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The Taylorian Lecture, 1920

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The Taylorian Lecture, 1920

Malherbe and the Classical Reaction in the Seventeenth Century (Classic Reprint)
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Excerpt from The Taylorian Lecture, 1920: Malherbe and the Classical Reaction in the Seventeenth Century During the next generation, under conditions with which we have no time to occupy us today, there was a steady, indeed an almost precipitous decline in the quality of French verse. If we turn to our own litera ture of half a century later, we see a parallel decline in the drama down from Shakespeare to Shirley and the later disciples of Ben Jonson. We all know how dis concerting it is to pass from the sheer beauty of the great Elizabethans to the broken verse and the mixture of flatness and violence of the lesser poets of the Commonwealth. But in France the decadence had been still more striking, because of the extremely high line adopted by Ronsard and Du Bellay in their prose manifestos. The doctrine of the Pleiade had been as rigorous and lofty as a creed in literature could well be, and it rose to an altogether higher plane than was dreamed of by the English critics half a century later. No dignity, no assurance of high and pure poetic reso lution could surpass the apparent aim of the manifestoes of 1549. Frenchmen, it seemed, had nothing to do but follow these exalted precepts and to produce the most wonderful poetry which the world had seen since the days of Pindar and Sappho. We cannot to-day enter into the question why these high hopes were almost immediately shattered, except so far as to suggest that excellent principles are sometimes insufficient to produce satisfactory practice. We have to look abruptly this afternoon into the conditions of French poetry in the last years of the sixteenth century, and to realize that those conditions had brought French literature to a point where reform was useless and revolution was inevitable. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Release date NZ
May 3rd, 2018
Author
Pages
38
Audience
  • General (US: Trade)
Illustrations
2 Illustrations; Illustrations, black and white
Publisher
Forgotten Books
Country of Publication
United Kingdom
Imprint
Forgotten Books
Dimensions
152x229x6
ISBN-13
9780484064620
Product ID
28016544

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