The only thing that would be more ponderous and difficult than trudging through Kant’s prose in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment would be attempting to put his aesthetic philosophy found within to the test. Kant delivers a paucity of practical examples to make his recondite and ostensibly inconsistent abstractions all the more difficult to assimilate. In an attempt understand and make his knowledge mine, and perhaps include commentary on the more lucid sections, this essay will attempt to define and cross-reference some of his key critical terms.

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The following are major ideas held by conservative writers and thinkers of Neoclassicism, e.g. Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Gay, Butler, Rochester, Gibbon, Mandeville, Burlte, Reynolds, and Smollet.

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This is the difference that marks tragedy from comedy: comedy is inclined to imitate persons below the level of our world, tragedy persons above it. . . . Comedy is, as I have said, an imitation of lower types; though it does not include the full range of badness, nevertheless to be ridiculous is a kind of deformity. The causes of laughter are errors and deformities that do not pain or injure us; the comic mask, for instance, is deformed and distorted but not painfully so. . . . The next best plot, which is said by some people to be the best, is the tragedy with a double plot like the Odyssey, ending in one way for the better people and in the opposite way for the worse. But it is the weakness of theatrical performances that gives priority to this kind, when poets write what the audience would like to happen, they are in leading strings. This is not the pleasure proper to tragedy, but rather to comedy, where the greatest enemies in the fable make friends and go off at the end, and nobody is killed by anyone. –Aristotle, The Poetics

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All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good:
And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
–Alexander Pope, from Essay on Man, IV.281-294

Alexander Pope, a poet and catholic, betrays his neoclassicist longing for a universe that is perfectly ordered, ineffable, and beyond human understanding. His final pronouncement in Essay on Man, insists that man’s reason is no match for God’s design: that while we, perhaps arrogantly, strive for a rational understanding of the universe, are minds are not a match for God’s. We must console ourselves that the universe was designed in the best possible way, by the best of artists, and even though events will often leave us face-down in the mud or staring impotently at heaven, we must realize that it could be no other way. We live in the best of possible worlds.

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Allusion in Neoclassical poetry has various functions: allusion provides a contrast between the virtues of the past and the insanity of the present; allusion enriches the meaning and the texture of the poem; and allusion suggests a universality: people are not as different as they might believe being separated by time and space.

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No simple label can describe the Romantic Age, for if anything the artists of this era were individualists. Some were disillusioned by the empty promises of the French Revolution; most were disgusted with the mechanistic society they saw around them in their cities. They seemed to feel that the men before them had been too analytic, too dogmatic, too shackled to rules set up by formidable academies. Now it was time for self-expression, for a new emergence of the individual and his feelings. The following sources point to some of the directions this concern with self took.

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August 30

Unhappy man! Aren’t you a fool? Aren’t you deceiving yourself? What sense is there in this raging endless passion? I no longer have prayers except to her; no other form appears to my imagination except hers, and I see everything in the world about me only in relation to her. And this brings me many a happy hour — until I must tear myself away from her again. Oh Wilhelm! The things my heart often urges me to do! — When I have been sitting with her for two or three hours and have feasted on her figure, her manner, the divine expression of her thoughts, and then gradually my senses become tense, a darkness appears before my eyes, I can scarcely hear anything, my throat is constricted as though by the hand of an assassin, and my heart beats wildly trying to relieve my oppressed senses, but only increasing their confusion–Wilhelm, often I don’t know whether I really exist. And at times — when melancholy does not get the upper hand and Lotte permits me the wretched comfort of shedding my tears of anguish on her hand — I must leave her, I must get outside and roam far through the fields; I then find my pleasure in climbing a steep mountain, cutting a path through an untrodden forest, through hedges which tear me, through thorns which rend me. Then I feel a little better. A little . . . Oh, Wilhelm! The solitary dwelling of a cell, the hair shirt, and belt of thorns are the comforts for which my soul yearns. Goodbye; I see no end to this misery but the grave.

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I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent, and which will never find an imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all truth of nature, and that man is myself.

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Many students find Pope’s Rape of the Lock challenging. This study guide hopes to make it more accessible.

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Upon hearing the word “evil,” many simply turn off, not wanting to hear anymore. Aren’t we, as good people, supposed to shun evil; do our best to destroy it; rebuke it; cast it down? For that’s what God did to his chief angel, Lucifer, and in turn, what Satan did to humanity. Indeed, humanity does not want to negate creation and the endeavors of humanity, but the much of what brings about the grandeur and greatness of humanity lies in its ability to challenge what is, even if it means the occasional revolution and destruction of systems and orders which no longer fit. Lucifer means “light bringer,” and I find that in many literary manifestations of the fallen archangel, he still fulfills that function.

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