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Alan Lindsay, PhD
The period that coincides roughly with the Eighteenth century is known by various names: The Enlightenment, The Neo-Classical Age, The Augustan Age, and The Age of Reason. Advancing the project of the Renaissance, it was a time that yearned to use logic or reason to raise history out of the darkness of superstition and establish a verifiable knowledge of the world. It is the age of the philosophy of John Locke and the science of Isaac Newton. As we will see however, we will need to understand more than reason to understand the poetry of the era.
The Rise of Reason
Commenting on one of his poems to the young woman who inspired it, Alexander Pope—the premier English poet of the eighteenth century—wrote: “I know how disagreeable it is to make use of hard words before a lady; but ’tis so much the concern of a poet to have his works understood, and particularly by your sex, that you must give me leave to explain two or three difficult terms” (italics added).
Once again, we see here how important it is for the poet that his poem not be “open for interpretation.” He’s afraid the lady might not understand his great work properly. And this worries him. So he will condescend to give her the means by which she can better understand what is going on in the poem. This is not at all surprising in the Enlightenment, which was officially sexist and, more importantly for our concerns, devoted to the idea that reason is the primary means through which humanity will lead itself out of error and into truth. If we lived in this era, we’d expect to reason not only about poems but also in poems.
This is perhaps the biggest change in poetry from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Poetry was still thought of as elevated language. You could still do all the things in poetry you could do in any kind of language, and there were still love poems, and lyric poems, and narrative poems. Poetry was still thought of as a moral force (or, if misused, as an immoral force). And poets were still thought of as artists—in fact, being an artist was an even bigger deal in the eighteenth century than it had been in the previous two centuries. And poetry was still expected to “imitate nature.” But in the eighteenth century, poetry became more aligned with the humanist project of understanding nature (including human nature) through reason than it ever had been before. It came to be believed in the eighteenth century that nature was best understood through reason, so poetry became more closely aligned to reason.
That does not mean that all poems were conceived of as making logical arguments bent on establishing objective truth through reason. As we’ll see below, both sentimental poetry and satire also rose to high prominence at the time, and neither of these makes a direct appeal to reason. But among the most characteristic poetry of the age was the essay poem. Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism,” and “An Essay on Man,” are the two most important examples. In th