suitable verse of high, solemn, spiritual subjects. The practice of Pope primarily had made the heroic coupletthe use of an iambic pentameter line in paragraphs of rhyming paired linesseem a poetic form almost inevitably social, practical (in the sense of moral), and satiric. It can be argued that no such clear division is to be felt in the poems of Dryden or other poets of the Restoration.
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It is perhaps a peculiarity of Restoration imagination that on all sides (not just that of the King-and-Church men) deep personal experience could be associated with institutions imaginatively conceived. Young is an Anglican churchman, but his meditations cannot point at last triumphantly to a Church Triumphant (as Dryden wanted to do); what happens, the event of the poem, must be personal meditation, zigzags of thought, and the endeavor in the darkness to convert his friend Lorenzo, a private turning along a personal thought line.
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The poets of the early mid-centurythe era roughly from the first publication of Young's satires in 1725 to the death of William Collins in 1759turned back to the Jacobeans for poetic forms, images, and turns of language. We have had some trouble in focusing on this relationship of the "Augustans" to the "Jacobeans" because our histories of "the Gothic" have really been dealing with developments of the novel toward the end of the century. There is a tendency to think of graves, ghosts, darkness, etc. as the accessories and prerequisites of the Gothic novelists, and with them of Romantic poets. A group of poets, including Gray and Collins, used to be referred to as "Pre-Romantic"a nicely question-begging term that tended to confuse students about chronology. It was hard to remember that Thomson wrote in the 1730s and Blair in the 1740s, or that Gray wrote most of his work in the 1740s and Collins likewise.
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We had wanted so much to say that there was a neoclassical period which lasted right up to the midpoint of the century, and that the other interests, wet and sloppy as they appeared to some historians and teachers, had come along later, with the dissolution of everything dry and manly and the outbursting of "the Gothic" and the French Revolution. But that is not at all the picture. In the first half of the century writers who had learned from the Restoration writers that there are no set models for literature were busy altering the inheritance from the Restoration writers themselves, and looking over the heads, as it were, of the Restoration crowd to other English poets. It is certainly true that the Metaphysical strain did not die out, but was transformed. It is also
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