classicism, classic

classicism, classic, are terms used in several different and at times overlapping senses. A ‘literary classic’ is a work considered excellent of its kind, and therefore standard, fit to be used as a model or imitated. More narrowly, ‘classicism’ may be taken to denote the deliberate imitation of the works of antiquity, and in this sense is often qualified as ‘neo-classicism’, which flourished in England in the late 17th and 18th cents. An elaboration of this concept leads to a distinction between Classicism and Romanticism; the Romantic movement, which dominated the early 19th cent., and which saw itself in part as a revolt against Classicism, led in turn to a reaction at the beginning of the 20th cent. from writers such as T. S. Eliot and T. E. Hulme, whose concern was to stress man's limitations rather than his perfectibility and illimitable aspirations, and who emphasized the virtues of formal restraint in literature rather than the virtues of inspiration and exuberance.

The shades of meaning which the term have acquired lead at times to apparent confusion: when one speaks of the drama of Racine and Corneille as ‘classical’, and the drama of Shakespeare or Hugo as ‘romantic’, one is not depriving Shakespeare or Hugo of classic status, nor suggesting that Shakespeare himself had any sense of such a contrast; whereas Hugo wrote as a conscious rebel against classicism. Auden and Dylan Thomas, near-contemporaries, are frequently described as exemplars of, respectively, the classical and the romantic in modern poetry, and both are widely considered classics of their own period and aesthetic approach.