Personification But Not Poetry

Abstract

This symposium on the literary accomplishments of the last part of the Neoclassical Age oddly includes a discussion of its lyric art. Even at the end of our examination, the inclusion may still seem odd to some of us, including perhaps the speaker, but we should begin with the realization that it would not seem so to the Age itself. The eighteenth century did not feel that, because it was to become known in history as the Age of Reason, it was prevented by dialectical necessity from appreciating and producing great lyric poetry, often regarded as the purest expression of faculties dialectically opposite to the rational. Instead, most Neoclassical critics placed the Great Ode with epic and tragedy at the top of the poetical hierarchy, and during the later Neoclassical Period many believed that they were witnessing a lyric renaissance; indeed, some revived the ancient-modern controversy, compared their ode writers to Pindar and Dryden, and maintained that theirs was not only a lyric age but the most splendid in history. This poetic renewal, if such it was, is marked by no creation more distinctive than the personified lyric. Since our subject must be limited, it will be limited to what the age regarded as one of its inventions and an invention of its outstanding poets, Collins, Gray, the Wartons, et al. And the term personified lyric will also be limited to refer only to the lyric that employs a single personification as a unifying device, a poem such as Collins' Ode to Peace which represents Peace as a goddess who is urged to return to England where at the end she will marry warlike Honour while all of England's ports and sons rejoice. Indeed, the personified lyric is so distinctive of the eighteenth century that it almost disappeared with it, and since then has usually been viewed as a literary fossil. Recently, however, it has been accorded the kindness of historical investigation which presupposes that knowledge of the past may restore some