Preconceptions

The study of eighteenth-century theories of poetry might be more safely ignored if we knew nothing rather than a little of the subject beforehand. The little learning that may be a dangerous thing, at least for an unbiased reading of the poetry itself, often rests on brief encounters with popular eighteenth- century works, Romantic reactions, and modern generalizations. A few points may loom disproportionately in the memory, for example, from Pope's An Essay on Criticism, epigrammatic but easily misconstrued; from Johnson's novel Rasselas, in which Imlac recommends “general truths” to poets, over the “streaks of the tulip”; from Wordsworth's retrospective simplification in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads of the prior age as artificial, or from later handbook reductions such as “neo-classicism,” “rules,” and “didacticism.” Through much of the modern era it has been assumed either that eighteenth-century poetry was inhibited by rigid theoretical principles and succeeded (when it did) by ignoring them. The authors of an influential history of criticism have earnestly insisted that eighteenth-century poetry was largely - and happily - “a hundred years behind the most advanced theory,” proceeding more along lines laid down in Renaissance treatises than in newer works such as Edward Bysshe's Art of Poetry of 1701. In this light, eighteenth-century criticism “before the rise of romantic theory” produced “only a more or less dismal continuation of the ornamentalist view” of metaphor and poetic language.