Voltaire

VOLTAIREAn Essay Upon the Civil Wars of France and Also Upon the Epik

Poetry of the European Nations from Homer to Milton

November 1694 – May 1778

ENLIGHTENMENT/ROMANTIC

Immanuel Kant born 1724

Voltaire publishes ‘Essay Upon Epik Poetry’ 1727

The border of Romanticism and the Enlightenment

Themes of Romanticism in Voltaire

The Man of Many Talents

Rousseau vs. Voltaire

HISTORICAL STAGE

Reading becomes a fad in France (coffee

houses/salons)

French frivolity at its height

French Revolution to come in 1789 (inspiration for

many Romantic ideas)

Voltaire the Exile

OVERARCHING THEMES

Voltaire’s proposition of pluralism vs. nationalism

Discussion of Author, Reader, and Critic (new)

Literature as a product of culture (nation)

FROM HOMER TO MILTON

“We have in every art more rules than examples, for men

are more fond of teaching than being able to perform; so

there are more commentators than Poets” (37)

Of Homer: “Critics…who mistake commonly the

beginning of an art for the principles of art itself” (37)

Poetry as a mirror of culture, changing daily, without

fixed essence, despite rules— Voltaire calls for a change

from nationalistic literary sentiments

THE EPIC

From “epos” meaning discourse

The only universal trait is to be awed or moved by

the work

“There is such a thing as a National Taste” (44)

In, “laying aside the prejudices of the School or the

overbearing love of the productions of his own

country” we are much better off.

Conflicting statements?

LITERARY THEORY

“The progress, the sinking of Art, its Raising

again”

Precursor to Hegelian theory of Thesis—Antithesis

—Synthesis

(Bakhtin’s later Criticism)

Voltaire’s secular beliefs and the reader as an

individual (able and competent judge)

WHY WE HATE HOMER

“Few have been able to go through the whole Iliad without struggling against a

secret Dislike, and some have thrown it aside after the Fourth or Fifth Book.

How does it come to pass that Homer hath so many admirers and so few

readers?” (90)

1. awed by Homer’s fame

2.Love for ‘The Great Author’

3.TL;DR

4.“the motifs of the heart do not keep pace with the pleasures of the fancy” (92)

5.Many books, read like soap operas (too much uniformity, not enough

continuity)

COOL STORY BRO, TELL IT AGAIN

Most of the following authors will be compared to

Homer, FYI

Interplay between contemporaries and the

Ancients

“he draws from the richness from the sane source

but not at the expense of his predecessor” (96)

Critics are too caught up with seeing the

‘plagiarized’ likenesses of two works to appreciate

them. Does this problem carry on today?

THE RUNDOWN

Lucan: “a recent history [as] the proper subject” (100) –

tackling the problem of a subject being too great to do justice to

Trissino: The Vulgar Tongue – “It is not vulgar to write a

historically based epic in one’s language; it can capture nuance”

Camounes (skip)

Tasso: Voltaire’s favorite –The reader’s dissatisfaction of being

made to fall in love with a character and have them dispatched

too quickly

MILTON

Don Alonzo D’Ereilla (skip)

Milton:

1. Uniformity yet varied

2. “I am very far from thinking that one nation ought to

judge of its productions by the standard of another…

would each nation attend a little more than they do to the

taste and Manners of their respective neighbors perhaps a

general taste might diffuse itself through all Europe” (135)

SOME CONCLUSIONS

Romantic idea:

“I admire the author, I desire to know something of the

man, and he whom all Readers would be glad to know, is

allowed to speak of himself” (137)

Poetry? Prose?

“For our poetry…would have nothing but loftiness of

Stile, to distinguish it from Prose, if it were not for Rime”

(148)