The English
Neoclassical movement, derived primarily from classical models, embodied a group
of attitudes toward art and human existence ideals
of order, logic, restraint, "correctness," decorum, and so on, which would
enable the practitioners of various arts to imitate or reproduce the structures
and themes of Greek or Roman originals. 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.
To a certain extent,
Neoclassicism represented a reaction against the optimistic, exuberant, and
enthusiastic Renaissance view of humanity as being
fundamentally good and possessed of an infinite potential for spiritual and
intellectual growth. Neoclassical thinkers, by contrast, saw humanity as
imperfect, inherently sinful, and whose potential was limited. They replaced the
Renaissance emphasis on the imagination, on invention and
experimentation, and on mysticism with an emphasis on order and reason, on
restraint, on common sense, and on religious, political, economic
and philosophical conservatism. They maintained that humankind itself was the
most appropriate subject of art, and saw art itself as essentially
pragmatic--as valuable because it was useful--and as something which was
properly intellectual rather than emotional.
Hence their emphasis on proper
subject matter; and hence their attempts to subordinate details to an overall
design, to employ in their work concepts
like symmetry, proportion, unity, harmony, and grace, which would facilitate the
process of delighting, instructing, educating, and correcting the social
animal which they believed humans to be. Their favorite prose literary forms
were the essay, the letter, the satire, the parody, the burlesque, and the
moral fable; in poetry, the favorite verse form was the rhymed couplet, which
reached its greatest sophistication in heroic couplet of Pope; while the
theatre saw the development of the heroic drama, the melodrama, the sentimental
comedy, and the comedy of manners.
The fading away of Neoclassicism
may have appeared to represent the last flicker of the Enlightenment, but
artistic movements never really die: many
of the primary aesthetic tenets of Neoclassicism, in fact, reappeared in the
twentieth century -- in, for example, the poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot --
as manifestations of a reaction against Romanticism itself: Eliot saw
Neoclassicism as emphasizing poetic form and conscious craftsmanship, and
Romanticism as a poetics of personal emotion and "inspiration," and preferred
the former.
--Incorporated from The Victorian Web (victorianweb.org)