Age pastoral no less than Philips's desire to update it meant making a political statement.

While it is easy to see in Ambrose Philips an effort at modernist triumph, it is no less the case that Pope's artificially restricted pastoral was a statement of what the ideal (based on an older Feudal arrangement) should be.

In Trivia, Gay writes as if commiserating with those who live in London and are menaced by falling masonry and bedpan slops, and The Shepherd's Week features great detail of the follies of everyday life and eccentric character.

It is a debate and a poetic tension that would remain all the way to Samuel Johnson's discussion of the "streaks of the tulip" in the last part of the century (Rasselas).

Similarly, Samuel Johnson wrote a poem that falls into the Augustan period in his "imitation of Satire III" entitled London.

Pope applied Virgil's heroic and epic structure to the story of a young woman (Arabella Fermor) having a lock of hair snipped by an amorous baron (Lord Petre).

To some degree, Pope was adapting Jonathan Swift's habit, in A Tale of a Tub, of pretending that metaphors were literal truths, and he was inventing a mythos to go with the everyday.

As a result, a decade after the gentle, laughing satire of The Rape of the Lock, Pope wrote his masterpiece of invective and specific opprobrium in The Dunciad.

Pope had translated Homer and produced an errant edition of William Shakespeare, and the 1727 Dunciad was an updating and redirection of John Dryden's poison-pen battle of MacFlecknoe.

Even The Dunciad, which seems to be a serial killing of everyone on Pope's enemies list, sets up these figures as expressions of dangerous and antisocial forces in letters.

The hireling pens Pope attacks mercilessly in the heroic games section of the Dunciad are all embodiments of avarice and lies.

The other side of this division include, early in the Augustan Age, John Dyer, James Thomson and Edward Young.

In the year 1726 poems by the two former were published describing landscape from a personal point of view and taking their feeling and moral lessons from direct observation.

In all the poems mentioned, there are the stirrings of the lyric as the Romantics would see it: the celebration of the private individual's idiosyncratic, yet paradigmatic, responses to the visions of the world.

On the other hand, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard set off a new craze for poetry of melancholy reflection.

It is only by being solitary that the poet can speak of a truth that is wholly individually realized, and the poem is a series of revelations that have been granted only to the contemplative (and superior) mind.