neoclassic and romantic: The simplest use of these extremely variable terms is

as noncommittal names for periods of literature. In this application, the "Neo­

classic Period" in England spans the 140 years or so after the Restoration
(1660), and the "Romantic Period" is usually taken to extend approximately
from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789-or alternatively, from
the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798-through the first three decades of
the nineteenth century. With reference to American literature, the term
"neoclassic" is rarely applied to eighteenth-centmy writers; on the other
hand, 1830-65, the era of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne,
is sometimes called "the American Romantic Period." (See periods of English
literature and periods of American literature.) "Neoclassic" and "romantic" are
frequently applied also to periods of German, French, and other Continental
literatures, but with differences in the historical spans they identify.
Historians have often tried to "define" neoclassicism or romanticism, as
though each term denoted an essential feature which was shared, to varying
degrees, by all the major writings of an age. But the multiplex course of liter­
ary events has not fom1ed itself around such simple entities, and the numerous
and conflicting single definitions of neoclassicism and romanticism are either
so vague as to be next to meaningless or so specific as to fall far short of equat­
ing with the great range and variety of the literary phenomena. A more useful
undertaking is simply to specify some salient attributes of litera1y theory and
practice that were shared by a number of prominent writers in the Neoclassic
Period in England, and that serve to distinguish them from many outstanding
writers of the Romantic Period. The following list of ideas and characteristics
that were shared, between 1660 and the late 1700s, by authors such as John
Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson,
Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke, may serve as an introducto1y sketch
of some prominent features of neoclassic literature:
1. These authors exhibited a strong traditionalism, which was often joined
to a distrust of radical innovation and was evidenced above all in their
great respect for classical writers-that is, the writers of ancient Greece
and Rome-who were thought to have achieved excellence, and estab­
lished the enduring models, in all the major litera1y ,i;tenres. Hence the
term "neoclassic." (It is from this high estimate of the literary achieve­
ments of classical antiquity that the tem1 "a classic" has come to be
applied to any later literary work that is widely agreed to have achieved
excellence and to have set a standard in its kind. Refer to the ent1y canon
 NEOCLASSIC AND ROMANTIC 237

of literature, and see T. S. Eliot, What Is a Classic? (1945), and Frank

Kermode, The Classic 1975.)
2. Literature was conceived to be primarily an "art"; that is, a set of skills
which, although it requires innate talents, must be perfected by long
study and practice and consists mainly in the deliberate adaptation of
known and tested means to the achievement of foreseen ends upon the
audience of readers. (See pragmatic criticism, under criticism.) The neoclassic
ideal, founded especially on Horace's Roman Ars Poetica (first century
BC), is the craftsman's ideal, demanding finish, correction, and attention
to detail. Special allowances were often made for the unerring and inno­
vative freedom of what were called natural geniuses, and also for felici­
tous strokes, available even to some less gifted poets, which occur without
premeditation and achieve, as Alexander Pope said (in his deft and com­
prehensive summary of neoclassic principles An Essay on Criticism, 1711),
"a grace beyond the reach of art." But the prevailing view was that a
natural genius such as Homer or Shakespeare is extremely rare, and prob­
ably a thing of the past, and that to even the best of artful poets, literary
"graces" come only occasionaJly. The representative neoclassic writer
commonly strove, therefore, for "correctness," was careful to observe
the complex demands of stylistic decorum, and for the most pa1t respected
the established "rules" of his art. The neoclassic rules of poetry were,
in theory, the essential properties of the various genres (such as epic, trag­
edy, comedy, pastoral) that have been abstracted from classical works
whose long survival has proved their excellence. Such properties, many
critics believed, must be embodied in modem works if these too are to
be excellent and to survive through the ages. In England, however, many
critics were dubious about some of the rules accepted by Italian and
French critics, and opposed the strict application of rules such as the three
unities in drama.
3. Human beings, and especially human beings as an integral part of a social
organization, were regarded as the primary subject matter of the major
forms of literature. Poet1y was held to be an imitation of human life--in a
common phrase, "a mirror held up to nature." And by the human actions
it imitates, and the a1tistic fom1 it gives to the imitation, poetry is de­
signed to yield both instruction and pleasure to the people who read it.
Not art for art's sake, but art for humanity's sake, was a central ideal of
neoclassic humanism.
4. In both the subject matter and the appeal of art, emphasis was placed on
what human beings possess in common-representative charactetistics
and widely shared experiences, thoughts, feelings, and tastes. "True
wit," Pope said in a much-quoted passage of his Essay on Criticism, is
"what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." That is, a primary
aim of poetry is to give new and consummate expression to the great
commonplaces of human wisdom, whose universal acceptance and dura­
bility are the best warrant of their importance and tmth. Some critics also
insisted, it should be noted, on the need to balance or enhance the
238 NEOCLASSIC AND ROMANTIC

general, typical, and familiar with the opposing qualities of novelty, par­
ticularity, and invention. Samuel Johnson substituted for Pope's definition
of true wit the statement that wit "is at once natural and new" and
praised Shakespeare because, while his characters are species, they are all
"discriminated" and "distinct." But there was wide agreement that the
general nature and the shared values of humanity are the basic source
and test of art, and also that the fact of universal human agreement, ev­
erywhere and always, is the best test of moral and religious truths, as well
as of artistic values. (Compare deism.)
5. Neoclassic writers, like the major philosophers of the time, viewed hu­
man beings as limited agents who ought to set themselves only accessible
goals. Many of the great works of the period, satiric and didactic, attack
human "pride"-interpreted as presumption beyond the natural limits of
the species-and enforce the lesson of the golden mean (the avoidance of
extremes) and of humanity's need to submit to its restricted position in
the cosmic order--an order sometimes envisioned as a natural hierarchy,
or Great Chain of Being. In art, as in life, what was for the most part
praised was the law of measure and the acceptance of limits upon one's
freedom. The poets admired extremely the great genres of epic and trag­
edy, but wrote their own masterpieces in admittedly lesser and less de­
manding forms such as the essay in verse and prose, the comedy of
manners, and especially satire, in which they felt they had more chance
to equal or surpass their classical and English predecessors. They submit­
ted to at least some "rules" and other limiting conventions in literary sub­
jects, structure, and diction. Typical was their choice, in many poems, to
write within the extremely tight limits of the closed couplet. But a distinc­
tive quality of the urbane poetry of the Neoclassic Period was, in the
phrase often quoted from Horace, "the art that hides art"; that is, the
seeming freedom and ease with which, at its best, it meets the challenge
set by traditional and highly restrictive patterns.
Here are some aspects in which romantic aims and achievements, as
manifested by many prominent and innovative writers during the late eigh­
teenth and early nineteenth centuries, differ most conspicuously from their
neoclassic precursors:
1. The prevailing attitude favored innovation over traditionalism in the
materials, forms, and style of literature. Wordsworth's preface to the sec­
ond edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800 was written as a poetic manifesto,
or statement of revolutionary aims, in which he denounced the upper­
class subjects and the poetic diction of the preceding century and proposed
to deal with materials from "common life" in "a selection of language
really used by men." Wordsworth's serious or tragic treatment of lowly
subjects in common language violated the neoclassic mle of decorum,
which asserted that the serious genres should deal only with the momen­
tous actions of royal or aristocratic characters in an appropriately elevated
style. Other innovations in the period were the exploitation by Samuel
 NEOCLASSIC AND ROMANTIC 239

Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and others of the realm of the supernatural
and of "the far away and the long ago"; the assumption by William
Blake, William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley of the persona of
a poet-prophet who writes a visionary mode of poetry; and the use of
poetic symbolism (especially by Blake and Shelley) deriving from a world­
view in which objects are charged with a significance beyond their phys­
ical qualities. "I always seek in what I see," as Shelley said, "the likeness
of something beyond the present and tangible object."
2. In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth repeatedly declared that
good poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Accord­
ing to this view, poet1y is not primarily a mirror of men in action;
on the contrary, its essential component is the poet's own feelings, while
the process of composition, since it is "spontaneous," is the opposite
of the artful manipulation of means to foreseen ends stressed by the neo­
classic critics. (See expressive criticism.) Wordsworth carefully qualified this
radical doctrine by describing his poetry as "emotion recollected in tran­
quility," by specifying that a poet's spontaneity is the result of a prior pro­
cess of deep reflection, and by granting that it may be followed by second
thoughts and revisions. But the immediate act of composition, if a poem
is to be genuine, must be spontaneous-that is, unforced, and free of
what Wordsworth decried as the "artificial" rules and conventions of his
neoclassic predecessors. "If poet1y comes not as naturally as the leaves to a
tree," Keats wrote, "it had better not come at all." The philosophical­
minded Coleridge substituted for neoclassic "rules," which he describes
as imposed on the poem from without, the concept of inherent organic
"laws"; that is, he conceives that each poetic work, like a growing
plant, evolves according to its own internal principles into its final
organic form.
3. To a remarkable degree external nature-the landscape, together with its
flora and fauna-became a persistent subject of poet1y, and was described
with an accuracy and sensuous nuance unprecede�ted in earlier writers. It
is a mistake, however, to describe the romantic poets as simply "nature
poets." (See nature writing, under ecocriticism.) While many major poems
by Wordsworth and Coleridge-and to a great extent by Shelley and
Keats-set out from and return to an aspect or change of aspect in the
landscape, the outer scene is not presented for its own sake but as a stim­
ulus for the poet to engage in the most characteristic human activity, that
of thinking. Representative Romantic works are in fact poems of feeling­
ful meditation which, although often stimulated by a natural phenome­
non, are concerned with central human experiences and problems.
Wordsworth asserted, in what he called a "Prospectus" to his major
poems, that it is "the Mind of Man" which is "my haunt, and the main
region of my song."
4. Neoclassic poetry was about other people, but many Romantic poems,
long and sho1t, invited the reader to identify the protagonists with the
poets themselves, either directly, as in Wordsworth's Prelude (1805, rev.
240 NEOCLASSIC AND ROMANTIC

1850) and a number of lyric poems (see lyric), or in altered but recogniz­
able form, as in Lord Byron's Childe Harold (1812-18). In prose we find a
parallel vogue in the revealingly personal essays of Charles Lamb and
William Hazlitt and in a number of spiritual and intellectual autobiogra­
phies: Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822),
Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817), and Thomas Carlyle's fictionalized
self-representation in Sartor Resartus (1833-34). And whether Romantic
subjects were the poets themselves or other people, they were no longer
represented as part of an organized society but, typically, as solitary figures
engaged in a long, and sometimes infinitely elusive, quest; often they
were also social nonconformists or outcasts. Many important Romantic
works had as protagonist the isolated rebel, whether for good or ill:
Prometheus, Cain, the Wandering Je,:v, the Satanic hero-villain, or the
great outlaw.
5. What seemed to a number of political liberals the infinite social promise
of the French Revolution in the early 1790s fostered the sense in
Romantic writers that theirs was a great age of new beginnings and
high possibilities. Many writers viewed a human being as endowed with
limitless aspiration toward an infinite good envisioned by the faculty of
imagination. "Our destiny," Wordsworth says in a visionaty moment in
The Prelude, "our being's heart and home, / Is with infinitude, and only
there," and our desire is for "something evermore about to be." "Less
than everything," Blake announced, "cannot satisfy man." Humanity's
undaunted aspirations beyond its assigned limits, which to the neoclassic
moralist had been its tragic error of genetic "pride," now became human­
ity's glory and a mode of triumph, even in failure, over the pettiness of
circumstance. In a parallel way, the typical neoclassic judgment that the
highest art is the perfect achievement of limited aims gave way to dissat­
isfaction with rules and inhe1ited restrictions. According to a number of
Romantic writers, the highest art consists in an endeavor beyond finite
human possibility; as a result, neoclassical satisfaction in the perfectly
accomplished, because limited, enterprise was replaced in writers such as
Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, by a preference for the glory
of the imperfect, in which the artist's very failure attests the grandeur of
his aim. Also, Romantic writers once more entered into competition
with their greatest predecessors in audacious long poems in the most
exacting genres: Wordsworth's Prelude (a rerendering, at epic length and
in the form of a spiritual autobiography, of central themes of John Mil­
ton's Paradise Lost); Blake's visionary and prophetic epics; Shelley's Prome­
theus Unbound (emulating Greek drama); Keats' Miltonic epic Hyperion;
and Byron's ironic conspectus of contemporary European civilization,
Don Juan.
See Enlightenment, and refer to R. S. Crane, "Neoclassical Criticism," in
Dictionary of World Literature, ed. Joseph T. Shipley (rev. 1970); A. 0. Lovejoy,
Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); James Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth
 NEW CRITICISM 241

Century Poetry (1948); W. J. Bate, From Classic to Romantic (1948); Harold

Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (1961);
Rene Wellek, "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History" and
"Romanticism Re-examined," in Concepts of Criticism (1963); Northrop Frye,
ed., Romanticism Reconsidered (1963), and A Study of English Romanticism
(1968); M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Criti­
cal Tradition (1953), and Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in
Romantic Literature (1971); Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of
Ruin (1981); Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Litera­
ture and Its Background 1760-1830 (1982); Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ide­
ology (1983); Marilyn Gaull, English Romanticism: The Human Context (1988);
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The
Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (trans. 1988); Isaiah Berlin, Tiie
Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (1990); Stuart
Curran, ed., The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism (1993). Hugh
Honour, in his books on Neo-classicism (1969) and on Romanticism (1979),
stresses the visual arts. A collection of essays that define or discuss Romanti­
cism is Robert F. Gleckner and Gerald E. Enscoe, eds., Romanticism: Points of
View (rev. 1975); see also An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British
Culture 1776-1832 (2001). In Poetic Fonn and British Romaniicism (1986),
Stuart Curran stresses the relationship of innovative Romantic forms to the
traditional poetic genres.
See also closed couplet; decorum; deism; Enlightenment; Great Chain of Being;
humanism; primitivism; satire.