The Art of Ease in English Poetry, c. 1683 - 1785

英国诗歌中的轻松艺术，c。

• 批准号: 2737991
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Oxford
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2737991
• 关键词: Art; Ease; English; Poetry; c.

'It is the most difficult Thing in the World to be easy'. So declares a figure in the mid-eighteenth-century conduct book The Art of Conversation; or the Polite Entertainer (1757). Such a paradox was not confined to the conversational arts, however; a similar problem preoccupied English poets throughout the long eighteenth century. The notion of 'ease' as a poetic ideal funds its most famous expression in Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711): 'True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, / As those move easiest who have learned to dance'. But despite the remarkable frequency with which the word appears in English verse and writing about it in the eighteenth century, the question of what exactly it means in this period for a writer 'to be easy' has never been satisfactorily answered. Moving from Soames and Dryden's translation of Boileau's Art of Poetry (1683), in which 'ease' denotes both the compositional aptitude of the poet and the particular way in which that aptitude is to be received by the reader, to William Cowper's The Task (1785), a poem that mounts a critique of the mannered fabric of urban life at the same time as itself aspiring to the polite paradox of 'laborious ease', I hope to remedy this critical oversight.This research will take the ubiquitous but still understudied imperative for 'Ease in Writing' as the starting-point for an exploration of the relationship between poetic style, authorial labour, and politeness in the long eighteenth century. 'Ease', Claude Rawson observed in 1994, 'is one of the pivotal terms in the discourse of urbanity, and has the usual slipperiness of such terms'. This thesis will tackle such 'slipperiness' head-on, critically reconstructing the complex set of implications carried by the word and the idea that it represents throughout the period. Juxtaposing an urbane and sociable poise of sprezzatura with a pastoral ideal of retirement, and a commitment to the labour of 'Art' with the concealment and disavowal of such labour, the concept of 'Ease' offers a valuable lens through which to clarify and rethink issues of civility and refinement, of artifice and artlessness, and of the nature of artistic labour, in eighteenth-century literature. Pope's 'True Ease' manifests itself in verse as a version of what Lawrence Klein describes as the 'polite style' that Shaftesbury prized in philosophy, and which he describes in the Characteristicks (1711) 'a Simple Manner' that 'conceals the Artifice as much as possible: endeavouring only to express the effect of Art under the appearance of the greatest Ease and Negligence'. 'Simple' styles possess their own complexities, however, and contemporary discussions of 'Ease' also dwelt repeatedly on its potentially unachievable nature. Johnson doubted, in Idler 77 (1759), 'whether any of our authors have yet been able, for twenty lines together, nicely to observe the true definition of easy poetry'. Attending to the gap between the theory of 'ease' and its poetic practice suggests new ways of understanding decorum and its violation in this period. Carey McIntosh's 1998 study, The Evolution of English Prose, 1700-1800 makes a compelling case for the way in which cultural shifts of refinement and gentrification play out at the level of prose style - even in 'the nit-picky details of grammar'. But there has been surprisingly little work on how those shifts are pursued as well as complicated in the period's verse. Thomas Woodman's Politeness and Poetry in the Age of Pope (1989) remains the only book-length study, and though valuable as a preliminary sketch of the terrain, it is hampered by its narrow historical scope (Parnell to Pope) and its lack of sustained formal attention to the 'nit-picky details' of style. Serious study of the place of manners in literature is seriously hindered if it fails closely to attend to the manner in which that literature is written. Drawing on Norbert Elias's foundational The Civilizing Process (1939) as well as on Keith Th

“这是世界上最难做到的事情。”18世纪中叶出版的《谈话的艺术》或《礼貌的演艺人》(1757)中的一位人物如是说。然而，这样的悖论并不局限于对话艺术；在漫长的18世纪，类似的问题一直困扰着英国诗人。作为一种诗意理想，“轻松”的概念在波普的“论批评”(1711)一文中为其最著名的表述提供了资金：“真正的写作轻松来自艺术，而不是偶然，/因为那些已经学会跳舞的人动作最容易。”但是，尽管这个词在18世纪的英语诗歌和写作中出现的频率非常高，但在这个时期，对于一个作家来说，这个词到底意味着什么，这个问题从来没有得到令人满意的回答。从索姆斯和德莱登翻译的博伊洛的《诗歌艺术》(1683年)到威廉·考珀的《任务》(1785年)，这首诗既批评了城市生活的文雅结构，同时又渴望找到一种礼貌的悖论--劳累的自在。这项研究将以无处不在但仍未得到充分研究的《写作自如》为起点，探索诗歌风格、创作劳动、写作自如之间的关系以及长达十八世纪的礼貌。克劳德·罗森(Claude Rawson)在1994年观察到，“易”是“都市风度”话语中的关键术语之一，具有此类术语通常的含糊不清之处。这篇论文将直面这种“滑稽”，批判性地重建这个词所承载的一系列复杂的含义，以及它在整个时期所代表的思想。将温文尔雅、善于交际的sprezzatura与田园般的退休理想并列在一起，并致力于“艺术”的劳动与隐藏和否认这种劳动，“轻松”的概念提供了一个宝贵的视角，通过它来澄清和重新思考18世纪文学中的文明与优雅、机智与朴素以及艺术劳动的性质等问题。波普的《真正的轻松》在诗句中表现为劳伦斯·克莱因所描述的沙夫茨伯里在哲学中珍视的那种‘礼貌风格’，他在《性格论》(1711)中描述了这种‘简单的方式’，“尽可能地隐藏了诡计：只努力在最轻松和疏忽的外表下表达艺术的效果”。然而，“简单”的风格有其自身的复杂性，当代关于“轻松”的讨论也反复谈到它潜在的不可实现的本质。约翰逊在《游手好闲》(Idler 77,1759)一书中怀疑，我们的任何一位作家是否已经能够用二十行文字很好地观察到轻松诗歌的真正定义。关注“安逸”理论与其诗歌实践之间的差距，提出了理解这一时期礼仪及其违反的新方法。凯里·麦金托什1998年的研究《英语散文的演变，1700-1800》提供了一个令人信服的案例，说明了精致和中产阶级化的文化转变是如何在散文风格层面上上演的--甚至在语法的挑剔细节中也是如此。但令人惊讶的是，关于如何追求这些转变的工作很少，而且在这一时期的诗句中也很复杂。托马斯·伍德曼的《教皇时代的礼貌与诗歌》()仍然是唯一一本全书长度的研究，虽然作为一幅关于这一领域的初步素描很有价值，但它的历史范围狭窄(从帕内尔到教皇)以及对文体的挑剔细节缺乏持续的正式关注，这一点阻碍了它的出版。认真研究礼仪在文学中的地位，如果不能密切关注文学的写作方式，就会受到严重阻碍。借鉴了诺伯特·埃利亚斯的基础著作《文明进程》(1939)以及基思·塔赫