Age of Sensibility

Age of Sensibility in English literature is the period roughly between 1744 and 1798. The year 1744 is marked by the death of Alexander Pope while Wordsworth and Coleridge published their joint literary piece Lyrical Ballads in 1978.

This later half of the 18th century was earlier known as the Age of Johnson because Dr Johnson (1709-1784) had a dominant position. His circle included Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, James Boswell, and Edward Gibbon.

This period is also known as neoclassicism because these men on the whole represented a culmination of the literary and critical modes of neoclassicism and the world view of the Enlightenment.

The period has be rechristened the Age of Sensibility because new cultural attitudes in literature and a special kind of poetry. This cultural attitude was nothing but a growing sympathy for the Middle Age, cultural primitivism, an intense interest in ballads and other folk literature, and a turn from neoclassic “correctness” and emphasis on judgment and restraint to an emphasis on instinct and feeling. It led to the development of a literature of sensibility which exalted the “original genius” and the “bardic” poetry of the sublime and visionary imagination.

This new sensibility and values were expressed in Thomas Gray’s poem “Stanzas to Mr Bentley” as follows:

But not to one in this benighted age
Is that diviner inspiration given,
That burns in Shakespeare’s or in Milton’s page,
The pomp and prodigality of Heaven.

The major poets of the age were William Collins, Joseph, Thomas Warton, Christopher Smart, William Cowper and Robert Burns.

William Collins, Joseph, and Thomas Warton along with Gray began publication of the Vogue in 1740s for what Johnson slightingly referred to as “Ode, and elegy, and sonnet”.

Thomas Percy published his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. There were many folk ballads and a few medieval metrical romances in it.

James Macpherson published his greatly doctored versions of the poems of the Gaelic bard, Ossian (also known as Oisin) during the same decade ie 1760s.

William Blake, in the last decade of this period, signaled the arrival of a new era in literature, which was sufficiently indicated in his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and his early books of visionary prophecy written in what he called “the voice of the Bard” including The Book of Urizen and The Book of Los.

Nearby pages
Age-old, Ageing, Ageism, Ageist, Ageless