American Literature I Professor Cyrus R. K. Patell Lecture Seven: American Neoclassicism New York University

Names and Concepts

Augustan / neoclassical style: John Dryden (1631-1700), Alexander Pope (1688-1744), (1709-84) Aristotle, Poetics mimesis: poetry as an imitation of nature Horace, Ars Poetica / John Stafford Smith broadside epideictic poetry

Quotes

Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (1784)

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!

Thomas Jefferson on the Enlghtenment in 1826:

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others.

Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Cowley,” Lives of the Poets (1779–81)

Wit, like all other things subject by their nature to the choice of man, has its changes and fashions, and at different times takes different forms. About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets, of whom, in a criticism on the works of Cowley, it is not improper to give some account.

The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the Patell / American Literature I / Lecture 7 2

finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables.

If the father of criticism [Aristotle] has rightly denominated poetry an imitative art, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated any thing; they neither copied nature nor life, neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect.

Those, however, who deny them to be poets allow them to be wits. Dryden confesses of himself and his contemporaries that they fall below Donne in wit, but maintains that they surpass him in poetry.

If Wit be well described by Pope, as being “that which has often been thought, but was never before so well expressed,” they certainly never attained, nor ever sought it, for they endeavoured to be singular in their thoughts, and were careless of their diction. But Pope’s account of wit is undoubtedly erroneous; he depresses it below its natural dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of language.

If by a more noble and more adequate conception that be considered Wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that, which he that never found it, wonders how he missed, to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen. Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.

But Wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

Leading Doctrines of the Enlightenment

· natural goodness of human beings · perfectibility of human race · emphasis on reason (beliefs to be accepted on the basis of · reason: atheism, deism) · equality before the law and the right to individual liberty · toleration · universal brotherhood of all rational beings · science / progress

Patell / American Literature I / Lecture 7 3

Principles of English Neoclassicism

• mimesis: from Aristotle’s Poetics, poetry as imitative, creating a truthful representation of nature • assimilation of classical genres: the epic, eclogue, elegy, ode, satire, tragedy, comedy, epigram • reaction against the metaphysical verse: • celebration of restraint, simplicity, impersonality, decorum (Horace’s Ars Poetica) • reaction against ornament, obscurity, personality, excess, extravagance, wild strains of imagination: Johnson’s Life of Cowley. • emphasis on the universal rather than the particular • didactic poetry • propagation of humanism: (see, for example, Pope’s Essay on Man)

Francis Scott Key, “The Defense of Fort McHenry”

• Meter: anapestic tetrameter (“the galloping meter”). How do the poem’s formal attributes (metrical scheme, rhyme scheme, diction, syntax) enhance its meaning? • How does the poem turn on the depiction of a literal enlightenment, of darkness lifted? • Note the mood of the verbs in the penultimate lines of each stanza. What does the progression signify? • How does the poem move from darkness, conflict, and uncertainty to light and knowledge?

Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784)

• Major influences: a) the Bible; 2) English neoclassical poetry, especially Alexander Pope. • Wheatley as a atypical and representative as a poet: she is the only poet who is a slave and a woman, but her status as a slave can be taken as an extreme version of the poet's marginal status during this period. Stylistically, she is a prime example of neoclassical verse in the manner of Pope. • Wheatley’s poetics: imitation, not experimentation. • Compare her need for “authentication” to that of Mary Rowlandson. Compare her self- deprecatory strategies to those of Anne Bradstreet. • Wheatley's imitation of accepted forms of poetic excellence serves to demonstrate that African Americans are not intellectually or spiritually inferior to whites and can be saved: “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train” (“On Being Brought from Africa to America”). On what pun does this poem turn?

Today’s Video

Clip from The Sum of All Fears, starring Ben Affleck (“Star-Spangled Banner”) Patell / American Literature I / Lecture 7 4

Today’s Songs

“The Star-Spangled Banner,” performed by:

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones Duke Ellington Louis Armstrong Bruce Springsteen (live at the “Vote for Change Concert,” St. Paul, MN, October 2004) Whitney Houston (live 1/27/91 at Super Bowl XXV) Jimi Hendrix