Classicism
is an attitude to literature that is guided by admiration of the qualities of
formal balance, proportion, decorum, and restraint attributed to the
major works of ancient Greek and Roman literature ('the classics') in
preference to the irregularities of later vernacular literatures, and
especially (since about 1800) to the artistic liberties proclaimed by romanticism.
A classic is a work of the highest class, and has also been taken to mean a
work suitable for study in school classes. During and since the renaissance,
these overlapping meanings came to be applied to the writings of major Greek
and Roman authors from Homer to Juvenal, which were regarded as unsurpassed
models of excellence. The adjective classical, usually applied to this body of
writings, has since been extended to outstandingly creative periods of other
literatures: the 17th century may be regarded as the classical age of French
literature, and the 19th century the classical period of the Western novel,
while the finest fiction of the United States in the mid-19th century from Cooper
to Twain was referred to by D. H. Lawrence as Classic American Literature
(despite the opposition between 'classical' and 'romantic' views of art, a
romantic work can now still be a classic). A classical style or approach to
literary composition is usually one that imitates Greek or Roman models in
subject-matter (e.g. Greek legends) or in form (by the adoption of GENRES like
TRAGEDY, EPic, ODE, or verse SATIRE), or both. As a literary doctrine,
classicism holds that the writer must be governed by rules, models, or
conventions, rather than by wayward inspiration: in its most strictly codified
form in the 17th and 18th centuries (see neoclassicism), it required the
observance of rules derived from Aristotle's Poetics (4th century BCE) and
Horace's Ars Poetica (c.20 BCE), principally those of decorum and the dramatic unities.
The dominant tendency of French literature in the 17th and 18th centuries,
classicism in a weaker form also characterized the augustan age in
England; the later German classicism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries
was distinguished by its exclusive interest in Greek models, as opposed to the
Roman bias of French and English classicisms. After the end of the 18th
century, 'classical' came to be contrasted with 'romantic' in an opposition of
increasingly generalized terms embracing moods and attitudes as well as
characteristics of actual works. While partisans of Romanticism associated the
classical with the rigidly artificial and the romantic with the freely
creative, the classicists condemned romantic self-expression as eccentric
self-indulgence, in the name of classical sanity and order. The great German
writer]. W. von Goethe summarized his conversion to classical principles by
defining the classical as healthy, the romantic as sickly. Since then, literary
classicism has often been less a matter of imitating Greek and Roman models
than of resisting the claims of Romanticism and all that it may be thought to
stand for (Protestantism, liberalism, democracy, anarchy): the critical
doctrines of Matthew Arnold and more especially of T. S. Eliot are classicist
in this sense of reacting against the Romantic principle of unrestrained
self expression.