transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:18] This is not just another Book Chat Podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading well. Explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week, we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The literary life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is The Literary Life Podcast. Hello, and welcome to The Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford, and here with me is my very own neoclassical poet, the mysterious Mr. Banks.

Speaker 2:
[01:37] I spake in numbers for the numbers came.

Speaker 1:
[01:40] See, I do always think of you as, I think of myself as the romantic and you as the neoclassical person at HHL.

Speaker 2:
[01:48] I think actually, I mean, I don't think any of us could have lived very comfortably in the past century because there's just too many modern conveniences we're used to. But if I had to pick a past century to live in, I don't know, I think the 18th and I could get along in some ways.

Speaker 1:
[02:05] Let's think about that because the 18th century is when you have the birth of the coffee house culture, and they would just go over there and read the newspaper and talk to each other and write pamphlets and write poems. I was like, that is you. You could do that.

Speaker 2:
[02:18] Yeah, literature was sociable. Literature was still sociable.

Speaker 1:
[02:22] So if you haven't figured out, today's episode is going to be an introduction to neoclassical period of poetry. When that is, what that is, what are some of the characteristics of it. As an introduction to next week, we're going to cover Alexander Pope's mock heroic epic, The Rape of the Lock. And you guys have really been enjoying, we've picked a longer poem and so we really hadn't covered a whole lot from the 18th century. So we thought this would be a fun introduction.

Speaker 2:
[02:50] And I think we needed kind of a nice light, a moosebush after the heady and sometimes heavy passions of Jane Eyre.

Speaker 1:
[02:59] Agreed, agreed, agreed. I mean, that was a fantastic book and we really enjoyed it. It was a really great series. But yes, I'm happy to turn the page on and it was quite exhausting. Before we get going, we are teachers and owners of the House of Humane Letters, where we teach online classes, year-long classes, short-term classes, everything from a 90-minute webinar, which I put that in quotation marks because we almost always go three hours to year-long classes and everything in between. This is a 100 percent member-supported podcast. There will be no ads at any point for changing your cell phone company or weight loss drugs. This is my running joke, except it's not a joke. I actually heard a podcast from a classical school company and it stopped it in the middle to ask you to change your cell phone and take weight loss drugs.

Speaker 2:
[03:55] Yeah. It's kind of disturbingly.

Speaker 1:
[03:57] It is kind of disturbing. Anyway, that won't happen here. We are member-supported. We are supported largely from our Patreon, who through their generous support keeps us going and, of course, has a lot of benefits to that Patreon community as well. Of course, our day job is teachers at House of Humane Letters. So we're always going to tell you what's going on there. This is going to be a nice introduction, but we have places where you can go for much deeper dives. We are currently enrolling for our year-long classes, and you can check that out there at our website, houseofhumaneletters.com, but we also have a couple of short-term things that we want to alert you guys to. If you listen to the Jane Eyre series, then you heard us talk about this there. But this might be somebody's first introduction to the podcast. So April's short-term webinar is going to be done by our own Inklings scholar, Jenn Rogers. And she's doing it on a lesser-known, but a very important work by C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress. And this is called Tell Me That Story Again, How the Pilgrim's Regress Wrote C. S. Lewis. She is going to take us through all of that allegory. He actually calls the work an allegorical apology for romanticism, reason, and Christianity. And she has been researching this for quite a while and thinks that this book is sort of kind of like an interpretive key for everything else Lewis does in his career. So this is going to be fascinating. There's already a group on Patreon who are reading The Pilgrim's Regress together. So that is going to be on April 27th at 7 p.m. if you'd like to join us for that. Again, you can register or find out more and read the whole description at houseofhumainletters.com. Everything we do is live or later, so the video would be yours to keep to watch again and again and to watch at a different time than the live session.

Speaker 2:
[05:39] And it is, yeah, just to lay some emphasis on this, it's a more important book than you would think. And I didn't realize that until I read it fairly late in my reading life. But it is, yeah, it does kind of set the stage for, I mean, I won't say everything, but for very much of what C.

Speaker 1:
[05:57] S.

Speaker 2:
[05:58] Lewis writes afterwards in his fictional creativity.

Speaker 1:
[06:04] I agree. I'm really looking forward to this one. So while you're at the website, do go ahead and sign up for our mailing list too, so you can find out. We have something new going on every month. You can also find out what's going on from scholars that work with us, like Dr. Jason Baxter or Dr. Michael Drought. There's going to be an exciting announcement about Dr. Drought teaching a Tolkien class for us, so you're going to want to keep on the lookout for that. We also have, as another side gig, our own publishing house, Cassiodorus Press, where we continue to try to contribute to the recovery of the lost intellectual tradition of the Humane Letters through our publications there. Some of you know that Dr. Baxter published a book for us, Why Literature Still Matters, which was a huge hit, and he's got another book coming out. It's actually right now, it's already out, so run over to the website and buy it, and it's called Falling Inward. As Dr. Anne Phillips said, she felt like Why Literature Still Matters was the abolition of man for our time, and she also felt like Falling Inward was the lost tools of learning for our time. If you have an interest in literature and the humanities and why they're still important or maybe even more important than ever in this technological age that we live in, those are going to be two fantastic, accessible, great places to start. That website is cassiodoraspress.com where you can find those. You can also see that Dr. Baxter is teaching a class for us over at House of Human Letters as well. It's a class that's part two of why literature still matters for people who are asking, well, now what? And so he calls this, where do we go from here? Reading for life. And he's going to take us through the epic, the lyric, the tragedy, several of the different forms. And that's shaping up to be a great class as well. So again, houseofhumainletters.com, cassiodoraspress.com. Get on the mailing list, find out what's going on, jump in. All right.

Speaker 2:
[07:56] Common places?

Speaker 1:
[07:57] Absolutely. If you're new to this podcast, we always like to start with a quote from something we've been reading.

Speaker 2:
[08:02] I have something angry and bitter from George Orwell's underrated novel, Coming Up for Air. And this is the main character in the book.

Speaker 1:
[08:10] You just reread that for the umpteenth time.

Speaker 2:
[08:12] Yeah, fourth time. Yeah, I like that book better every time I read it. And I don't know why it doesn't have more fans. Anyway, so from Coming Up for Air, the main character, George Boling, in this scene has just come away from an ugly suburban set of houses, which have been built in the neighborhood where he used to fish, which was just open fields when he was a boy. And he's commenting on the landscaping and lawn decor of some of his neighbors. And this sounds almost contemporary. So he says, say what you like, call it silly, childish, anything. But doesn't it make you puke sometimes to see what they're doing to England with their bird baths and their plaster gnomes and their pixies and tin cans where the beech woods used to be?

Speaker 1:
[09:05] Oh, that's right. I remember you read this to me and we had a long discussion about how old our garden is.

Speaker 2:
[09:09] Yeah, like, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[09:11] I was surprised it went back that far.

Speaker 2:
[09:12] If you have a garden gnome, it's nothing against you. But, but yes, yeah. And as long as there have been garden gnomes, there have been people, you know, maybe more misanthropic people who found them kitschy and, and hate them. Do you remember back, this is something I heard of back in the early 2000s. There was an activist group, and this sounds like a joke, but it was serious. And they wanted to, it was called, it was the Free the Garden Gnomes group. And it was, the objective of it was to ban the use of garden gnomes as lawn decor because that was objectifying or something like that.

Speaker 1:
[09:51] To, to the fictional gnomes?

Speaker 2:
[09:53] To gnomes, yeah. If there were real gnomes, it would mean that, you know, it would be implying that they were only decorative and had no agency of their own.

Speaker 1:
[10:01] I'm glad to know that imaginary figures have defenders.

Speaker 2:
[10:05] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[10:05] What year was this?

Speaker 2:
[10:07] This would have been the early 2000s. I remember hearing about this when I was a teenager.

Speaker 1:
[10:12] I need to know what comes first. This are that almost identical storyline in Harry Potter.

Speaker 2:
[10:19] I know. There is- Right.

Speaker 1:
[10:21] You have to free the house elves.

Speaker 2:
[10:23] Yeah. But no, this was a serious thing. This was an activist. Yeah. I wonder if the same sort of person-

Speaker 1:
[10:28] Get out of things to be-

Speaker 2:
[10:29] I know, to be offended at. It's like that other group. I think this is just a couple of people, but they have dedicated their lives to it. That couple who aims to get the relevant agencies, I don't even know who they would be, to ban Comic Sans in public advertising and things like that. Yeah. I don't like Comic Sans either, really.

Speaker 1:
[10:55] You are not people who need a cause to be able to function.

Speaker 2:
[10:58] No, I'm too lazy for that in a lot of ways. You're not too lazy, but you're too idealistic for any cause. Maybe that would be the most we can do. We avoid causes for the same reasons. I think if either of us became a professional activist for anything, it would probably bother the other.

Speaker 1:
[11:17] Oh, very much so. I'd have to question all my life choices if you did.

Speaker 2:
[11:21] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[11:23] Well, transitioning from our marriage counseling session to my commonplace.

Speaker 2:
[11:26] Yeah, that was getting kind of dark.

Speaker 1:
[11:29] That's just for the Patreon. They get that cut.

Speaker 2:
[11:31] U-turn here.

Speaker 1:
[11:32] Yeah, exactly. I cover the neoclassical literary period in my class, Early Modern Lit, where we cover the poets and we cover Jonathan Swift. We read all of Gulliver's travels. Then we read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. One of the things I like to say in that class is that a lot of people make the mistake of lumping Jane Austen in with the romantic writers, and that I think that is entirely incorrect. I think that she's actually the last of the great neoclassical writers. And I found an article once that supported that idea. So I was looking over it a little while ago and thought, oh goodness, what quote to pick. But I'm just going to quote one little part which I think will probably go with our discussion today about the neoclassical poets. So this essay is called Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in the 18th Century Mode by a scholar named Samuel Kleger.

Speaker 2:
[12:27] All right.

Speaker 1:
[12:28] So here's my quote. No notion was more characteristic of an English neoclassicism than the idea that taste in the fine arts is an ally of morals. The 18th century believed that both the feeling for beauty and the pricing of what is decent and proper, perfect the character of the gentleman.

Speaker 2:
[12:50] Ah, yes. No, that summarizes it very, very aptly, I think.

Speaker 1:
[12:53] Yeah, I think so too. And if you follow that idea through Jane Austin's works, what you find is that she gives a lot of attention to the taste of the characters, right?

Speaker 2:
[13:02] Who likes what books?

Speaker 1:
[13:04] Who likes what books?

Speaker 2:
[13:04] Or pretends to.

Speaker 1:
[13:05] Who pretends to read.

Speaker 2:
[13:07] Caroline Bingley looking at you.

Speaker 1:
[13:09] Their drawings, their piano playing, the way they decorate their houses, the way that they decorate their gardens, all of those things, she pays a great deal of attention to. Who talks in slang? Who uses proper diction? Because like the quote said, that is indicative of something of their character. So Lydia speaks in a lot of slang, so then we're not too surprised when Lydia makes some choices. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[13:36] What's Lydia's, what's the thing she always says? La. La. Which is like the PG rated, is it like Lord or something, but it's not. And that society probably have counted as a violation of-

Speaker 1:
[13:49] Almost the blasphemous age of the day. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[13:51] But La is-

Speaker 1:
[13:52] Oh, I didn't know that.

Speaker 2:
[13:53] Is that the OMG of-

Speaker 1:
[13:55] I think it's the OMG of its day. And yeah, she's obsessed with playing that card game lottery tickets.

Speaker 2:
[14:04] I had forgotten this.

Speaker 1:
[14:04] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[14:05] She's been way too long since I've read this.

Speaker 1:
[14:06] She's just very sliverous. And again, there's a lot of kind of, I think almost to us throw away scenes. But when you realize that symmetry is a great value of the neoclassical period, as we will talk about today, that Jane Austen's novels have a tremendous amount of symmetry in them. And what she likes to do is delineate character by doubling and contrasting. So Mr. Collins has very bad taste, and Mr. Darcy has very good taste. In their homes, you see that difference there, and the way Mary plays the piano versus the way Elizabeth plays the piano. Just on and on and on, you'll notice those little things. So yeah, we're going to talk about the neoclassical period.

Speaker 2:
[14:46] So Mr.- Also, one more note about Jane Austen. If you read a lot of Jane Austen, and then you start digging in the great prose writers of the 18th century, Samuel Johnson, Joseph Addison, Oliver Goldsmith, you realize that she formed her style on these, in fact, the opening line of Pride and Prejudice, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune is one of a wife, is an ironic twist on how a great many 18th century treatises began.

Speaker 1:
[15:16] They all would begin.

Speaker 2:
[15:17] It's some large generalization like that.

Speaker 1:
[15:20] It's universally acknowledged and they'd say their thing, and that would be their thesis statement. So yeah, I'm always surprised when people think she's a romantic. I think she's just a neoclassical writer through and through.

Speaker 2:
[15:30] Yeah, who happened to be living at the end of that period, as it was expiring?

Speaker 1:
[15:36] I think she, I mean, you'll hear us criticize some things on the podcast about the neoclassical period, but that doesn't mean that everything is bad. And I think Jane Austen represents the best of that period.

Speaker 2:
[15:46] I might be tempted to agree. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[15:50] All right, so let's start off with sort of just defining our terms here. What is the neoclassical period for our listeners? What time period does that cover?

Speaker 2:
[16:00] To bracket it in dates, it's kind of hard. I would say from about 1650 to the late 1700s, maybe 1800s, with some lingering after effects.

Speaker 1:
[16:11] So the Restoration.

Speaker 2:
[16:12] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[16:13] Okay, so the Restoration, King Charles II comes back to the throne, to the publication of lyrical ballads by Wordsworth and Goldrich at the end of 1700s.

Speaker 2:
[16:22] If I had to choose like a year, when does the movement end? I might pick like 1796. I actually might pick 1789 because the French Revolution, all those.

Speaker 1:
[16:31] The phone being 1789 is a major.

Speaker 2:
[16:33] Often like cultural histories of the Romantic Age will begin in 1789 for good reasons. But yes, so the neo-classical movement, which is not like most literary, like all I would say great literary movements is not limited to one country. I mean, it's basically a, I would say it has its origins mainly in France, they're not exclusively there and kind of radiates outward to other countries. And also we should say to across the ocean, to the colonies as well.

Speaker 1:
[17:04] I mean, capitals, nothing but neo-classical.

Speaker 2:
[17:07] If you read any of the founding fathers, Jefferson especially, Jefferson is a very cosmopolitan sort of writer. Jefferson could have been a Frenchman, I think. And he was, he in fact was in some ways very comfortable in that country, and he had a lot of French acquaintances. And the whole neo-classical movement, if you try to reduce it to a couple of principles, one of them is the search for good sense.

Speaker 1:
[17:33] Absolutely.

Speaker 2:
[17:34] And that's actually the name of a book by, a fellow by the name of F. L. Lucas, Frank Lucas who was a Oxford literary scholar. He wrote a number of books including a history of literary style, which is just called style. C. S. Lewis and he knew of each other, though I don't know that they ever met. Anyway, a couple of F. L. Lucas' books are studies of some of the main figures in the continental movement that was neoclassicism. And it's a period in which, as we said, good sense, rational order, and gentlemanly taste are prized almost as a substitute for religion with some people, I think you can say. And it's also an era during much of which, though, of course, public religion is still a very important part of people's lives. It's a period in which a kind of urbane skepticism is also fashionable, not atheism. But remember, this is a period in which deism is, a lot of the main figures you could point to like Voltaire, I think Montesquieu. Some people say Alexander Pope himself, though I would not include him in that. But Edward Gibbon, the famous English historian, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin.

Speaker 1:
[19:04] This is a period that is going to primarily appeal to the intellect and to the reason when it comes to matters of faith, good sense, good morality, good Christian living, but not a lot of mysticism, miracles, embarrassing parts.

Speaker 2:
[19:19] Yeah, the strong feelings expressed strongly. That's something that we, they liked to think they had grown beyond. And in many ways, this is kind of a cultural, in many places, it's a cultural reaction to, you know, in the 16th and 17th centuries, you know, the great controversies of religion and, you know, wars of religion and all that kind of thing that had animated so much of the, you know, so much of the experience of many generations of European people. You know, the Age of Reason, its principle protagonists tended to look back on that period with regret and also disdain, I think you can say.

Speaker 1:
[20:05] And continuing just to try to at first sketch up, kind of sketch out the landscape for us of this period. It's, scholars generally break it into three different periods. So we have the Restoration, which marks the end of the Renaissance. And it's kind of its own period. And then the next period, this is all the 18th century. So the Restoration is, the Restoration is 1660 to 1700. So it closes out the 18th century there. I mean, it closes out the 17th century. And then the 18th century, you have what's called the Augustan Age or the Neoclassical Period. And that's when you've got your Swift and your Pope and your Dryden and all my favorites there. And then in the latter half of that century, you have the Age of Johnson, also sometimes called the Age of Sensibility.

Speaker 2:
[20:50] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[20:51] So that's Samuel Johnson and the Scripps Club.

Speaker 2:
[20:53] Yeah, if you wanted to divide the Neoclassical Era into kind of three chunks, that would be one way to do it. And of course, if you're looking at France or Germany, it would be a bit different, of course. But yeah, Samuel Johnson also, I mean, I would say you can't really understand the period without understanding him as a key figure because he's a man who writes in many different genres, you know, fiction and non-fiction. He was a pretty accomplished poet himself. He wrote London and the Vanity of Human Wishes. He wrote one kind of melancholy philosophical novel called Rassilus. He was a literary critic and he was in his own day known as the Great Cham of Literature. So, he became kind of a dictator of taste almost. That sounds like an unpleasant thing to be, but if ever anyone deserved to be a dictator of literary taste, I think Samuel Johnson would be high in the running. And immediately after his death, almost immediately after he dies in 1784, you start to see kind of the beginnings of reaction against that. And there are even hints of the coming romantic revolution already, like with the gothic novel, which has its beginning in the 18th century.

Speaker 1:
[22:05] The Scottish poet.

Speaker 2:
[22:07] I was going to say Ossian, because do you remember Ossian? Okay, Ossian was a literary hoax. It claimed to be, it was purported to be by a number of publishers and a Scottish antiquarian named MacPherson. Okay, he claimed to be like the Scottish Homer, like this primitive heroic poetry, which we have recovered from old manuscripts and are now giving to the general public. And Samuel Johnson, of course, at the beginning, because he had just kind of hardheaded common sense about these things. He knew that you didn't have a literary culture in Scotland in like 750 BC. And this is like, this is rubbish. At the same time, though, it did kind of light a fire with some people. And it did something to serve, it was sort of a prelude to the revolution in literary taste, which came after Johnson's death. And with the lyrical ballad. So even though, yes, it was basically a hoax. And the people who were taken in by it probably felt justifiably foolish for it. Nonetheless, it did show that people were, I guess you could say that the heart and the attraction to primitive things, distant things and darker and more obscure parts of history and human experience was sort of coming back into fashion.

Speaker 1:
[23:28] So the neoclassical period of literature and art does correspond to the Enlightenment. And with the Restoration and the official end of the Renaissance, it's like the Renaissance wants to rediscover Greek and Roman artistic ideals. And the neoclassical period is like, we're going to up that to a thousand. We're the new Greeks and Romans. We're the new classical period. And it's called the Augustan Age for Caesar Augustus, right? Right. And this means a number of things. This means that anything medieval is very out of fashion. Everything from medieval literature to writing romances, meaning like Knights on a Quest story, the type of meter changes. We see poetry dominated by the heroic couplet, and where medieval literature is multi-layered with lots of symbolism and allegory. The neoclassical period is going for some sort of Greek freshness and clarity.

Speaker 2:
[24:26] Yeah, bright and translucent.

Speaker 1:
[24:28] Yes. And so they want clarity and brevity. So we get those heroic couplets. You also see, we said symmetry, okay, that's a Greek ideal, order, balance, a huge emphasis on wit. The neoclassical period is extremely witty.

Speaker 2:
[24:48] And though you still find allegory in the arts, you get the impression that it's kind of there on sufferance when it does appear. And Samuel Johnson again once remarked that, I would rather look at a picture of a dog I know than all of the allegorical paintings in the world.

Speaker 1:
[25:07] Oh Samuel, we have to part ways on that. But okay, so just as an aside, a couple of things about what got really popular in this time period, because I find this kind of stuff fascinating is you see the trend that people are bringing Greek and Roman ruins into their homes. This is when you get the statues in the yards and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2:
[25:26] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[25:27] But if you follow the-

Speaker 2:
[25:28] Glottos and-

Speaker 1:
[25:29] Right, right. If you follow the fashion trends of the 18th century, though, you realize that they're trying to look like Greek and Roman people, okay? I mean, it's just wildly different. The Regency period, the dress. And they're trying to capture that. This is one of the reasons why I obsess when I watch historical movies and I get mad every time there's a sidebar.

Speaker 2:
[25:50] The costumes are wrong.

Speaker 1:
[25:51] Yes. Because everyone parted their hair down the middle because the ideal was symmetry. That was the Greek ideal. And so the hair part cuts your face in half. And you'll read Jane Austen and she will describe people as having a symmetrical face. That is high praise.

Speaker 2:
[26:06] Here's something. If you look at most of the portraits of almost all the well-known men of the period, almost without exception, they're clean shaven.

Speaker 1:
[26:15] Like the Romans.

Speaker 2:
[26:16] Because it was thought that the Romans in the period of their greatest public virtue and discipline as a state, the Republican period, they tended not to wear beards very often as well.

Speaker 1:
[26:28] Right.

Speaker 2:
[26:29] And we will copy them in this.

Speaker 1:
[26:31] Exactly. So like everything, everything, their style of writing, their fashion, the parts in their hair, it's all being very, very influenced by what their understanding of the Greek and Roman world is. And I think it's important to say what their understanding was. Because in some ways, they were comically wrong. Like, for example, white became extremely fashionable. Everyone was wearing white because why? Well, because that's what those Greek statues are wearing, white dresses. But now we know they actually were...

Speaker 2:
[26:57] Actually, statues are painted. They're often very garishly.

Speaker 1:
[26:59] Right. We lock it over time.

Speaker 2:
[27:01] Very vulgarly, almost. But yeah. So yes. Greece and Rome are always being rediscovered by successive generations. But the things we go to find there vary. I don't even know. I mean, we, of course, you know, there's thousands of books about Greek and Rome, academic and popular, written every year. We still make Sword and Sandals movies, Gladiator and all that. I don't exactly know what we go to Greece and Rome to find. Well, maybe various things we can't mention on a family show. But yeah, I think that we have a definite, we have a fascination with that period as well, but it's a very different one from what Thomas Jefferson or Edward Gibbon or Voltaire sought there.

Speaker 1:
[27:48] This is also the great age of prose. So, you know, the medieval period is the great age of the romance. You get to the Elizabethans, hands down, it's drama. That is what isn't, you know, so that's what's in a sendency. When you get to the 18th century, this is the great age of prose. This is, we have to remember that historically, everything was written in poetry, math treatises were written in poetry, science treatises were written in poetry.

Speaker 2:
[28:10] Astronomical treatises in the ancient world were written in poetry.

Speaker 1:
[28:13] But now people are writing in prose. And so that's a huge shift.

Speaker 2:
[28:16] And Matthew Arnold said that in one of his essays, a century later, Matthew Arnold was a Victorian. He made the remark that with a few exception, even the great poets of that era, and there's plenty still lots of poetry being written, they have a kind of both feet on the ground, commonsensicalness about them. And I think that's true of Pope as well, which is not to belittle him as a poet, but many of the subjects he deals with in his poems, you could also deal with, I would say almost equally well in a prose treatise.

Speaker 1:
[28:53] His essays are called Essay on Criticism and Essay on Man, and Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing, which is one of my favorite lines of poetry, and that's from Essay on Man by Alexander Pope. But honestly, how is that even a poetic line? That's just a sentence. Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing. And there's a lot of commonsens in there.

Speaker 2:
[29:11] Actually, it is interesting that WH. Auden said that though Wordsworth, not all the romantics, but Wordsworth claimed to be bringing back the literature of ordinary experience and everyday speech. If you actually read a lot of Pope, and then you read a lot of Wordsworth, there's much more prosiness in Pope, much more what sounds like ordinary discourse in Pope's writing. And Wordsworth is much more verbal inversion and a more self-conscious poetic diction. That's not to say that Pope is better than Wordsworth, or Wordsworth is better than Pope, but that Wordsworth didn't necessarily do in many of his major poems what Wordsworth the theorist set out to do.

Speaker 1:
[29:56] At the same time, the neoclassical period is dominated by a great deal of poetic diction.

Speaker 2:
[30:02] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[30:04] It's part of the characteristics of the period.

Speaker 2:
[30:06] I mean, elevated diction is, and Samuel Johnson here also, when Samuel Johnson talks about what makes a great poet in his late work, The Lives of the Poets, which is another key critical work of the period. He thought a great poet was someone who had ennobled the language and brought new graces to it. While still, Samuel Johnson is very much a traditionalist, while still operating within the received forms that had been approved by the best informed poets and critics of the past. So yeah, I don't know that most romantic critics looked for the same values to great poets, that they had brought new graces to the language, enriched and ennobled it. I mean, Coleridge wouldn't say that those were bad things, of course, but Coleridge seems to be looking for, I don't know, maybe a more exalted sort of imaginative achievement.

Speaker 1:
[31:08] Well, he's true.

Speaker 2:
[31:09] That's a really vague way of getting it, I know.

Speaker 1:
[31:11] Yeah, I don't want to be spoiled by Heather's Coleridge webinar. I guess I'll say that that's a huge rabbit trail. Coleridge is trying to get us back to a more medieval understanding of the nature of meaning. But at the same time, okay, speaking broadly, the neoclassical period is reacting against the medieval period in some bad ways and in some good ways, as is the case, but it's also varied, right? On the one hand, you could say about the neoclassical period that they hated Shakespeare, which was true. He falls out of fashion for a couple of centuries, largely because they don't think that he, and they're correct, he does not follow the classical rules of drama writing. Ben Johnson does.

Speaker 2:
[31:53] He seems never to have heard of the unities.

Speaker 1:
[31:55] Right, exactly. Well, the so-called unities. You can listen to our episode on poetics about how they misunderstood that. But Shakespeare falls out of fashion. And yet, one of the things that Alexander Pope does is put together a volume of Shakespeare.

Speaker 2:
[32:10] And Samuel Johnson also put out an edition of Shakespeare.

Speaker 1:
[32:13] And Dryden was a great defender of Chaucer. So you do have these little places here or there defending things.

Speaker 2:
[32:19] And what I said about allegory still existing, it's still something that painters still paint allegorically and things like that, but it's there with permission and with a bit of condescension. I think the same is true of Shakespeare's presence in the 18th-century literary world. His plays are still performed and still can draw audiences, but they're often rewritten with appropriate endings. I think Samuel Johnson...

Speaker 1:
[32:45] He's putting appropriate in air quotes folks. Yeah. Sorry.

Speaker 2:
[32:48] Well, like Samuel Johnson, for instance, recalls seeing a production of King Lear where King Lear is restored to his throne and Cordelia lives and they live happily ever after. Because it's a bit too dark and Gothic otherwise, right? Who wants to see that?

Speaker 1:
[33:02] Exactly. Exactly. Who wants to see that? But in keeping with the idea that this is a period trying to get back the classics, the classical literary heritage, the first English translation of Homer is Chapman's Homer in the late 1500s, early 1600s. It takes him like...

Speaker 2:
[33:21] Which is rollicking.

Speaker 1:
[33:22] Decades, decades to finish both of them.

Speaker 2:
[33:24] Which is boisterous and yeah, there's something very cavalier about Chapman's Homer.

Speaker 1:
[33:29] And of course expires John Keats' poem, A Poem that's Looking Upon a Chapman's Homer. But Alexander Pope also gives us a translation of both the Iliad and the Codice.

Speaker 2:
[33:38] Which is not rollicking or boisterous.

Speaker 1:
[33:40] It's very 18th century.

Speaker 2:
[33:41] Yeah, you kind of imagine his character, I mean, when Achilles and Agamemnon are slanging at each other in Book One of the Iliad, as Alexander Pope gives it in his perfect, perfectly disciplined heroic couplets, you sort of imagine them having a gentlemanly dispute in Will's coffee shop in 18th century London. And even Pope's friend, and again, it is kind of a masterpiece in its own way, but it's as Pope's friend, what was his name? Bentley, who was a notable classicist of the time said, It's a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer. I don't think Pope took that very well.

Speaker 1:
[34:26] Feel that way. I bought so many translations.

Speaker 2:
[34:29] That's also, it's not just Homer, but you had mentioned Dryden and Chaucer. Dryden loved Chaucer, but in the 18th century, Chaucer was usually updated into the, fashionable poetic diction of the day, and his, whatever you want to call it, his rough edges and his sort of that kind of, that kind of earthy humor we associate with Chaucer. Much of that was kind of sanded down a bit.

Speaker 1:
[34:57] Authorization has a long, long history.

Speaker 2:
[35:00] Yeah. Oh, yes, it does.

Speaker 1:
[35:03] It's also interesting to me about this time period that the sorts of forms that dominate are different. Now, the Restoration period, so the early part of this period, like kind of going up to 1700, does have its own kind of drama, but not very many people read Restoration drama much anymore. The Elizabethan period was absolutely the heyday of drama in the same way that the Victorian period was the high watermark for the novel. And the 18th century, what's very interesting to me, you know, you have a lot of wit, a lot of reasonable common sense. So you don't have people writing great epics, and you don't have them writing romances, and they're not writing great drama, but you see the ascendancy of a great deal of satire.

Speaker 2:
[35:48] A lot of satire.

Speaker 1:
[35:49] A lot of satire. It's a lot of mock heroic epics.

Speaker 2:
[35:51] I will take one exception to what you said about drama. There's still a very thriving comic drama. And you had mentioned the Restoration wits, and that goes into the 18th century too, like She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith. Yeah. But I mean, when you think of the tragedies, and people are still writing tragedies, but there's not very many of them that I would say travel well across the centuries. Maybe one exception would be Joseph Addison's Cato, which famously George Washington had played at Valley Forge to encourage his men. That one though, that is a play that's full of noble and uplifting patriotic sentiments. I don't know that it's a really great stage drama though. But yes, satire is very much the lifeblood of 18th century literature.

Speaker 1:
[36:40] This makes sense, right? They see themselves a bit above the previous generation, they're more civilized.

Speaker 2:
[36:48] And yeah, there's a kind of, a kind of, I think it's fair to say, smug tendency to look down on humanity in ages which didn't live up to your own cultural standards as you defined them.

Speaker 1:
[37:04] Actually, it has a lot of, I'm going to really stick my foot in it here, but there's a lot of parallels between this sort of coffee house vibe, we're above it all, and we're just mocking everything, with what we saw with like the hipsters in 15 years ago, right?

Speaker 2:
[37:22] Yeah. Like involving yourself in so many layers of irony that you sometimes find yourself being mistakenly sincere.

Speaker 1:
[37:32] Right. Right. That's like the whole neoclassical period to me.

Speaker 2:
[37:36] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[37:37] So some hilarious satire. I mean, you've got Jonathan Swift writing satires all over the place. A Gulliver's Travels is a giant satire.

Speaker 2:
[37:45] I would say even writers who are not satirists primarily have a good deal of it in them. I mean, Jane Austen.

Speaker 1:
[37:51] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[37:52] A lot of it. Henry Fielding.

Speaker 1:
[37:55] You could point to others. Dryden's got some satires.

Speaker 2:
[37:57] Yeah. The funny thing is Dryden made his bread and butter as a dramatist, but his satires like Mac Flecknoe and Absalom and Akithafel. Those are the stuff that I think that's the stuff that really lives with him. Yeah. Alexander Pope, he and Dryden, they did not know each other intimately. I mean, Pope would have been just about 12 years old when Dryden died, but Pope is very much the successor, I think, to John Dryden. I mean, I remember when I was first reading them in high school, I sometimes forgot who had written which poem because they're so alike in so many ways.

Speaker 1:
[38:42] And as you said, the early American nation state is also being done, the colonies and the early nation is also being at the same time period. And so while the printing press comes earlier, there's something about this time period that just takes the printing press to the whole next level.

Speaker 2:
[39:02] Well, you have journalism and it's primitive forms. I mean, the newspapers are not...

Speaker 1:
[39:07] But also magazines, The Spectator, The Gladly.

Speaker 2:
[39:10] Literary journals and periodicals and pamphlets. I mean, so many of the writers of the time are pamphlet writers.

Speaker 1:
[39:16] So that's where I was going with this. So it's extremely cheap to mass produce things. And actually, we can give some examples about this because the way Jonathan Swift handles his Twitter wars of his day is rather hilarious and we should share some of those stories. But I explained it to my students that the printing press was so cheap that people were writing pamphlets like blog posts. Now, that even ages me because we don't have blog posts, like sub stack posts or even like tweets.

Speaker 2:
[39:45] Everyone and his dog has one.

Speaker 1:
[39:46] Everybody had one. And so there's just this very rich culture of the printed word and engaging with the printed word. And of course, we see that in the United States with the Federalist Papers. The historians have long documented the role of the newspaper in educating the average American. I don't have an advert. You just have a really rich literary world, high literacy rates and people writing and reading.

Speaker 2:
[40:13] This is the kind of joke that's only funny to like eight people. But I think it was on The Onion or something years ago. It was a fake pamphlet written by Thomas Payne to encourage his fellow pamphleteers because girls find it really, really hot. If you've produced a pamphlet.

Speaker 1:
[40:29] That would be back in the day.

Speaker 2:
[40:30] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[40:31] But you know, okay, Thomas Payne writing a pamphlet called Common Sense. That is so neoclassical.

Speaker 2:
[40:37] The Age of Reason, the phrase itself, that was another one of his famous books. So yeah, Thomas Payne, I don't actually know. It seems like he's one of those guys. Everyone knows who he is because of the he was sort of one of our founding fathers in a lot of ways. And does anyone actually read him though?

Speaker 1:
[40:56] I've wondered that too and I've heard historians say that everyone lists that book as super important, but it actually wasn't that important at the time.

Speaker 2:
[41:05] Well, I think Common Sense was. Common Sense in this country became a best seller. And actually, I've read that one and rather enjoyed it. He has a good sort of fighting, salty, journalistic style.

Speaker 1:
[41:16] I have not read it, I confess.

Speaker 2:
[41:18] Yeah, but yeah, I mean, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin also was, I mean, spent a lot of his life producing what we would call political journalism. So did Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, actually. They were both hired guns for the Tory party.

Speaker 1:
[41:33] Jonathan Swift was the personal secretary for William Temple.

Speaker 2:
[41:37] That's right. And William Temple, for anyone who doesn't know, he was an English politician and ambassador who, amongst other things, negotiated what will become a very important marriage between Princess Mary, the daughter of King James II and William of Orange. So William and Mary, they become, yeah, were they like the ultimate power couple of the 17th century? The only English couple who have both reigned jointly rather than one being a royal consort to the other.

Speaker 1:
[42:07] That's right. Let's tell the story of what I like to call as Jonathan Swift's Twitter war. It was really a pamphlet war, just to give you a sense of like the witch, the sense of humor, the pamphlet wars were very much like Twitter wars in terms of like, gets people very riled up and there's a lot of emotion over this.

Speaker 2:
[42:27] Some people had their teams and yeah, there's a lot of puppy spirit.

Speaker 1:
[42:30] So Jonathan Swift gets involved in a pamphlet war with this guy.

Speaker 2:
[42:34] Yeah. You're thinking of the almanac and horoscope writer? Yeah. So this fella, and I'm blanking on his name.

Speaker 1:
[42:42] It doesn't matter.

Speaker 2:
[42:44] There was this guy, Partridge I think was his name. There's this hack writer of, he produced from what I understand, it was fraudulent versions of The Farmer's Almanac and also wrote political horoscopes predicting the death of this or that king or statesman. Jonathan Swift thought this guy is a Chaucerian fraud who needs to be put in his place. So he himself writing in the style of Partridge, produces his own almanac horoscope, saying that within a few weeks, it is prognosticated by the stars that the right honorable Partridge will die. And then when the predicted date came around, he produced another pamphlet saying, it is with great regret that we announced to the general public that Mr. Partridge died last night of such and such a cause. And again, Jonathan Swift had a much larger reading public than this Partridge character who's only remembered because Jonathan Swift was just magnificently trolling him. And when Partridge insisted that, no, I'm still alive, Swift produces a third pamphlet saying, it has come to our attention that an imposter claiming to be the late lamented Mr. Partridge is claiming still to be alive. But in any case, Partridge spent the rest of his life having people come up to him and saying, oh my goodness, you're alive. I thought I could have sworn you were dead.

Speaker 1:
[44:04] The best. I love that so much. I adore Jonathan Swift. I love teaching him.

Speaker 2:
[44:11] Sorry, I'm interrupting you.

Speaker 1:
[44:12] Well, I did a whole webinar on Jonathan Swift. If you guys want to, you think it's some of my best works, you can pick that up for $15. It's like three hours on Jonathan Swift. And we'll really hold your hand for understanding his work. But he is hilarious and very witty. I always, when we're doing Gulliver's Travels, I always tell the kids, like I imagine Jonathan Swift at the gates of heaven. Okay, inside, inside. But he's talking to St. Paul and St. Peter and he's going like, just five minutes on Twitter. Just give me five minutes on Twitter, please. Someone's gotta say something about the state of the world right now. I keep saying we're gonna make our own fake Swift Twitter account and just have him roast everybody.

Speaker 2:
[44:52] Someone did that with Evelyn Waugh a while ago. I think the account was banned eventually. But yeah, conveniently, since he brought up Jonathan Swift, he and Pope were close friends. They were amigos. And I think that must be because I don't think they could really be friends with many other people, but they admired each other very much.

Speaker 1:
[45:13] They did. So who are some of the other major figures? We don't want to cover everybody, but let's just make sure we're kind of, okay, so we said Dryden, Pope, Swift, Samuel Johnson, who are some of the others? Edison and Steele for-

Speaker 2:
[45:29] A writer who was a very, very skillful comic playwright, who wrote comedies of man is William Congrave. Who today, everyone has heard exactly one line from William Congrave. What is it? Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. That's William Congrave. He's the origin of that. So yeah, he wrote a number of restoration comedies. Another one, I will say this with reserve, he wrote some very, very funny poems, which often are wildly inappropriate. But John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester.

Speaker 1:
[46:07] We talked about him a little bit.

Speaker 2:
[46:08] We did mention him. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[46:09] We said don't Google his poems.

Speaker 2:
[46:11] Yeah, some of them are for just, yeah, very, very R rated, we'll just say. And so yeah.

Speaker 1:
[46:21] Technically, I guess John Bunyan is, but I wouldn't include him. I wouldn't either.

Speaker 2:
[46:25] I wouldn't. I mean, he happens to be alive during the beginning of the period. I guess The Pilgrim's Progress would have been written kind of at the same time as like Tartuffe and all that. But it seems much older in some ways.

Speaker 1:
[46:39] The thing I'd say it has in common with it is the 18th century tends to be pretty moralistic and didactic, and Pilgrim's Progress is definitely that.

Speaker 2:
[46:47] Yeah. Oh, and Daniel Defoe. We should mention Daniel Defoe. He's a major figure. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[46:51] Very important. Now, there's a lot of debate about exactly what is the first novel, the first English novel, but a lot of people point to Daniel Defoe. So Robinson Crusoe and Maul Flanders.

Speaker 2:
[47:03] Yeah. Yeah. He wrote a lot.

Speaker 1:
[47:05] And the novel being, again, a story in prose, and that's a whole new thing.

Speaker 2:
[47:09] Yeah. And if you read any of his other books, like Maul Flanders or Roxana, expecting them to be like Robinson Crusoe, you will be very, very surprised.

Speaker 1:
[47:19] I love Maul Flanders. I love Maul Flanders. That was a novel I read, I don't even know how many decades ago, but it was so surprised to find out it was 18th century because I just felt like this is so easy to read.

Speaker 2:
[47:30] Actually, Robinson Crusoe, even though it's, I mean, you might think, well, that's kind of an outlier in 18th century neoclassical fiction. I would say no because if you look at the way, you remember Robinson Crusoe, like he's alone at first, but Friday shows up and then Friday's father, and then there's a Spanish sailor also who ship right there. He has to constitute a little commonwealth and he does so, according to commonsensical John Locke principles of religious, he establishes religious tolerance and Friday's father still continues to practice his ancestral religion and isn't troubled by anyone else. The Spanish guy is of course a Catholic and he just insists that none of the parties harm each other and we should all exist in a free commonwealth. I think that's a very neoclassical fictional arrangement.

Speaker 1:
[48:23] No, I agree, I agree.

Speaker 2:
[48:24] It's so strange that I can't think of any good movie version of Robinson Crusoe but it seems like you should be able to make one.

Speaker 1:
[48:29] You should be able to make one. All right, before we start talking about Alexander Pope in particular, because he is the poet we've chosen to explore this time period through, anything else? Did I miss anything of the big major kind of painting with broad strokes?

Speaker 2:
[48:46] We've painted with broad strokes adequately for our purpose.

Speaker 1:
[48:50] Yes, wit, balance, order, symmetry, good sense, taste, brevity, clarity. Many of these things in the romantic movement is going to push back again. So if you read Jane Eyre, she is neither brief nor clear.

Speaker 2:
[49:05] Nor always tasteful.

Speaker 1:
[49:06] And that's very intentional, that's very intentional, right? So part of what's going on with the clarity is this idea that by rule in line, we can unravel all the mysteries, to paraphrase John Keats' line.

Speaker 2:
[49:22] That's good, that's a good way of putting it.

Speaker 1:
[49:24] That we live in a universe which we can understand. We have microscopes, we have telescopes, we have the scientific method. We can understand this world, it is clear, and we should be able to clearly state these things.

Speaker 2:
[49:34] Yeah, this is the age of John Locke and Isaac Newton.

Speaker 1:
[49:37] That's right, that's right. And so the reaction against that is like, well, actually we can't understand anything, and this is a mysterious world, and maybe some things you have to wrestle to find out the meaning and not everything. It's just clearly and briefly stated. Maybe these things have layers of meaning and symbolic meaning, and the universe is a little more complicated than you think it is. And we saw that in Jane Eyre, amongst other things that we've looked at. But even though I'm absolutely a romantic at my core, I very much enjoyed, I took a whole, so when I was in graduate school, the hardest class in the entire English department was a class on 18th century poetry. And at that time, I had no particular interest in 18th century poetry. I was madly in love with the metaphysical poets. I had taken a grad level class on that and had presented a paper on John Donne at the Conference of Christianity and Literature. And was just mad about those guys. But I was interested in this class because it had the reputation of being a really, really difficult class. And he was going to work you. And I thought, you know what? I think I would like to learn something. So I tended to search out the professors that were very old school and were going to make you work hard. And he did. It was a difficult class. I made an A. And I learned a ton. I'm sitting here actually with the file folder of my notes showing my husband my faded ink here from my 1995 class. But I became very, very fond of this period. And I felt like it was the first time somebody had really explained to me what it is I'm trying to understand when I read a poem. And I had a great affection for Dryden and Pope. I liked them both a whole lot. Later, we didn't read Gulliver's Travels in there because it was a poetry class. But later, of course, I became like a super fan of Jonathan Swift. But yeah, I know I love Alexander the Pope. Alexander the Pope, wow, no, Alexander Pope. So let's start talking about Alexander Pope because in some ways, he's such a typical neoclassical poet, but in other ways, he's an outlier. Like, for example, he's a Roman Catholic at a time when that is very much not a thing to be. And he's not even allowed to live in-

Speaker 2:
[51:44] He has to create a last name for it.

Speaker 1:
[51:45] I know, right? Yeah, there you go. Signaling a little bit there. He wasn't even allowed to live in the city limits of London because that was against the law.

Speaker 2:
[51:56] I think he was born in London, but yes, his family had to remove- He was born- He was actually born in a very inconvenient year to be a Roman Catholic in England. He's born in 1688, which is the year of the Glorious Revolution, when the last Catholic king- actually still, still to this day, the last Catholic king of England, James II, who was one of the stewards, he is driven out in a kind of an aristocratic who orchestrated by mostly the Whig Party in the House of Commons and with their allies elsewhere. And his daughter and her husband, Mary and William of Orange, who were Protestants, came over from the Netherlands and established their government there. And James spent the rest of his life in exile. And as for the Catholic population, remember that at this time, there aren't very many Catholics in England. It was kind of an odd constitutional, I don't know, accident, if you will, that James became King of England at all because his brother, Charles II, didn't have any legitimate sons. Lots of illegitimate ones, but no legitimate ones. That's a problem. Anyway, so Catholics probably constituted, I think we can say certainly less than 10 percent of the populace on the whole. And the penal laws were still in force against them. So Pope would have grown up and this is kind of an odd one. I believe it was illegal for Catholics to own horses.

Speaker 1:
[53:19] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[53:19] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[53:21] So a lot of that, just in case you guys are wondering, a lot of that had to do with the gunpowder plot. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[53:26] Yeah. So you would be barred from the university, the military service, political life, you couldn't be a member of parliament, and the learned profession. So Pope kind of had limited...

Speaker 1:
[53:41] He also, so I'm looking at my notes from 1995 here. I don't, they'll be impressing and I remember any of this, but I have been speaking from memory, I should say, but right now I'm looking at my notes, but Dr. Green said that as a Catholic, Pope could not get a patronage.

Speaker 2:
[53:59] It was more difficult for him. Yeah. I mean, there were just a lot of social avenues, sort of closed opportunities.

Speaker 1:
[54:05] As a result, he becomes the first poet to earn a living.

Speaker 2:
[54:08] Right.

Speaker 1:
[54:09] Poetry.

Speaker 2:
[54:09] Actually, yes. He was a professional writer and he did not have to have a day job, I guess as we would say. He was a writer and nothing but a writer. It wasn't like his life was a miserable slog through poverty. His parents actually were pretty prosperous. His father was a linen merchant. In his later life, he had a actually rather lovely estate from what I understand, private property with adjoining gardens at Twickenham. I think it is not too far from London, I believe. He was on good terms with Swift and Arbuthnot, and he was frenemies with Joseph Addison. He and Addison appreciated each other, but they were very different in their politics amongst other things. Addison was a Whig, Pope was a Tory. They both had very different views of the Hanoverian monarchy, and there's a passage in one of Pope's works, The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, where he describes someone whom he refers to as Cato. It's obvious that he's referring to Addison. Addison wrote the point of Cato. That's the origin of the famous passage, Damn with faint praise, Ascent with civil leer, And without sneering, Teach the rest to sneer. And he accuses Pope of being kind of a small man who likes to surround himself with adoring disciples who will approve every word he says, as though it's like divine genius speaking. That wasn't exactly fair, but Pope, Pope, but Addison did have, I think it's fair to say that Joseph Addison, who was a very, very, a very gifted writer of the second rank, I would say. He was a periodical essayist and a very elegant writer and a perfect gentleman. There was something a bit self satisfied and smug about him if you knew him personally. So again, a man with no major faults, but I think you could hold his self satisfaction against him perhaps.

Speaker 1:
[56:16] And Alexander Pope had some physical ailments.

Speaker 2:
[56:19] Yeah, so he suffered from spinal tuberculosis, which caused his, like his whole skeletal frame developed abnormally. And he, amongst other things, and he also suffered from perpetual migraines. So probably half his life was spent with a headache. Again, you kind of see why such a man would be an effective satirist. He's kind of, you know, always in kind of a bad mood. Yeah. And he even in one of his poems, he refers to this long disease, my life. It's like something John has to do. His joints, from what I understand, his joints kind of fused together. So like, he just couldn't move normally. He was four foot six.

Speaker 1:
[56:59] Oh, wow.

Speaker 2:
[57:00] Yeah. And he was also conscious of the fact, I learned this in a biography of his I read years ago, that you would think that, I mean, he's a satirist and, you know, going to literary war with everyone must be a very confident guy. He was very shy and unsure of himself around women, as you might understand. And he also sensed that he was kind of ridiculous to the fair sex. And it's been pointed out that many of the references to women as, women as a class in his work are not flattering ones. He's not the most chivalrous of writers.

Speaker 1:
[57:36] But he shares this, you have to tell this anecdote because you charmed me with this story.

Speaker 2:
[57:41] Oh, yeah, it's an odd bit of trivia. How do you think neoclassical poetry with 80s rock? The guitarist from Motley Crue, Mick Mars suffers, I believe, from the same disease that Alexander Pope did.

Speaker 1:
[57:55] Yeah, I always joke that we're going to kill it, you and I, a Trivianite downtown if they were to ask the question. Yes, yes. Alexander Pope has shares the same medical diagnosis as what 80s rocker. We'd be all over that Trivianite.

Speaker 2:
[58:11] I have to say that the guitarist, Mick Mars, impresses me more because living with the lifestyle of an 80s rocker and still being alive is probably a bit more taxing than being a neoclassical poet in a lot of ways. But anyway, that aside. So yeah, Alexander Pope, I think it's actually his most popular work, though his satires were widely known and feared. But his best-selling book was his translation, was Pope's Iliad, and it really is Pope's Iliad. It's more his Iliad than Homer's in many respects as we already said. But again, it shows much about the literary standards of the age. That was considered a perfect poem and a perfect rendition of Homer in its own right. Usually by people who didn't necessarily read that much Greek. But you know, this was nothing can improve on this.

Speaker 1:
[59:04] OK, I have to tell you a story about high school Angelina. I think you're going to think this is funny. When I was in high school, we read The Odyssey. And I think the teacher had picked like the Penguin version. And I think that was prose.

Speaker 2:
[59:18] Yeah, it is.

Speaker 1:
[59:20] And I said, oh, we already have a copy of The Odyssey. Can I just read the one at home? And she said, sure. Well, the copy we had at home was a leather-bound Franklin Press edition of Alexander Pope's The Odyssey.

Speaker 2:
[59:31] Well, at least that's in poetry.

Speaker 1:
[59:33] Right. And so I opened it and started trying to read 18th century poetry version of The Odyssey. And I was like, wow, this is really hard. This is way harder than everybody. Why is everybody else rocking it with this? And I'm really struggling. And then I realized I was the only one reading it. Heroic couplets. So I got the Penguin version.

Speaker 2:
[59:51] We should talk about the heroic couplet as well. And Pope does not invent this. But you could say as a literary weapon, he perfects it. Well, maybe he and Dryden together sort of perfected. But the heroic couplet is, consists of two lines of rhymed iambic pentameter. And it was a convention that every line had to be end stopped. So there has to be a pause at the end of every line. Yeah, so with either a comma or a period or some other punctuation mark. Because to give your reader who's presumably reading a loud time to catch breath. And it was one half of the couplet was of course meant to balance out the other. And it's very convenient because both lines are of the same length.

Speaker 1:
[60:39] Symmetry.

Speaker 2:
[60:40] And they run. And Alexander Pope, one of the things you notice about Alexander Pope is, very rarely does he grow tedious even when he's writing at long stretches in this very, I mean, kind of by its nature, repetitive form. So it's easy to write heroic couplets. Like if you're a poet and you find yourself like, yeah, well, heroic couplets are kind of easy, you know. It's also very easy to become sing-songy and monotonous with them. And Pope generally avoids that. And that by itself is kind of a major achievement. So, yeah, after Pope, and this might be kind of the bane of his influence, he's an immensely popular writer. He's widely imitated. But most of the later neoclassical poets do not, do not wield the heroic couplet with quite as much variety and grace as he does. So that is another reason why when the romantic, you know, the great romantic reaction against the neoclassical literary order begins, the heroic couplet becomes very unfashionable very quickly. I mean, that's not exactly true. I guess Byron does use it some, Keats uses it in one, in Lamia, the one major poem. But other than that, it becomes kind of yesterday's news. And Pope also becomes very unfashionable in the 19th century.

Speaker 1:
[62:01] Right. And so just to contrast the heroic couplet with something else you might know, Shakespeare is writing in blank verse. So that's unrhymed iambic pentameter, does not have an end stop and so it will just kind of flow. And blank verse was an attempt by the Renaissance writers to imitate the Latin verse of Horace.

Speaker 2:
[62:22] Seneca, I think.

Speaker 1:
[62:22] Seneca. You're right. It is Seneca. No, no. I'm so glad I have a classicist here to correct me.

Speaker 2:
[62:28] Yes, Seneca's dramatic tragedies were written in, not iambic pentameter, but a meter which to an English ear sounded kind of like it.

Speaker 1:
[62:37] Because iambic pentameter is the one that most mimics regular speech.

Speaker 2:
[62:41] Actually, yeah, it is true that a lot of our just ordinary speech patterns sort of can be arranged into iambic verse without our intending them to. We tend to speak iambically. Nice.

Speaker 1:
[62:56] Well done. I saw your eyes.

Speaker 2:
[62:58] I tell my students this. I use the example of, say, you're talking to someone about what you had for dinner last night. And you say, we went to Pizza Hut the other night. That's a line of iambic pentameter. So like, yeah, I would say in an average day, you probably speak a line or two of iambic pentameter without meaning to. So everyone's a poet even if they don't know it.

Speaker 1:
[63:18] So that's a nice little heroic couplet, right?

Speaker 2:
[63:20] Yeah. All right.

Speaker 1:
[63:22] Well, let's talk about what some of the major works of Alexander Pope are. We're going to talk about Rape of the Lock. That was actually one of his early things, and it's a mock heroic epic. But we mentioned Essay on Man and Essay on Criticism, which are two very large works.

Speaker 2:
[63:36] Yeah, those two are more ambitious. The Rape of the Lock is kind of a, on the one hand, it's kind of a trifle. It's a mock heroic poem, and it, if you're not, there's no rape in our sense of the word. The word rape itself in, I don't really know until when, but for a long time, the primary meaning of that word was theft or kidnapping, or taking something that's not yours. And gradually it came to the more familiar meaning.

Speaker 1:
[64:06] The Rape of the Sabian Women painting is the kidnapping of the Sabian.

Speaker 2:
[64:09] Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 1:
[64:10] The Rape of the Lock is the kidnapping of the lock.

Speaker 2:
[64:13] So yeah, if you want to get acquainted with Pope, apart from The Rape of the Lock and the essay on criticism, I would recommend reading the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. He wrote one or two religious poems, and which is kind of interesting because he was not a man who wore his religion on his sleeve. He didn't talk about it very much. He tended to get kind of defensive when people brought it up. And you know, for good reason, it was technically illegal for him to be practicing his religion at this time. But he wrote one called Messiah, A Sacred Eclogue. This would be around the same time actually that Handel's Messiah debuted under the reign of what, George II. So yeah, there's those. And I think his Iliad is worth looking at as a period piece if you're interested in the history of how Homer has been translated. That being said, it is notoriously not the most accurate or faithful English Iliad. So you have to go into it with certain expectations and understandings. Oh, another one of his, which is not terribly long, and I think it's also a proof that not all 18th century poetry is frigid on the memory of an unfortunate lady. Yeah. Yeah. Those are the ones that come to mind first. I don't know if there's any others that you would bring up.

Speaker 1:
[65:41] No, those are the ones that I would think of. How about John Dryden if somebody wants to dip into him?

Speaker 2:
[65:47] Yeah. Dryden, I would say, something about Dryden and Pope, since they're both satirists and they're both writing very often in response to current events and mocking current phenomena and figures, you will often find that you have to look up some of the names, some of the characters referred to in both of their works. Dryden, for instance, I think Dryden's best satirical poem is Absalom and Akithophel, which is a mock biblical retelling of Monmouth's Rebellion. If you don't know what that was, some of Charles II's advisors who were unhappy with his reign, tried to raise a coup against him, and they took his illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, and they tried to convince him to raise up an army and convince his father to give up his throne. This Monmouth was not a leader and he failed. Anyway, he had to flee abroad. He tried to do the same thing when James II came to the throne, and James got tired of having to deal with this idiot wayward nephew and just had him executed, which he kind of deserved. Anyway, Dryden viewing all this, he realized this reminds me a little of a biblical story, doesn't it? You know, the very charismatic but rather foolish son trying to rise up against his father. And he thinks of Absalom and David, and he sort of retells the story of Absalom and David, but with contemporary figures mixed into it. It's actually really a brilliant poem. Absalom and Nikithafel, I like that one. Another one, some people really like this one and others don't, is The Hind and the Panther. And in that one Dryden gives sort of a summary of contemporary religious controversies going on between Puritans and Anglicans and Catholics. And you get a sense of which types of Christians he liked and which he didn't in that in that poem pretty quickly. But yeah, that one is still, I think that one still bears reading today as well. And then there's this one is really kind of a mean kind of, it is a mean spirited poem. It's still brilliant. A Mac Fleckno, which is a mock ode. It's written against a fellow poet of his, I'm drawing a blank, what was the name of the poet? It was, he's only remembered because of this poem. Anyway, yeah. So Mac Fleckno, he tells, he tells it in the form of one poet laureate replates each other. Yes, it was Shadwell.

Speaker 1:
[68:35] It's in my notes, right?

Speaker 2:
[68:36] Thomas Shadwell. So Thomas Shadwell was a less talented neoclassical poet. And Dryden imagines, what if the least talented poet today died and he named Shadwell as his successor? So he imagines this other hack writer named Flecknoe on his deathbed saying, who should inherit my dullness? Who should inherit my heavy handedness, my lack of grace and all of my verbal ineptitudes? I know Shadwell, because Shadwell alone is worthy of my duncery. And he imagines the soul of this dying poet being taken up into heaven and the cloak of his dullness, like the cloak of Elijah descending on Shadwell in his place. It's really, like I said, really a mean poem. And yeah, you kind of feel a little bit bad for Shadwell at the end of it, but that is his sole claim to fame today, that this poem was written against him. The poor sot.

Speaker 1:
[69:37] All right, how about Jonathan Swift?

Speaker 2:
[69:39] Swift, okay, so Swift is a poet. I will say I enjoy Swift's poetry, but it is, well, maybe everything in Swift is kind of not for the faint of heart. Swift introduced-

Speaker 1:
[69:51] He's not a light setter.

Speaker 2:
[69:53] Okay, here's something I kind of like about Swift, is that he can take subjects which seem to defy poetic handling and make poetry of them, like his famous description of a city sewer. And a city sewer, by the way, in the 18th century was much grosser than today. Like dead puppies would be floating in it in a human way, and all of this is an open sewer. It's not closed off in subterranean drains.

Speaker 1:
[70:20] Consort of Queen Victoria for cleaning up the sewers. This is what cholera epidemics would break out.

Speaker 2:
[70:25] It was really, really bad.

Speaker 1:
[70:26] London was gross.

Speaker 2:
[70:28] London was very gross. Yeah, and there's another one where he, this also is a really gross poem. I think it's on a nymph going to bed. He describes a woman taking off her makeup and wig and patches, and I think false teeth also might come into it. So when she sits down, she's this gloriously beautiful young woman, but by the end of it, you, yeah, you... Yeah, it's another one of those poems that's not very chivalrous, I guess. Let me see what else. Jonathan Swift has another, also a sort of mock ode, a mock heroic ode written against the Duke of Marlborough. And the Duke of Marlborough, by the way, was one of the Churchills. He was John Churchill. He was the ancestor of Winston. He was the greatest English general of his day. He won a number of battles in the War of Spanish Succession and elsewhere. So he was an undefeated champion of British arms. Swift thought that he was a social climber and a man with absolutely no principles, who would turn his coat in the blink of an eye. And actually all that is true also. He did betray James II when he saw that James probably wasn't going to win in the Glorious Revolution. His wife was a notorious, yeah, what we would say a social climber named Sarah Churchill, who was the scheming lady in waiting of Queen Anne, who often manipulated Queen Anne to advance her husband's career. Swift saw through these people.

Speaker 1:
[71:55] He loved Queen Anne though.

Speaker 2:
[71:57] He loved Queen Anne and he thought she was being unfairly taken advantage of by the Churchills. So he wrote a poem mocking Churchill, I think after Churchill's death. This was when most of the nation was mourning the great fallen hero, but Churchill just saw him as a jumped up self-promoter, I suppose.

Speaker 1:
[72:22] For longer works, I would say I have to give my plug for Gulliver's Travels.

Speaker 2:
[72:26] Oh yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[72:26] You need a guide because again, you got to know what it is he's satirizing. But my students adore that book once we get into it. They often say it's their favorite thing they read in that class. For $15, you can get my webinar and I'll hold your hand through Gulliver's Travels and you'll see what it's all about. I also talk about The Battle of the Books, another Swift one. I'm very fond of The Battle of the Books.

Speaker 2:
[72:49] Which is Swift's contribution to the famous War of the Ancients and Moderns. And Swift was, though he was in some ways kind of above the fray, he was basically on the side of the Ancients and the Moderns to him. He thought that it involved a certain degree of pretension to claim that we Moderns have nothing to learn, that we have surpassed the Ancients.

Speaker 1:
[73:10] Exactly, exactly. And I explain all of this in the Swift webinar because Gulliver's Travels has to be understood in that too. But that also gives you a sense of what's going on, right? So in France, at this time period, a great quarrel breaks out. What is better?

Speaker 2:
[73:24] The French Academy, I guess, the Academy is all saying.

Speaker 1:
[73:26] Are we, the modern French poets, do we still need Aristotle and Plato and those hacks? And they concluded, surprisingly not, that they don't need those hacks. And Sir William Temple, who Jonathan Swift was his personal secretary, he wrote a response to that saying, look, if moderns are good at all, it's because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Speaker 2:
[73:46] Oh, that's right. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[73:47] And that's why there are giants and Gulliver's Travels.

Speaker 2:
[73:52] Another figure very notable in this choral of the Ancients and Moderns, who's a partisan of the moderns. In fact, I think the leading partisan of the moderns is, perhaps not surprisingly, Charles Perrault.

Speaker 1:
[74:03] Yep. I was just about to say that, the guy who messed up all of our fairy tales.

Speaker 2:
[74:07] Yeah. Some people like them. But are they wrong to do so?

Speaker 1:
[74:12] Not at all. Take the fairy tale class. I just explained that he's messing with them, but you can still like them.

Speaker 2:
[74:19] Maybe it is fair to point out, without trying to be guilty of an ad hominem, that Charles Perrault wrote a lot. He wrote, I think he must have written dozens of volumes of various kinds of poetry. I think he was a historian too. I don't think anyone reads anything by Charles Perrault except the Book of Fairy Tales.

Speaker 1:
[74:40] Yeah. Just to be clear here, we said that this time period is extremely didactic. So he rewrites the fairy tales and he actually puts morals at the end. Most of the translations now leaves them out, but he puts morals.

Speaker 2:
[74:53] Fairy tales with helpful hints on social decorum for young ladies.

Speaker 1:
[74:57] For example, here is the moral he put at the end of Sleeping Beauty. Young girls today don't want long engagements, but long engagements bring about happy marriages. I'm like, that's what you took away from Sleeping Beauty?

Speaker 2:
[75:13] Okay. Yeah, I guess I wouldn't have.

Speaker 1:
[75:16] I'm reading it as the resurrection and we're asleep, and our prince comes, and we're awakened into new life, and he's like, our engagements.

Speaker 2:
[75:23] So you thought long engagements were a good idea?

Speaker 1:
[75:24] They were a good thing.

Speaker 2:
[75:26] That's fascinating.

Speaker 1:
[75:26] They're a good thing.

Speaker 2:
[75:27] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[75:29] All right. How about Samuel Johnson? I feel like I should say this. Cindy, a few years back, Cindy Rollins decided to read Boswell's biography of Samuel Johnson, another great work of the period, the introduction of the Modern Biography. She loved it. Then you and your classes, I mean, I talk about Samuel Johnson in my classes, but you also teach it in Early Modern History. One of our students, shout out to her, Olivia Hornstrup, really became fascinated. She's smitten with Samuel Johnson. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[75:59] I think that our characters have given birth to a few Johnsonians.

Speaker 1:
[76:03] I love it. She got very captivated by that, and she read Boswell's Johnson and just loved it, and has just really gotten into Johnson. So for somebody out there, I think Emily Rabel, shout out to her too. I think she also read Boswell, Samuel Johnson. So for people who get a little Samuel Johnson itch, how should they scratch it? Where should they start?

Speaker 2:
[76:21] Actually, reading Boswell's Life of Johnson might be the best way, and Johnson's own writings are voluminous. Some of them are more important than others, but I think he's, I have to say, I enjoy, it is a didactic work, but I don't think ungracefully so. I enjoy Rosalice a lot.

Speaker 1:
[76:40] So you have recommended to me several times that we do that one on the podcast. I think we probably will.

Speaker 2:
[76:44] Yeah. Imagine the Book of Ecclesiastes rewritten as an Eastern tale, and that's sort of what Rosalice is.

Speaker 1:
[76:52] Well, just as an aside, so Samuel Johnson was involved in the Scribler's Club, and he was friends with William Jones, Sir William Jones, who was also in there, and he's the guy who, boy, I'm about to connect some dots for y'all. He goes out to India, and his job, because the British have colonized India, and they want to translate things from English to Indian, Indian back to English, I guess it's Hindustani, but anyway, nonetheless, the Indian language to help facilitate this transition, this cultural justice system. But he ends up going in a different direction and starting to find that there is a connection between the Indian language and Greek and Latin. And long story short, he ends up laying all the groundwork for the theory that there is a Indo-European language that is the root of all of our languages.

Speaker 2:
[77:46] I didn't know there was an Englishman who was behind that. That's fascinating.

Speaker 1:
[77:49] And so his work ends up being what Jacob Grimm, Jacob Grimm builds on for the whole modern philology system. But it was just really interesting when I found out he was part of the Scribler's Club and was friends with Samuel Johnson because I realized that Samuel Johnson's dictionary project, which we didn't even talk about that, but his dictionary project was very much connected to all of this. They had just a really an intense interest in language, the origins of language, the meaning of words, and they were doing some interesting things.

Speaker 2:
[78:15] Actually, Samuel Johnson's dictionary, Penguin Classics has republished selections from that. And I got a copy and I just really enjoy reading that. As for the insights it gives into Johnson's character, and he was just a fascinating man. Even though, like, yeah, it's admitted that his dictionary, like, was kind of handicapped from the beginning because he didn't know Anglo-Saxon. And you can't really, you know, deal with the English language and its development in a proper systematic faction without any kind of grounding in that language. But nonetheless, it's still as a period piece, kind of like Pope's Iliad, I think it repays re-reading a few pages here and there. Especially when Samuel Johnson defines something or someone he doesn't like. Like, so for instance, Samuel Johnson was a Tory. You have the Tory Party and the Whig Party, it's opposite the two main political groups in Johnson's day. And he defines Tories as that party which is grounded on loyalty to the established church and the throne and then Whig, the name of a faction. It's great, it's biased, like bubbling to the top, but it's brilliant.

Speaker 1:
[79:32] How about The Vanity of Human Wishes?

Speaker 2:
[79:34] Yeah, actually, amongst his poems, The Vanity of Human Wishes is not a translation exactly, but it's an imitation of the 10th satire of Juvenal, who was a Roman satirist of the second century AD. Samuel Johnson in it begins with... Well, he kind of takes a close look at different kinds of fame, military glory, literary glory and all these other things, and he examines kind of the baselessness and the fragility of all of them. And again, arrives at this kind of sadly wise solomonic conclusion that in this world, in this world, you know, there's much more to be endured perhaps than enjoyed, and that here we have no no abiding city.

Speaker 1:
[80:30] Any final thoughts for our listeners?

Speaker 2:
[80:31] Not really. I'm looking forward to dealing with some Alexander Pope, because he is a major writer, and in the 18th century, he is kind of a king of the type of poetry that men and women of that day enjoyed.

Speaker 1:
[80:49] And The Rape of the Lock is not super long. It's easy to find online. If you don't have any number of anthologies lying around, probably have the two. If you're over on the Patreon, in the Discord, they found a couple of really good editions to look at. So you should be able to find it for free. It's not very long, like I said. And we have never covered a mock heroic epic on the podcast before. So we'll talk about what that is and how this functions as a genre and the characteristics of it and read it.

Speaker 2:
[81:16] And Alexander, if you're looking for a larger collection of his work, of course, as with, you know, practically every major writer, Oxford World Classics, Penguin Classics, without which we all would be lost, you can find Alexander Pope in a good edition. Good editions there.

Speaker 1:
[81:32] I'm also looking forward to this. I'm glad you suggested that we do this.

Speaker 2:
[81:36] Yeah, I think we need a good little palate cleanser.

Speaker 1:
[81:40] Yeah. So thanks for sticking around. And I hope that we have laid out the landscape of the neoclassical period for you so you can sort of get oriented and find your way. And hopefully you'll explore some of these poets we talked about and come back next week. And we'll lead you by the hand through Alexander Pope's mock heroic epic, The Rape of the Lock, and come back in two weeks because Malcolm Geith will be on the podcast to discuss his new book, Galahad and the Quest for the Holy Grail. And we're going to talk about the imagination and legends and why should Americans read about British legends and all kinds of fun stuff like that. I'm really looking forward to that conversation. So thanks again. Shout out to our Patreon. You can join us and support this podcast at patreon.com/theliterarylife. You can become part of the very vibrant community of readers and lovers of literature and people trying to live this literary life over there. And again, you can find us and our classes and our webinars and Dr. Baxter and Dr. Drought at houseofhumainletters.com. You can also pick up Dr. Baxter's books at cassiodoropress.com. Stick around to the very end. Mr. Banks has a special poem picked out for us. And until next time, friends, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to The Literary Life Podcast, brought to you by our loyal Patreon sponsors. Visit houseofhumainletters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com. Join the conversation at our member-only Patreon forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com/theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review, and check out our sister podcasts, The New Mason Jar and The Well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

Speaker 2:
[83:45] A Selection from The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot by Alexander Pope. Is there a parson, much bemused in beer, a maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer, a clerk, for doomed his father's soul to cross, who pens a stanza when he should engross? Is there who, locked from ink and paper, scrawls with desperate charcoal round his darkened walls, all fly to twitnam, and in humble strain apply to me to keep them mad or vain? Arthur, whose giddy son neglects the laws, imputes to me in my damned works the cause. Poor corner sees his frantic wife elope, and curses wit and poetry and hope.