Eighteenth century ideas of taste as reflected chiefly in the poetry of the period

Abstract

The eighteenth century was a period of reconstruction in every branch of national activity. Clearness and method are first principles of reconstruction. The language must be unclouded and perspicuous. Hence the men of this age had recourse to painting and the plastic arts for analogies. This accounts for the extraordinary popularity of Du Fresnoy's Essay on Painting and for the numerous poems on Beauty, Landscape and Gardens. The essential unity of the arts was grasped by their close interdependence. To effect a unification of the arts and to draw out analogies was one of the methods of reconstrucion. We have seen how metaphors and similes borrowed from painting and gardening became very common in prose arid poetry of this age. Poets drew upon the sister -arts, just as the latter were inspired by the poetical idea. The creation of aesthetic pleasure was their common aim. Despite Lessing's theories, the appreciation of the ingredients of one art by another produced beneficial results. The poetry of this age is full of pictorial description. Gradually the dependence of poetry on painting ceased. Towards the close of the century, from Cowper onwards, poets and painters threw aside the 'Claude -glass and found beauty in hedge -rows and corn -fields. Their long training in looking at landscape pictorially exercised a wholesome influence on the romantic generation. Constable and Wordsworth represented the spirit of the English landscape in their respective spheres. In Byron's descriptions of the destructive forces of Nature, we feel an impress of the genius of Salvator Rosa, who has been called by Hazlitt 'the most romantic of landscape -painters.' In Keats's poetry we find a pictorial world of infinite suggestion. Morris, Rossetti and Swinburne were influenced by Keats's art. The Pre-Raphaelites took over from painting a new interest in colour. Their colours are pure, intense and bright and we find these colours reflected in their poetical vocabulary. In this way English poetry has maintained its great tradition and the ideas of the picturesque which came into being in the eighteenth century attained the vigour of maturity in the Art of England in the nineteenth century.