Student Question
What are the differences between seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century literary features?
Quick answer:
One main difference between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary features is the seventeenth century's emphasis on experimentation with imagery and metaphor versus the eighteenth century's emphasis on regularity and harmonious form.
A main difference between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writing is style. The seventeenth century is associated with the fractured, experimental style of the metaphysical poets, who were willing to strive for unusual metaphors and images to make a startling point. As eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson pointed out when he writes about the metaphysical poets,
The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.
An example of what could be called heterogeneous ideas yoked together can be found in John Donne's poem "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning." In this poem, Donne uses the unusual metaphor or conceit of comparing lovers to the two legs of a drawing compassing, writing:
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff...
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twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do
This is a highly unusual way to refer to the bond between two lovers.The imagery jolts us and forces us to think. In criticizing this experimental way of writing, much admired in later centuries, Johnson shows his eighteenth-century tastes. What he admires are the smooth heroic couplets of a poet like Alexander Pope. Pope's writing is characterized by elegantly regular cadences and is measured and easy to understand, often juxtaposing opposites in a balanced way. An example of his form is, as follows, from his mock-epic poem The Rape of the Lock:
Say what strange motive, Goddess! could compel
A well-bred lord t’ assault a gentle belle?
O say what stranger cause, yet unexplor’d,
Could make a gentle belle reject a lord?
Pope's verse is Neoclassical, imitating the verses and ideals of ancient poets of the Greek and Latin world. It values a seeming effortlessness and harmony over a groping for new ideas and images. It reflects an age most often associated with reason rather than jagged passion.