The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry. William Powell Jones

Isis ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-429
Author(s):  
G. S. Rousseau
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Rhetoric Of Science ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Scientific Ideas

‘Levelling the Sublime’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Shapiro
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
Paradise Lost ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
English Prose ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Status

The eighteenth century saw the curious tradition of translating Milton’s Paradise Lost into normative English prose and verse. The status of these translations as literary curiosities belies their serious ambition: to secure a universal readership of this English classic, an ambition also articulated in contemporary works of criticism and commentaries. Rather than treating this cluster of works as adaptations, this chapter conceives of them as intralingual translations, thus positioning them in the terms with which their authors describe them and within the earlier tradition of translation-as-commentary. Milton’s English translators aim at making his epic accessible to women, ‘foreigners’, ‘young people’, and ‘those of a capacity and knowledge below the first class of learning’, even if that accessibility requires some rewriting. Borrowing methods from the teaching of Latin, these authors established a practice that persists to this day in student-friendly translations of English poetry.

scholarly journals Personification in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry

Books Abroad ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
Stewart C. Wilcox ◽  
Chester F. Chapin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Poetry

Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry

1998 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 320
Author(s):  
Allan Ingram ◽  
John Goodridge
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Rural Life ◽  
English Poetry

Dryden and the scientific image

1963 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-35
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
The Public ◽  
Scientific Image ◽  
Copernican System ◽  
Active Interest ◽  
Scientific Ideas

For one brief period, at all events, no one could speak of two cultures in England, and that period was the Restoration. The decades that surround the founding of the Royal Society in 1660 are full of the intellectual excitement that might ideally arise from the free interchange of ideas among scientists, poets, and philosophers. In no other age has it been so: no Elizabethan poet can be shown to have taken an active interest in scientific discovery, unless we call geography a science—though it is conceivable that Ben Jonson, lecturing in rhetoric at Gresham College in London in the very centre of the ferment that eventually produced the Royal Society, had access to new scientific ideas. Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605) was merely a manifesto for the public encouragement of knowledge, and for years after his death it remained unfulfilled. Milton wrote Paradise Lost indifferent, apparently, to the question whether the Ptolemaic or Copernican system were true, and probably preferred the discredited Ptolemaic system for no better reason than that, in its picturesque detail, it suited his epic purposes better. And the record of English poets and philosophers after the appearance of Newton’s Principia in 1687 is hardly better. His Opticks of 1704, it is true, had a perceptible influence on eighteenth-century poets which has already been studied; but what is much more remarkable is the general avoidance of scientific discovery by the literary world of Augustan London.

Percy's Essay “On the Ancient Metrical Romances”

PMLA ◽  
1934 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-97
Author(s):  
Leah Dennis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
The Third ◽  
Medieval Romances ◽  
Important Landmark ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Function ◽  
King John

The essay “On the Ancient Metrical Romances,” introduced into the third volume of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), is an important landmark in the modern revival of interest in the medieval romances. Through the earlier part of the eighteenth century the infrequent comments on the romances had been incidental to something else (chivalry, for a conspicuous example) or had been concerned with theories, chiefly of origin, based on very little evidence. Of the romances themselves, little was known, but they were generally considered barbarous, uncultivated, and infantile. But in Percy's essay the subject is treated with some attempt at completeness, and includes not merely theories about their origin (though these are present) but a discussion of the romances themselves. Upon scrutiny, Percy's knowledge of the subject is found to be large, much larger than has been generally suspected, and toward the material he is seen to display a hesitating and diffident enthusiasm manifestly held in check by the disapproval of the current taste. A summary of his essay follows:The purpose of primitive poetry (according to Percy) was at first to record the valiant deeds and the genealogies of the race heroes; but as letters began to prevail, the bards gave over their historical function and devoted themselves to entertainment. From these songs of the Gothic bards are derived the romances of chivalry, which existed in their elements among the Teutonic peoples long before the days of the Crusades. Though romances first developed in France, the English had a native taste for this type of fiction, and there is reason to believe that they had romances of their own without French originals. These old romances throw light on the manners of the time and often have poetic merit. The publication of a judicious collection of them would thus be desirable. Our classical poets—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser—abound in allusions that are understood only by a knowledge of romances. To illustrate these points Percy quotes a passage from Richard Cure de Lyon that explains an allusion in King John, and gives a detailed abstract of Libius Disconius, one of the romances found in his manuscript. A catalogue of such romances as he knows to be extant closes the essay.

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