Page 213 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes 28.1 Didacticism

Much of romantic poetry is marked by an egregious lack of realism amounting at times to sheer
escapism. Classicism, on the other hand, puts special emphasis on concrete reality and aims
pre-eminently at edification and improvement of the reader. That is why much of classical
poetry is realistic, didactic, and satiric. Almost all classical poets were men of action very much
in the thick of life and its pressing affairs. They wrote with a very clear and concrete purpose, not
just for the fun of it or for fulfilling a pressing necessity of self-revelation. Political, religious,
and even personal satire became in the Augustan era the vogue of the day. If the neo-classical
poet was not satiric, he was, at least, sure to be didactic. It is very rarely that we come across in
this age such a poem as Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, which is “a poem without a purpose” aiming
neither at instruction nor at ridicule nor chastisement through satire. To quote some instances,
Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel and The Medal are political satires, and his Mac Flecknoe a
personal satire. Pope’s most important poems, like The Dunciad, The Rape of the Lock, and The
Epistle to Afbuthnot, are all satires. Most of the rest of his poems, like his “Moral Essays”, are
didactic in aim. A subject on which neo-classical poets showed much brilliance was dullness—
the dullness of some specific rivals or the collective dullness of all of them put together. The
Dunciad and Mac Flecknoe show how dullness can serve as a target of brilliant satire. Some of
neo-classical poems are too much topical in nature, and all of them are full of contemporary
references, and they need exhaustive annotation to become comprehensible to the reader of
today who is unfamiliar with the atmosphere out of which these poems grew and which was
very well known to the readers of that age. The poem of the romantics, on the other hand, are
largely free from contemporary references, for the romantic poet, generally speaking, is not a
man of action and affairs and scarcely lives on the common, humdrum earth. He lives, instead, in
a world of his own fancy with magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery
lands forlorn.

28.2 Symbolism

Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in
poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs
du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Charles Baudelaire. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which
Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the
source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and
Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and ’70s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of
manifestoes and attracted a generation of writers. The name “symbolist” itself was first applied
by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the symbolists from the related
decadents of literature and of art.
Distinct from, but related to, the style of literature, symbolism of art is related to the gothic
component of Romanticism.

Notes In ancient Greece, the symbolon, was a shard of pottery which was inscribed and
then broken into two pieces which were given to the ambassadors from two allied
city states as a record of the alliance.
Symbolism was largely a reaction against naturalism and realism, anti-idealistic styles which
were attempts to represent reality in its gritty particularity, and to elevate the humble and the
ordinary over the ideal. Symbolism was a reaction in favour of spirituality, the imagination, and
dreams. Some writers, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, began as naturalists before becoming
symbolists; for Huysmans, this change represented his increasing interest in religion and
spirituality. Certain of the characteristic subjects of the decadents represent naturalist interest in

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