| |
Comedy of manners—its concern is to bring the moral
and social behavior of its characters to the test of comic
laughter. The male hero lives not for military glory but for
pleasure and the conquests that he can achieve in his amorous
campaigns. The object of his very practical game of sexual intrigue is
a beautiful, witty, pleasure-loving, and emancipated lady, every bit
his equal in the strategies of love. The two are distinguished not for
virtue but for the true wit and well-bred grace with which they conduct
the often complicated intrigue that makes up the plot.
Mock-Heroic/Mock
Epic—A poem in Epic form and manner ludicrously
elevating some trivial subject to epic grandeur, juxtaposing high/grand
style and low/trivial subject, to make fun of somebody or something.
The Augustan Poets —A special feature of
eighteenth-century poetic language is its emphasis on visualizing or
personifying. Critics of the time all argued that poets
showed their genius best by imagining or seeing what they wrote about
(not by facility with words or forms or abstract ideas); and readers
were skilled at making pictures from very small hints.
Text
Source: http://www.liu.se/isk/eng/cs/cs2home5.html#Art
TOP
|
| |
Disciplined
Invention: "The poet must
have 'invention,' the gift of finding materials for his
poems--fictional, but representative, images of human actions and of
the world in which those actions take place; and he must vivify,
heighten, and order those materials that they seem true pictures of
what is, or might or ought to be, or of the evil and folly that we
should avoid.
Nature--the
universal, permanent, and representative elements in the moral and
intellectual experience of men. External nature--the
landscape--both as a source of aesthetic pleasure and as an object of
scientific inquiry or religious contemplation attracted the attention
of Englishmen throughout the 18th century, But Pope's
injunction to the critic, 'First follow Nature,' has primarily human
nature and human experience in
view." Scientifically, Newton also reinforced the
idea of Nature as order.(1685)
Wit--quickness
and liveliness of mind, inventiveness, a readiness to perceive
resemblances between things apparently unlike and so to enliven
literary discourse with appropriate images, similes, and metaphors.
An excess of imagination was considered dangerous
to sanity, and in literature to lead away from Nature and truth to
falsehood and such violent and farfetched conceits as we find in the
poetry of Donne of Crashaw at their boldest. One task of the
age was to tame what seemed the wildness of metaphysical wit into the
more reasonable and decorous wit ...So Pope insists in the Essay
on Criticism ll. 80-83, on the necessity of a harmonious
union of judgment and fancy (which he calls "wit") in a work of
literature. (1687)
Heroic
Couplet
"The simplest form of stanza is the couplet; it is simply two lines
rhyming together. . . . when [a single couplet] includes a
complete unified thought, ending with a terminal mark of punctuation,
it is called a closed couplet. [Heroic
couplet] is a strictly iambic pentameter couplet,
strongly end-stopped, and with the
couplets prevailingly closed.
Heroic couplets generally are varied by means of a decided caesura
(strongly grammatical pause within a line), and limited to precisely ten
syllables per line. The heroic couplet is
the principle form of English neoclassical style("Poetic
Forms and Literary Terminology" The Norton
Anthology of English Literature vol. 1. 3rd
ed. p. 2471).
TOP
|
