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British Poetry

Notes Introduction

Literary devices refers to specific aspects of literature, in the sense of its universal function as an art
form which expresses ideas through language, which we can recognize, identify, interpret and/ot
analyze. Literary devices collectively comprise the art form’s components; the means by which authors
create meaning through language, and by which readers gain understanding of and appreciation for
their works. They also provide a conceptual framework for comparing individual literary works to
others, both within and across genres. Both literary elements and literary techniques can rightly be
called literary devices.

2.1 Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature,
theatre, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the “classical” art and culture of Ancient
Greece or Ancient Rome. One such movement was dominant in Europe from the mid-18th to the
19th centuries. Neoclassicism is opposed to Modernism, in which self-expression and improvisation
are considered virtues.
The English Neoclassical movement, predicated upon and derived from both classical and
contemporary French models, embodied a group of attitudes toward art and human existence-
ideals of order, logic, restraint, accuracy, “correctness,” “restraint,” decorum, and so on, which
would enable the practitioners of various arts to imitate or reproduce the structures and themes of
Greek or Roman orginals. Though its origins were much earlier, Neoclassicism dominated English
literature from the Restoration in 1660 until the end of the eighteenth century, when the publication
of Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge marked the full emergence of Romanticism.
“Neoclassicism” in each art implies a particular canon of “classic” models-e.g. Virgil, Raphael, Nicolas
Poussin, and Haydn. Other cultures have other canons of classics, however, and a recurring strain
of neoclassicism appears to be the natural expression of cultures that are confident of their mainstream
traditions, but also feel the need to regain something that has slipped away.
Neoclassicism was a widespread and influential movement in painting and the other visual arts
that began in the 1760s, reached its height in the 1780s and ’90s, and lasted until the 1840s and ’50s.
In painting it generally took the form of an emphasis on austere linear design in the depiction of
classical themes and subject matter, using archaeologically correct settings and costumes.
Neoclassicism arose partly as a reaction against the sensuous and frivolously decorative Rococo
style that had dominated European art from the 1720s on. But an even more profound stimulus was
the new and more scientific interest in classical antiquity that arose in the 18th century. Neoclassicism
was given great impetus by new archaeological discoveries, particularly the exploration and
excavation of the buried Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, the excavations of which began
in 1738 and 1748, respectively. And from the second decade of the 18th century on, a number of
influential publications by Bernard de Montfaucon, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the Comte de Caylus,
and Robert Wood provided engraved views of Roman monuments and other antiquities and further
quickened interest in the classical past. The new understanding distilled from these discoveries and
publications in turn enabled European scholars for the first time to discern separate and distinct
chronological periods in Greco-Roman art, and this new sense of a plurality of ancient styles replaced
the older, unqualified veneration of Roman art and encouraged a dawning interest in purely Greek
antiquities. The German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s writings and sophisticated
theorizings were especially influential in this regard. Winckelmann saw in Greek sculpture “a noble
simplicity and quiet grandeur” and called for artists to imitate Greek art. He claimed that in doing
so such artists would obtain idealized depictions of natural forms that had been stripped of all
transitory and individualistic aspects, and their images would thus attain a universal and archetypal
significance.
Neoclassicism as manifested in painting was initially not stylistically distinct from the French Rococo
and other styles that had preceded it. This was partly because, whereas it was possible for architecture

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