routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Contexts and conditions
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economics, science and engineering, together with rapid developments
in both agricultural and industrial technology, suggested human progress
on a grand scale. At the centre of these advances towards a perfect
society was mankind, and it must have seemed that everything was
within man’s grasp if his baser, bestial instincts could be controlled.
The Classical temperament trusts reason, intellect, and the head. The
Romantic temperament prefers feelings, intuition, and the heart.
There are further contrasts in the ways in which children are regarded
and represented in Classical and Romantic literature. For the Augustan
writer the child is only important because he or she will develop into an
adult. The child’s savage instincts must be trained, making it civilised and
sophisticated. For the Romantic writer the child is holy and pure and its
proximity to God will only be corrupted by civilisation. The child then is
a source of natural and spontaneous feeling. When Wordsworth wrote
that ‘the Child is father of the Man’ (in My Heart Leaps Up) he stressed that
the adult learns from the experience of childhood.
The two ages may be contrasted in other ways: the Classical writer
looks outward to society, Romantic writers look inward to their own
soul and to the life of the imagination; the Classical writer concentrates
on what can be logically measured and rationally understood, Romantic
writers are attracted to the irrational mystical and supernatural world;
the Classical writer is attracted to a social order in which everyone
knows their place, Romantic writers celebrate the freedom of nature
and of individual human experience. In fact, the writings of the
Augustan age stress the way societies improve under careful regulation;
Romantic literature is generally more critical of society and its injustices,
questioning rather than affirming, exploring rather than defining.
The language and form of the literature of the two ages also shows
these two different ways of seeing. The Augustans developed a formal
and ordered way of writing characterised by the balance and symmetry
of the heroic couplet in poetry and by an adherence to the conventions
of a special poetic diction. The Romantics developed ways of writing
which tried to capture the ebb and flow of individual experience in
forms and language which were intended to be closer to everyday
speech and more accessible to the general reader. Here is an extract
from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (in the revised version of 1802):