Augustans

When the German King George ascended to the English throne in 1714, he imagined himself the new Caesar Augustus, and in order to please, the poets around him allowed themselves to be called “Augustan”. Dryden and others wrote with discipline and satire, and the standard was Homer, Horace, Virgil, and Cicero. They mocked each other and argued over the smallest matters.

But this was the Age of Enlightenment, and a larger subject occupied much of their best work. Voltaire, who lived in exile in England at the height of his philosophical powers, admired the new “constitutional monarchy” and thought that bringing the power of kings and emperors under a more reasonable regime might set a good example.

In France, Descartes had suggested that man could think for himself. John Locke reasoned that if so, individuals then had the right to overthrow even their king if he was a tyrant. The important question to be discussed by intelligent men, he said, was how people should govern themselves. Alexander Pope, who was practically Voltaire’s contemporary, wrote that in poetry, as in philosophy, “the proper study of mankind is man.”

Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns