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HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH ROMANTIC HELLENISM

Harry Levin (essay date 1931)

SOURCE: "The Romanticists and the Classical Tradition," in The Broken Column: A Study in Romantic Hellenism, Harvard University Press, 1931, pp. 18-28.

[In the excerpt below, Levin offers a brief account of Romantic Hellenism as a reaction against eighteenth-century neo-classicism.]

The Romanticists and the Classical Tradition

Although we ordinarily expect to find the man reflected in the books that he reads, what are we to judge from the classical tastes of É mile, the romantic child of nature? "En général, É mile prendra plus de goût pour les livres des anciens, que pour les nôtres," explains his godfather, Rousseau, "par cela seul qu'étant les premiers, les anciens sont le plus près de la nature, et que leur génie est plus à eux." Emile, then, took his books along with him into the thicket and the shadows of leaves sifted over...

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1. Introduction
2. Representative Poetry
3. Overviews
4. Historical Development Of English Romantic Hellenism
5. Influence Of Greek Mythology On The Romantics
6. Influence Of Greek Literature, Art, And Culture On The Romantics
7. Further Reading
8. Copyright