Only when the admiration for such emotional and imaginative
qualities should outweigh the desire for symmetrical form; when
"primitive" literature should be preferred to Virgil and Horace;
and when this preference should be joined with a belief in the
diversity and fatality of literary bents--only then could the
concept of original genius burst into full bloom.
In Aaron Hill's preface to the paraphrase of Genesis, published
in 1720, we find no preoccupation with the fatality of
temperament and style. But we do find a rising discontent with
the emptiness and restraint of much contemporary verse, and a
very real preference for a more meaningful and a more emotional
and imaginative poetry. We find, in fact, a genuine appreciation
for the poetry of the Old Testament--a poetry which Biblical
scholars like Le Clerc were already viewing as the product of
untrained primitives.
Hill was not alone in his admiration for Biblical style, for the
praise of the "unclassical" poetry of the Bible, which had begun
in the Renaissance, had swelled rather than diminished during the
neoclassical age. By the second decade of the 18th century such
Augustans as Dennis, Gildon, and Pope were crying up its
beauties. Not all agreed, of course, on just what those beauties
were. And still less did they agree on the extent to which
contemporary poetry should imitate them.
One thing upon which almost all would have agreed, however, was
the adoption of the historical point of view in the approach to
Hebrew poetry.
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