The Twilight of Classicism

The Twilight of Classicism

The second half of the 18th century was a complex period in which new trends rose and developed side by side with prevalent classical ones,until the latter finally declined.New ideas and attitudes were beginning to circulate in this period;in fact greater attenction was being paid to the problems caused by the Industrial Revolution,the poor and dispossessed were being regarded with more sympathy and tolerance than in the first decades of the century,and interest had begun to shift from town to country life.The renewed interest in country life led to a new approach to nature,which was seen as something real and tangible.Now nature was granted an existence of its own and began to be observed and described as it really was.The countryside thus became the ideal setting of poets:in fact it was considered the mirror of their intimate state.New themes based on intimate feelings began to appear beside the classical ones,and poetry was increasingly pervaded by a melancholy tone,often associated with meditation on death.This tendency was also favoured by Methodism which,although based on practical social work,preached an awareness of the vanity of life.The "Age of Reason" turned into an "Age of Sensibility",dominated by sentimentalism,by a new interest in nature and by the quest for new sources of inspiration.The language was changing:in fact expressed the emphasis on individualism and the immagination that will characterized Early Romanticism.

Early Romanticism

In the third quarter of the 18^th century,neoclassicism finally crumbled under the pressure of ideas and techniques introduced by writers later known as the "Early Romanticism".The first signs of a new approach to literature began to appear in the isolated,sporadic manifestations of small groups or even individual writers,who shared a common distaste for the artificiality,conventional formality and intellectual elegance of the Augustans,and were united by a belief in immagination against realism,feeling against reason.This new attutude was the result of the new aesthetic and social theories expounded by such writers as Edward Young and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.Maintaining that genius is a divine gift and that one must find one's own original genius within oneself without letting it be suffocated by imitation and tradition,Young emphasized the contrast between the concepts of the "natural" and "artificial".In this way there was the exaltation of primitive ages in which one could be "natural" was therefore closely connected with the new interpretation given to the word "natural",which for the "primitivists",came to mean the spontaneous expression of feelings,no longer hindered by reason.Rousseau was the real "new" man of the time, and his writings have traditionally been regarded as seminal for later Romanticism.In his rejection of the Enlightenment and its rationalism,he worked out theories which paved the way for most of the "cults" which were to characterized Romanticism:

-Childhood:the child was regarded as the archetipal innocent endowed with wisdom and happiness;

-The noble savage:our false civilization,through the institution of private property,created inequality,envy and evil.Since man is naturally good and only by institutions is he made bad,Rousseau advocated the return to nature,to "the first social state",in which "primitive" savage man lived innocent,and happy,at peace with all nature and the friend of all his fellow-creatures.The old dualism between good and evil within the individual was replaced by a new dualism between corrupt society and "nature";

-Democracy:greater interest was shown in the poor and destitute than in the upper classes;

-Immagination:this was a device which allowed escape from the here and now of human society;

-Nature:became a refuge from society,and Rousseau was the first that assimilated nature to individual mood,of which it then became the outer manifestation;

-Intimacy & melancholy:happiness derived from the free play of personal emotions and immagination,but the disproportion between dream and reality eventually led to depression and melancholy.

The Romantic Literary Movement

The term "romantic" first appeared in England in the 17^th century in the sense of "extravagant,fictitious,unreal",but,by the end of the 18^th,it had already assumed a somewhat different meaning and was particularly connected with feelings,imagination and emotional pleasures.In literature it was applied to a movement.It appeared in most Western countries between the late18th and the third decade of the19th century.There are certain historical events which can be cited as reference points since,with their emphasis on freedom and democratization,they fostered the growth of Romanticism and its future development:-The American Revolution;-The French Revolution;-The Napoleonic Wars.For some time almost every English man of letters was strongly sympathetic to the democratic ideals coming from America,and to French ht for "Liberty,Equality and Fraternity"But the period of Terror in France left many disillusioned and eventually turned them into conservatives.As a literary movement,English Romanticism presented a clear and sharp break with the insistence on reason,common sense and realism,as well as the "correctness"and formality that had characterized the Augustan Age.It encouraged individualism and the free expression of personal feelings,and turned to emotion and imagination as sources of inspiration.The Literary background of the Romantic movement is complex.Other factors of great importance were:

-the philosophical thought of such French writers as Voltaire and Rousseau,with their attacks on social stratification,and their concern with nature and man's emotional and imaginative powers;

-the German literary movement called"Sturm and Drang",which was strongly nationalistic and included among its members such names as Goethe and Shiller.It emphasized the value of individualism,opposed the rationalism of the Enlightenment,revolted against the dependence of literature on ancient classical canons and advocated a return to nature.

Poetry

The English Romantic period was characterized by poetry:it was a type of poetry different to anything previous,both in form and content.The language was affected by new ideas of simplicity and democratization:artificial"poetic diction"was replaced by a kind of language really spoken by ordinary people.Eglish Romanticism disregarded the old concept of"man in society",and focused on"individual" as the subject of all meaningful experience and the centre of life and art.The artist,and the poet in particular,came to be seen as someone unique in his creative faculties,a prophet divinely inspired.As a prophet,he was convinced that his mission was to convey truth to mankind,since he considered poetry as an expression and a vehicle of the most profound truths of experience.The poet tended to withdraw into himself,indulging in introspection and meditation.Egotism and individualism led in turn to a costant intrusion of the poet himself into his work.In this period the poet spoke of himself,of his joys and fears,of his melancholy and triumphs,of his passions and his rebellions.Romantic poets,especially the younger ones,turned into social rebels and opposed society or rejected its traditional moral codes and religious values.In some poets this spirit of revolt resulted ia a sort of titanism,in an overstatement of passions.It led to exaltation of the irrational and mystic aspects of life,and a concern with the supernatural.Some looked for solace in an idealized Hellenism,inspired by greek ideal of beauty and by the concept of poetry for poetry's sake.Other found escape from reality in the exotic and distant.This love for the strange and distant informed the new interest in history,and expecially in the Middle Ages.Romantic poets looked to tis period for inspiration and rediscovered the fascination of past writers:they revisited the past through their own imagination.Imagination became the distinguishing feature of the Romantic writer:this feature with fancy and fantasy came to mean the noblest gift of the poet who,who was able to modify or even re-create the world around him.The attempt to see imaginative ideal everywhere in real life led in turn to Romantic melancholy,since the ideal is not attainable in everyday existence.All the poets turned to nature,and devoted themselves to recording its beauty as a counterpart to the sordid ugliness of the industrial towns.The Romantic poetry conveyed a new sense of intimate communion between nature and man,twodifferent but inseparable parts of the same universe.The conception of nature was influenced by three philosophical theories:Platonism,which saw this world as the image of an ideal metaphisical world;Panteism,according to which nature,like the rest of universe was moved by a Mighty Power,an immanent God,whose presence is manifest in every things; German Idealism, with the three great philosophers,Fichte,Shelling and Hegel.Romantic poets are usually divided into two groups,defined as First and Secon Generation,that with their different features,gave life to one of the most important literary revolutions in England.

William Wordsworth (1770-l850)

He was born ina small village of Cumberland,where he spent his childhood happily and in close contract with nature.When he went to France,he was attracted by the new democratic ideals,and for this reason he became a fervent supporter of the French Revolution.When war broke out between France and England,he returned to England,and then settled in Dorset.After that he met Samuel Coleridge,with whom he was to develop a long and productive friendship.They shared the same love for nature and enjoyed taking long walks and talking about poetry.After that he gradually turned to political and religious conservatism,forswearing his previous republican and liberal sympathies.His most poetic production is formed by this works:

-The Prelude,an autobiographical poem in fourteen books;-The Excursion,a poem in 9books,which was to be only part of a longer philosophical poem "on man,on nature and on human life",ned by Wordsworth under the title of  The Recluse,but never completed;-Miscellaneous poems,typically expressed in the form of sonnets and odes.Lyrical Ballads was a collection ned and written together with Coleridge:its long preface is considered the Manifesto of the Romantic Movement in English literature.Lyrical Ballads was characterized by the union of realism and poetry.In fact Wordsworth tried to draw inspiration from everyday life, and to write in a language as near as possible to actual spoken English.Wordsworth was the first to bring these experiments to completion and,with his revolutionary ideas on poetic style,he solved the discrepancy between form and content.In the long preface of this work,there are the main features of Wordsworth poetry:

-Subject of poetry:poetry was about incidents and situations of common life,in particular "rustic life" and simple people living in the countryside,since they were in close contact with nature.

-Language:was near to the simple language of men,though purified of any disagreeable or disgusting expressions.

-Role of the Imagination:wasvery important,because was identified with its capacity of "colouring",that is to say of modifying the objects observed,presenting them in an unusual aspect.This was possible seeing the world with the eyes of soul and not only the mind's ones.

-Poetry as memory:the poet describes natural and simple objects and peaceful landscapes with the eyes of memory,which recollects already lost emotions and half-extinguished thoughts.In this way the feelings are not immediate,but originate from "emotion recollected in tranquillity",recreated by the subjectivity of memory;it is not original emotion,but past feelings contemplated and reorganized.

-Task of the poet:Although equal to other men in quality,the Poet stands apart from them because of his higher degree of sensibility and imaginative capacity.He is therefore best suited to reach the very essence of things and communicate them in a simple language.He is also a moral teacher,whose task is to purify men's emotions through the "descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings".

Themes

Childhood:our soul comes from God,that is to say from a divine celestial state,where we enjoyed a particular visionary faculty,which may be identified with the immagination.When we come into the world,we aren't entirely forgetful of this pre-existence but,while in infancy and childhood the memory of it is relatively strong,since the child is closest to its divine origin,it fades away as we grow up,since maturity,with its cares and habits,carries us further and further away from it.Yet the child's "visionary gleam"is not totally lost,as "nature yet remembers what ws so fugitive".Through Nature,therefore,the adult,who is heir to the child,can remember his heavenly state and rediscover God.It is in fact only in childhood that man establishes a perfect communion with nature,which he later perceives die away as he grows up.But the happy moment of childhood can be brought back to him through the ecstasy he can still feel for a natural event.Bound together by memory and meditation they become the substance of his inner life.It is in this sense that  "the child is father of Man",whose days,as a continuation of his earlier self and bound to each other by religious love for nature,may turn into everlasting joy and blessing.

Nature:man and nature were different but inseparable parts of a whole universe,a total scheme created by God,or rather by a Mighty Power.He maintained that Nature,far from being a decorative background or simply the mirror of a particular mood,was endowed with a spirit and a life of her own,present not only in ts and animals,but in inanimate objects as well,such as stones and mountains.She was therefore a living presence speaking to all those who were able to enter into intimate relationship with her and understand her language.It was through a fusion with nature,and through a contemplation of her beauty,that man could rediscover the image of God and become aware of his own inner life,since Man and Nature fitted together perfectly as parts of one Mighty Mind.Nature was a friend and a comforter to man,the only great teacher from which,by penetrating into her divine essence,man could learn virtue and wisdom.The mission of the poet was therefore to open men's souls to the inner reality of Nature and the calm,meditative joy she can offer us.

The three ages

Wordsworth was influenced by David Hartley,a philosopher that developed the principle of association in order to explain how the mind works.He maintained that no ideas are innate in man,but that they all derive from impressions of external objects,which set up vibrations in the nerves.Groups of vibrations then become associated with particular simple ideas.Human beings,endowed with a "power of association",eventually transform these simple ideas into other that are more complex and organized.For Hartley,the three stages of the mind's development are:sensations,simple ideas,complex or organized ideas;and they correspond to the three ages of man:childhood,in which there are only sensations from external world; youth,in which sensations give rise to emotions and simple ideas; manhood,in which man organizes his ideas through rational thinking.Wordsworth agreed with Hartley's philosophy,but he was convinced that we "receive" sensations,but can also "half-create" them by enriching simple impressions with the power of the Imagination,thus giving rise to higher and more complex ideas in a further mental development.