Education of the republic of uzbekistan

Neoclassicism from 1660 to 1700
By the Restoration, the poets had turned their attention primarily to public and social themes. The comedy of this period has given readers the impression of a licentious age determined to bury the memory of Puritanistic domination and live as fast and loose an existence as possible. Such behavior could not have characterized more than a tiny percentage of the people of later Stuart England. It was an age struggling for order through compromise. Wit might entertain, but life required sober judgment.
The classical tradition survived the New Science better than did the Metaphysical. Itdid not aspire to compete with science in the realm beyond everyday human and social experience. The Jonsonian tradition of short lyric and reflective poems no longer flourished, but the neoclassicists of the Restoration rediscovered satire and the heroic poem—the latter primarily in the remarkable triad of Miltonic poems published be-tween 1667 and 1671: Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671).⁵


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⁵https://literariness.org/2020/07/08/analysis-of-john-drydens-mac-flecknoe/
Horace was not neglected, but the study and translation of the Homeric and Vergilian epics gained in popularity. The time might have been ripe for a great patriotic epic (Milton considered a true Arthurian epic that would rectify the deficiencies of Spenser’s episodic one before he finally settled on the yet nobler idea of justifying God’s way to humans), but whether because Milton’s accomplishment had pre-empted the field or because history as Restoration poets knew it could not be hammered into the Vergilian mold, it was not written.


Instead, Dryden produced something new: a political satire in a heroic style based ona contemporary controversy over the attempt to exclude Charles II’s Roman Catholic brother James from the royal succession. It was a serious matter, laden with danger for the principal in the struggle, for Dryden, and for the nation. He did not use blank verse, as Shakespeare and Milton had in their greatest works, but the heroic couplet, a form that Dryden had been honing for twenty years. The result is a poem of peculiar urgency, yet by virtue of Dryden’s skillful representation of Charles II as the biblical King David and of the earl of Shaftesbury as “false Achitophel,” who attempts to turn Absalom(Charles’s illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth) against his father, the poem takes on universality. It is by far the most impressive poem of the period: Absalom and Achitophel (1681, 1682).⁶


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⁶ https://literariness.org/2020/07/06/analysis-of-john-drydens-absalom-and-achitophel/


The drama aside, satire is the greatest literary achievement of the Restoration, and it is also the most diverse. From Samuel Butler’s low burlesque of the Puritans in Hudibras (1663, 1664, 1678, parts 1-3) to Dryden’s sustained high style in Absalomand Achitophel, from a butt as small as one undistinguished playwright (Thomas Shadwell in Dryden’s 1682 mock-epic Mac Flecknoe: Or, A Satyre upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T. S.) to one as large as humankind, vain aspirer to the status of rational being (the earl of Rochester’s “A Satire Against Mankind,” ⁷ printed in 1675),verse satire flourished, providing models for even greater achievements in the first part of the following century. The Renaissance notion of decorum as the delicate adjustment of literary means to ends, of the suitability of the parts to the whole, governed these di-verse attempts at diminishing the wickedness and folly that Restoration poets considered it their duty to expose and correct. Even Hudibras, with its slam-bang tetrameter couplets and quirky rhymes, seems the perfect vehicle for flaying the routed Puritans, and its levels of irony are far more complex than superficial readers suspect. When sat-ire began to invade prose, as it increasingly did in the eighteenth century, its narrative possibilities increased, but it lost subtle effects of rhythm, timing, and rhyme.


Compared with the first sixty years of the century, the Restoration seems a prosaic age. A considerable number of its most accomplished writers—John Bunyan, the diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, Sir William Temple, John Locke—wrote no poetry worth preserving, and Dryden himself wrote a large proportion of prose.