105 History of English Literature 1350-1900
The Neoclassical Age was also a period of:
Political and military unrest
British naval supremacy
Economic growth
The rise of the middle class
Colonial expansion
The rise of literacy
The birth of the novel and periodicals
The invention of marketing
The rise of the Prime Minister
Social reforms
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope, (born May 21, 1688, London, England—died May 30, 1744, Twickenham, near London), poet and satirist of the English Augustan period, best known for his poems An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), The Dunciad (1728), and An Essay on Man (1733–34). He is one of the most epigrammatic of all English authors.
His writing style
Alexander Pope, an 18th-century poet, is renowned for his distinctive writing style, often characterized as neoclassical and marked by its precision, clarity, and polished form.
Pope is most famous for his use of heroic couplets, a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter. He perfected this form, employing it in many of his works, including "The Rape of the Lock" and "The Dunciad." His skillful use of this structured verse form allowed for concise expression and balance in his poetry. Pope's writing often contains biting satire and keen wit. He was adept at using satire to critique the society, politics, and culture of his time. "The Rape of the Lock" is a prime example, satirizing the triviality of social etiquette and aristocratic society.
His writing is characterized by clarity, precision, and economy of words. Pope was meticulous in his choice of words and their arrangement, aiming for maximum impact and clarity of expression. Pope frequently used classical allusions and vivid imageries drawn from nature and classical literature. These elements added depth to his work and often served as a means to enhance the understanding of his themes.
The Rape of the Lock
Pope, in his poem, elevates this incident to an epic scale, employing grand language and epic conventions to narrate the story. The poem begins with an invocation to the Muse and presents Belinda, a beautiful young woman, as the protagonist. Belinda's lock of hair becomes the central object of desire and conflict in the narrative.
Pope employs wit, irony, and humor to highlight the absurdity of the situation, ultimately aiming to gently satirize the aristocratic society's trivial obsessions and exaggerated reactions. The poem is known for its clever use of language, its satire of social customs, and its skillful blending of the serious and the trivial.
One of the central themes of “The Rape of the Lock” is morality and the development of virtue. Because the poem is a satire, a textual example of a moral or virtuous person is absent from the poem itself, but Pope uses the characters to reveal an absence of morality or virtuousness. Ironically, the most moral character of the text is Ariel, a sylph whose purpose is to protect Belinda from making immoral choices, but even he falls short of moral obligations.
Social Satire in Rape of the Lock
Alexander Pope was one of the best satirists England has ever produced. The function of a satirist is didactic and his object is the reformation of humankind and their follies and foibles. The satirist has a yardstick of conduct. He has weapons like wit, mockery, humor, ridicule and irony. Pope has been accused of venom and pungency, which are attributed to his physical deformity. However, a close look at the Rape of the Lock would show that Pope has a wide range and, unlike Swift, he is quite capable of sympathetic understanding, ironic humor, as well as venomous castigation. Nevertheless, most of the time, he is elegantly polished and can say the bitterest thing with urbanity.
Why Pope Wrote the Rape of the Lock as a Social Satire?
The event of the writing of The Rape of the Lock was a quarrel between two families over a trifle, the cutting of a lock of hair of a girl by a lord. The Pope was commissioned to write a poem to make the two families laugh it away. It was a difficult task because Pope had to point out the triviality of the episode without giving offence to either party. Judging by the events, Pope perhaps did not succeed because the Lord in question married another woman with greater fortune, but the result was an incomparable mock-heroic poem.
The poem is incomparable in design and execution, with a combination of the gay and the serious, and the sparkle of wit and humor, which it irradiates. When Pope began the poem, he meant to concentrate upon the woman in question, but he was so carried away by the subject, he slipped from particular to the general. Belinda became a representative figure of the 18th century high society and Pope’s picture of her turned out as a satirical picture of that society.
Pope’s Sincerity Towards Belinda’s Beauty:
It is averse that Pope’s attitude towards women was disdainful, perhaps because of a lack of sympathetic understanding on the part of women for the deformed poet. However, there are many indications in the poem to show that a sweeping statement of this kind is unfair. In the beginning of the poem, Pope pays homage to the beauty of Belinda, which has a ring of sincerity in it.
The poem’s center of focus is around the experience of a beautiful woman, Belinda, who lost her lock of remarkable hair to a nobleman known as the Baron. As the poem goes along, it steadily becomes sillier and sillier and the characters collapse into a battle over the lock. Pope also added Clarissa’s speech into the poem, which argues that women spend much time on their looks rather than thinking to become a better person and serve society. The main thesis of Pope was that this kind of self-obsession is useless and radically nonsense. However, the poem’s conclusion seems to suggest that true beauty would be of some value, but if it becomes the subject of poetry, thus it achieves a kind of literary immortality.
Immorality and Carefree Nature of Upper Class:
Pope has presented that in a matter of times the careless and casual response of high society is dangerous. He presented the society where the upper class is busy in pursuit of their own goals through trivial and vain. He portrayed that upper-class people just think about themselves and obsessions. In this poem, the society displayed is one that fails to distinguish between things that matter and things that do not. What they care about is their personal life, luxuries, pomp, vanity. A life that is matchless to the ordinary and the common. He makes fun of their stupid deeds and self-obsessed attentions. He has disguised that this society just leads to immorality and distraction between humans. Alas, in the end, all upper-class people stay empty-handed.
It is serious that a woman’s hair is cut, but she has rejected a lord and such crimes are frivolities and fun of life in ease of nobility.
Pride in Rape of the Lock
The Rape of the Lock, reveals that the central concerns of the poem is pride, at least for women like Belinda and other social ones found in that society. Pope wants us to recognize that if Belinda has shown all her typical female weakness, then that would be against her pride, partly it is because she has been educated and trained to act in this way. The society as a whole community is as much to blame as she is or the men free from this judgment.
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift, (born November 30, 1667, Dublin, Ireland—died October 19, 1745, Dublin), Anglo-Irish author, who was the foremost prose satirist in the English language. Besides the celebrated novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), he wrote such shorter works as A Tale of a Tub (1704) and “A Modest Proposal” (1729).
Gulliver’s Travels
Swift’s greatest satire, Gulliver’s Travels, was published in 1726. It is uncertain when he began this work, but it appears from his correspondence that he was writing in earnest by 1721 and had finished the whole by August 1725.
The Individual Versus Society
Like many narratives about voyages to nonexistent lands, Gulliver’s Travels explores the idea of utopia—an imaginary model of the ideal community. The idea of a utopia is an ancient one, going back at least as far as the description in Plato’s Republic of a city-state governed by the wise and expressed most famously in English by Thomas More’s Utopia. Swift nods to both works in his own narrative, though his attitude toward utopia is much more skeptical, and one of the main aspects he points out about famous historical utopias is the tendency to privilege the collective group over the individual. The children of Plato’s Republic are raised communally, with no knowledge of their biological parents, in the understanding that this system enhances social fairness. Swift has the Lilliputians similarly raise their offspring collectively, but its results are not exactly utopian, since Lilliput is torn by conspiracies, jealousies, and backstabbing.
It's a satirical work that follows the voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, who narrates his adventures in four parts, each describing a different journey to fantastical lands.
In the first part, Gulliver travels to Lilliput, a land of tiny people, where he is a giant among them. Here, Swift uses the size difference to satirize various aspects of European society, including political and social issues, by presenting them in a distorted, miniature form.
The second voyage takes Gulliver to Brobdingnag, a land of giants, where he becomes the miniature being surrounded by enormous inhabitants. This part of the novel allows Swift to reverse the satire, highlighting the flaws of human nature when seen from the perspective of a vulnerable, small individual in a world of giants.
The third part sees Gulliver visiting the floating island of Laputa, where he encounters absurd scientific and intellectual pursuits, poking fun at the impracticality and detachment from reality often found in academia.
Finally, in the fourth part, Gulliver visits the land of the Houyhnhnms, intelligent and rational horses, and the brutish, human-like Yahoos. This part serves as a critique of human nature, society, and behavior, contrasting the noble, rational horses with the savage and base Yahoos.
Throughout the novel, Swift uses the different societies encountered by Gulliver to satirize various aspects of 18th-century English society, including politics, religion, science, and human nature. The book is celebrated for its wit, satire, and timeless commentary on the flaws and follies of humanity.
Conclusion
Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift expressed neoclassical nostalgia by drawing inspiration from classical literature and philosophy. Pope and Swift, through their respective works, embody the neoclassical spirit by using wit, satire, and classical literary elements to reflect on and critique the societal norms, values, and follies of their time. Their works serve as enduring reminders of the neoclassical era's emphasis on reason, restraint, and the examination of human nature within the framework of classical ideals.
References
Butt, John Everett. "Alexander Pope". Encyclopedia Britannica, 10 Sep. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alexander-Pope-English-author. Accessed 26 November 2023.
Cregan-Reid, Vybarr , Quintana, Ricardo and Bauer, Pat. "Gulliver’s Travels". Encyclopedia Britannica, 16 Oct. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gullivers-Travels Accessed 26 November 2023.
pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock. Alma Classics, 18 July 2018.
Quintana, Ricardo and Luebering, J.E.. "Jonathan Swift". Encyclopedia Britannica, 15 Oct. 2023 ,https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jonathan-Swift Accessed 26 November 2023.
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