The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

literature held it fast in an elaborate mesh
of formal rules which they then tried
to use as the basis of their own work,
thus ensuring its own classic status. The
Romans, inheriting this classificatory
system of rhetorical terms, based their
own upon them and reinforced the ‘classic’
status of Greek literature, which they
imitated with a recurrent sense of inferiority.
For us ‘the classics’ means first the
literature of both Greece and Rome: but
‘a classic’ is nowadays likely to signify a
work about the status of which there is
general agreement, often unenthusiastic
(Arnold perhaps used the term thus when
he called Dryden and Pope ‘classics of
our prose’). A turning-point in the conception
of classic status may have
occurred in the neo-classical eighteenth
century when deference to the rules of
rhetoric, enshrined in the much-imitated
Ars Poetica of Horace and in Aristotle’s
Poetics and sustaining an aristocratic
culture, gave way to that sense of cultural
diffusion that enabled Dr Johnson to
invoke the general admiration for Gray’s
‘Elegy’ as real evidence of its excellence.
Since Arnold’s time the term classic has
lost effectiveness in proportion as moral
criticism has waned. Where there is no
critical consensus or (in Johnson’s phrase)
‘common pursuit of true judgement’ the
term is of doubtful use. Eliot, in What is a
Classic? cites ‘a very interesting book
called A Guide to the Classics which tells
you how to pick the Derby winner’: and
his own argument for the classic status of
Virgil is clearly shaped by extra-literary
concerns. In general the term is too readily
used as a substitute for criticism, and
to endorse received judgements.
Nevertheless an impulse towards
classicism as fostering the virtues of formal
discipline, impersonality, objectivity,
and the eschewal of the eccentric and selfindulgent
has since the time of Goethe
Classic 27
(who defined the classical as the healthy,
the romantic as the sick) served to check
the individualistic aesthetics of romantic
conceptions of ‘genius’. Pushkin’s work
displays a classicism of this kind, often
manifesting itself through SATIRE, as
in the case of much eighteenth-century
neo-classical writing. The revolt of many
twentieth-century writers against their
late romantic predecessors either enlisted
the literature of classical antiquity as an
aid to objectivity or universality (Joyce’s
use of Homer in Ulysses, or Pound’s of
Sextus Propertius) or contained lyric
sensibility within the disciplined forms of
a deliberate doctrine of classical impersonality.
Eliot’s theory of the OBJECTIVE
CORRELATIVE is neo-classical in this sense,
as is his insistence on the separation in
great literature of the man who suffers
from the mind which creates. A neoclassicism
of this kind also underlies
IMAGIST theory and practice. It was Eliot’s
elaboration of this new classicism into
a Virgilian absolutism and orthodoxy
extending beyond the frontiers of literature
that prompted D. H. Lawrence’s
expostulation that ‘This classiosity is
bunkum, and still more cowardice’
(Collected Letters, p. 753); and it is true
that such neo-classical phenomena as
neo-Aristotelianism in criticism run
deliberately counter to the eclecticism of
the culture they spring from, rather than
constituting an authoritative definition of
literary norms (as did the neo-classicism
of Dryden, Pope and Boileau). Such phenomena
amount in essence to a renewed
emphasis on the importance of style and
technique.
See Matthew Arnold, Essays in
Criticism, Second Series (1888);
T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (3rd edn,
1951); T. S. Eliot, What is a Classic?
(1945); H. M. Peyre, Que’st-ce que le
classicisme? (1933); S. Vines, The Course