1. Second half of the 18th century: Poetry in Transition

2. History 1688 – Glorious (Bloodless) Revolution
Industrial Revolution and Agrarian Revolution (cf. Goldsmith, Crabbe)
: war with France
Ireland (Catholicism of majority)
Scotland (1707: Union of Parliaments; Jacobite Rebellions: 1715, 1745)
Scottish Enlightenment – David Hume, Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) – idea of sociability
American Revolution (1775)
French Revolution (1789)

3. Simultaneous trends develop side by side
Literary production
Growth of publishing industry
Differentiation of readership
Professionalization, incl. women poets
Rise of the professional critic
Simultaneous trends develop side by side
& influence each other

4. I) The persistence of Augustan idiom: Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Rambler
Dictionary of the English Language (1755)
Preface to Shakespeare (1765)
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)
Ideal of sociability, conversation –
the ‘Club’ (Joshua Reynolds, Goldsmith, Garrick, Burke)

5. The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749)
imitation! Juvenal’s Satire (3rd and esp. 10th) cf. Pope’s Imitations of Horace; Dryden’s translations of Juvenal, etc. concern with history! – recent events assimilated to famous examples of the past

6. The Vanity of Human Wishes
Let observation with extensive view, 
Survey mankind, from China to Peru; 
Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, 
And watch the busy scenes of crowded life; 
Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate, 
O’erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate, 
Where wav’ring man, betray’d by vent’rous pride 
To tread the dreary paths without a guide, 
As treach’rous phantoms in the mist delude, 
Shuns fancied ills, or chases airy good. 

7. The Vanity of Human Wishes
imitation heroic couplet public voice

8. The Vanity of Human Wishes
imitation heroic couplet public voice historical & geographical range (‘Survey!’) comprehensiveness, universality

9. The Vanity of Human Wishes
Let observation with extensive view, 
Survey mankind, from China to Peru; 
Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, 
And watch the busy scenes of crowded life; 
Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate, 
O’erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate, 
Where wav’ring man, betray’d by vent’rous pride 
To tread the dreary paths without a guide, 
As treach’rous phantoms in the mist delude, 
Shuns fancied ills, or chases airy good. 

10. The Vanity of Human Wishes
5 kinds of wishing:
For political power
For military glory
For scholarly achievement
For longevity
For beauty

11. The Vanity of Human Wishes
Turning point: Enquirer, cease, Petitions yet remain, Which Heav’n may hear, nor deem Religion vain (ll. 349–50) Christian resolution (St. Paul; fideism)

12. The Vanity of Human Wishes
when the Sense of sacred Presence fires, And strong Devotion to the Skies aspires, Pour forth thy Fervours for a healthful Mind, Obedient Passions, and a Will resign’d. (ll. 357–60) ‘imitation to end all imitation’? New idea of originality! (cf. Edward Young: Conjectures on Original Composition, 1759)

13. II) Transformation of the Augustan Idiom
Thomas Gray ( )
Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1742)
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)
Johnson: ‘The Churchyard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.’ 

14. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

15. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
quatrain (abab) veiled allusions, closer to the vernacular intimacy, subjective voice But also: intertextuality, sense of tradition (Milton, Shakespeare, Virgil’s Georgics, etc.)

16. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
solitude – the private self (vs public voice) melancholy , isolation of the poet (cf.: ‘graveyard school’) sensibility, sympathy for the ‘common people’ memory (vs history) Tradition of the ‘prospect poem’ transformed

17. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The problem of memory: ‘short and simple annals of the poor’ ‘Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault, If Memory o’er their tomb no trophies raise’ - discontinuity, disconnectedness

18. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The problem of the ‘common people’
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

19. New features of the poetry of the age
New emphasis on originality / genius Loss of public engagement Retreat from the city Aesthetic of the sublime (cf. Burke) The ode (Collins, Cowper, Gray) Turn to the past (Gray, Percy, Macpherson, etc.) Sensibility