During the early decades of the eighteenth century, some English writers became discontented with the reigning literary fashion. They chafed under the formal constraints of the closed couplet and found the ends of Augustan verse - refined style and sophisticated wit - unsatisfying. For some, like James Thomson in his poem The Seasons (1730), blank verse offered liberation. Blank verse also had a classical pedigree: it had been associated with the Latin hexameter since Surrey first translated portions of the Aeneid into unrhymed pentameters, and Milton had reaffirmed that linkage in his choice of blank verse for Paradise Lost. Thomson’s matter, though, was new as well: his poem celebrates man’s interaction with the natural world and marks a new stage in the poetic description of nature. And yet here, too, an alert reader finds frequent reminiscences of Vergil and Ovid throughout. Few poets of this age, even when turning to new materials, would wish to separate themselves completely from the classical past.
At the same time, a new classical influence was beginning to make itself felt: a heightened interest in Greek literature. Although Boileau, Dryden, and Pope all knew at least some Greek, their taste had been formed by reading the Roman poets. But Greek instruction had improved, and now a handful of writers had come to prefer Homer and the Greek tragedians to Vergil and Horace. For this new generation the Greeks seemed to offer a simplicity, nobility, and emotional honesty not found in the polished artificiality of Augustan verse.
This enthusiasm is perhaps most obvious in the odes of William Collins and Thomas Gray, where the ability of Greek poets to move the passions becomes a frequent theme. But the shift in taste had its greatest impact on criticism, especially on the new aesthetics developing in Germany. It was Johann Winckelmann who taught modern Europe to see idealized beauty and artistic perfection in Greek statuary; and his assertion that the characteristic greatness of Greek art lay in its ‘‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’’ posited a new basis for aesthetic judgment and a new standard of taste (1987: 33).
Winckelmann’s remarks in the Reflections on the statue of Laococln provided a starting point for G. E. Lessing as he probed the differences between poetry and the visual arts. Lessing declared that painting and sculpture are spatial arts, poetry a temporal art. The true poet, then, will represent action and eschew description, a lesson he draws not only from reason but from Homer (Laokoon 1766: ch. 16). It is of particular significance that Lessing turned to Homer to demonstrate his thesis. Throughout the neoclassical age, Homer was honored as the father ofpoetry, but the Aeneid was considered a finer (at least a more polished) poem than either the Iliad or the Odyssey. Homer, it was agreed, abounded in genius, but he lacked ‘‘art.’’ In explaining what true poetry should be, Lessing cited passage after passage from the Iliad. He had returned Homer to the center of artistic achievement.
World History
