... Dryden is read with frequent astonishment and Pope with
perpetual delight."
Such overemphasis placed on mere form tended to draw the attention of the
writer away from the matter. The American poetry of this period suffered
more than the prose from this formal influence.
Since the motto of the classicists was polished regularity, they avoided
the romantic, irregular, and improbable, and condemned the _Arabian
Nights_, _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, _The Tempest_, and other "monstrous
irregularities of Shakespeare." This school loved to teach and to point out
shortcomings, hence the terms "didactic" and "satiric" are often applied to
it.
The last part of the eighteenth century showed a revolt against the
classicists. Victory came to the new romantic school, which included
authors like Wordsworth (1770-1850), Coleridge (1772-1834), Shelley
(1792-1822), and Keats (1795-1821). The terms "romantic" and "imaginative"
were at first in great measure synonymous. The romanticists maintained that
a reality of the imagination might be as satisfying and as important as a
reality of the prosaic reason, since the human mind had the power of
imagining as well as of thinking.
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