Augustan Period

Augustan was satire

                                 The Augustan age in English literature remarkable for its satire verses According to Dr. Johnson, “Satire is a poem in which wickedness of folly is censored”. The first triumphs of satire were political particularly in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras and Dryden’s Absalom an Achidophel , Mac Flecknoe  and The Medall.

 

                                                          But whereas Butler is a stimulating curicity, Dryden is a great satirist in English. Dryden’s first satire Absalomn  and Achetophel was called forth by a political emergency .The whigs headed by the Eart of Shaftesbury agitated to exclude Charles ll’s heir and brother James from succession to the throne , they supported the claims of Monmouth. Dryden, the poet laureate was trying to sway openion against Shaftesbury. Dryden’s second satire The Medall was included by a commemorative medal struck in honour of Shaftesbury’s acquittal. Here Dryden attacks Shaftesbury once again and maintains that only a rightful monarch , holly independent of popular sentiment car subdue faction and maintains a peaceful country. And this prompted Dryden to write. The finest of his shorter satirical poems. Mac Flecknoe ,  in which Shadwell is treated with humorous contempt.

 

                                                The true successor Dryden in the line of satirical verse was Alexander Pop. His first satirical model was Boileau’s Le- Lutrin. Pope’s masterpiece The Rape of the Lock deals with a trivial matter with grand, epic style:   Lord Peter’s cutting of a lock from Miss Arabella Farmer’s hair. Whereas Dryden followed the example of Juvenal, Pope found his true exemplar in Horace who was much giver to poetic autobiography. In The Imitation of Horace we find Pope proctising the same art. An Epistle to Dr Arburthnot (1735), the best of Pope’s portrays himself as a model of moderation and genteel decorum, intent upon high standards for the realm of art.

 

                                                The greatest, the most tremendous of Pope’s satire is certainly The Dunciad. The Dunciad is a collection of episodes each one of which is a self-contained unit and deals brilliantly with literary dullness and pedantry in connection with specific writers guilty of these vices. The poem concludes with a picture of the triumph of dullness:

 

                   “Thy hand great Anarch: lets the curtain fall

  And universal darkness buries all”.

 

It is a venomous poem that revetels “The wasp of Jwickenhan” at his malicious best.