1. THE TEMPER OF CLASSICISM AND ROMANTICISM HOEL

2. to think clearly, to feel nobly, and to delineate firmly (Matthew Arnold) 3. Form controls the writers emotions and hold them in constant check Rules and Balance must be respected (e.g. three unities of action, time, and place; plot: a beginning, a middle, and an end, etc) Proportion is of great importance Literature as an exercise of rules language should fit certain conventions 4. It elevates reason Logic and intelligence were in the saddle Order and good sense must prevail Feeling must be held in balance by reason A standard of values was available for all 5. A classical work of art is objective rather than subjective Its author does not express her/his personal moods and fancy but human nature in general The interest in universal rather than individual qualities reflects itself, as wel, in the treatment classicism accorded to nature In general, nature to the classicist was a philosophical concept; it meant order and the universal 6. Austere, decorous, dignified, proper, never squalid, with a great repugnance for all that is low and a conscious purpose to improve society and humankind, the classical writers gave ab aesthetic significance, a nobility of manner, a moral purpose, to their work They interested themselves characteristically in actions which were excellent They identified the good and the beautiful 7. Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flowFor old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago (Wordsworth) 8. the return to nature (Rousseau) liberalism in literature (Hugo) sentimental melancholy (Phelps) the renascence of wonder (Watts-Dunton) a tendency toward individualism (Brunetiere) curiousity and the love of beauty (Pater) 9. enthusiasm for wild and irregular respect for the manner of living of the noble savage emotional psychology the democratic attitude an attack upon the established order restoration of passion 10. ecstasy spontaneity a zest for living the excessive dreaming faith without reason 11. It is not concerning with portraying a rational or external world; its is very much concerned with portraying the world from the vantage point of the personality of the writer They care very much for nature as a symbol of their own individual life 12. Trusting their personal sensation, they find the world one day dancing with the daffodils and another day tell us that a tear is an intellectual thing Joy and enthusiasm alternate with melancholy and Byronic pessimism Even when regarding the same scene, a poet finds it one day the basis for happiness, another day reason for despair, as witness Wordsworths sonnet Composed Upon Westminster Bridge in which London appeared to him a desired city, and yet, in the same month, September, 1802, another sonnet Written in London portrays the same city as one which lives by rapine, avarice, and expense His concern was with himself, not with London, and all he need retort, to justify his inconsistency, would be that one day one mood was uppermost, another day the other, for, as he says in his famous Preface, all good poetry is the spontaneous flow of powerful feelings 13. The romantic poet is carried away by a sense of wonderwonder at beauty, at melancholy, at the mystery of life itself The world is new, the grass is dew-pearled; in ecstasy the poet stands full of wonder and awe-stricken by the mystery of the morning 14. The search for a better world The romantics shuns actuality. Their desire is to remake the worldor find a new one nearer to the hearts desire Yet the romantic temper was not naively escapist The quest for a better world accounts, too, for the preoccupation of the romantic writer with dreams 15. The great romantic knows that he lives by faith and not by reason (Grierson). His is a literature of aspiration, of idealisation. His very day-dreams confirm it The romantics set a high value on nature. It meant for them irregularity and wildnessthe lack of order and conventionas for the neoclassicist it had been uniformity and universality Nature for these romantics, was a refuge The woods offered not only solace but cure 16. It was part of the same desire to idealise a civilisation which was not that in which the romantics themselves movedwhether it were a dream universe, a life of aspiration and faith, the simplicity of the noble savage, or a past epoch Allied with this enthusiasm for the remote in time is the interest of the romantic writer i things remote in space Still another means of escape for the romantic writer is that of adventure heightened by exaggeration 17. review: comparison & contrast