In England, the neoclassical period spans over 180 years of art history, starting with the restoration of Charles II in 1660. The works of Neoclassical writers were based on classical texts and followed various aesthetic values developed in Ancient Greece and Rome. A Neoclassicist is a traditionalist who believes that literature should be mastered through study, discipline, and practice.
The classical values of unity and proportion were revived. They viewed their art as a means of entertaining and informing. They depicted humans as social creatures, as members of polite society. They possessed a sophisticated, elitist, and erudite manner.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
John Dryden (1631-1700)
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636-1711)
John Locke (1632-1704)
John Dennis (1658-1734)
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Joseph Addison (1672-1719),
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
Edmund Burke (1729-1797):
David Hume (1711-1776)
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Edward Young (1683-1765)
Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792)
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Mary Wollstonecraft
The neoclassical ideal was founded on Horace's Roman Ars Poetica. It occurs without premeditation and achieves, as Alexander Pope said in An Essay on Criticism, 1711: "a grace beyond the reach of art." Neoclassical humanism was not about art for art's sake but humanity's sake."True wit," defined by Pope in his Essay on Criticism, is "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed."
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