English Literature

The Augustan Age/the Neoclassical Age/ the
Age of ReasonThe Augustan AgeAugustan Age, one of the most illustrious periods
in Latin literary history, from approximately 43 BC to AD 18;
together with the preceding Ciceronian period, it forms
the Golden Age of Latin literature. Marked by civil peace and
prosperity, the age reached its highest literary expression in
poetry, a polished and sophisticated verse generally addressed to
a patron or to the emperor Augustus and dealing with themes of
patriotism, love, and nature. One decade alone, 29 to 19 BC, saw
the publication of Virgil’s Georgics and the completion of
the Aeneid; the appearance of Horace’s Odes, Books I–III,
and Epistles, Book I; the elegies (Books I–III) of Sextus Propertius,
a member of a group of promising young poets under the
patronage of Gaius Maecenas; and Books I–II of the elegies of
Tibullus, who was under the patronage of Messalla. During those
10 years also, Livy began his monumental history of Rome, and
another historian, Pollio, was writing his important but lost
history of recent events. Ovid, the author of Metamorphoses, a
mythological history of the world from the creation to
the Augustan Age, was the last great writer of the Golden Age; his
death in exile in AD 17 marked the close of the period.
By extension, the name Augustan Age also is applied to a
“classical” period in the literature of any nation, especially to the
18th century in England and, less frequently, to the 17th
century—the age of Corneille, Racine, and Molière—in France.
Some critics prefer to limit the English Augustan Age to a period
covered by the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14), when writers such
as Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, John
Gay, and Matthew Prior flourished. Others, however, would
extend it backward to include John Dryden and forward to take
in Samuel Johnson... ... ...