Addison's Classical Criticism and the Origins of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics.

It has sometimes been suggested that Addison never in fact outgrew Dryden's influence, not even in the "Pleasures of the Imagination" papers; that the imaginative and "psychological" emphases of those papers were already present in Dryden's criticism, in his most Longinian essays such as "Of Heroique Playes" (1672) and "The Author's Apology for Heroic Poetry; and Poetique Licence" (1677).[55] According to Clarence De Witt Thorpe, "Dryden ... contributed so much in the way of lively forward-looking discussion of basic critical problems ... that there was little in Addison's theory that had not been at least intimated in his great essays."[56] C. H. Salter was more trenchant: "it was Dryden, and not Addison, who broke with the canons of neo-classical criticism [and] laid the foundations of Romantic aesthetics": Addison's apparent innovations as a critic are the result of "his concealment of his sources and attempts to disagree with them, if necessary by misrepresenting them." The notes contain few dateable references: Addison's determination to present himself as a poetry-lover rather than scholar entailed a refusal to flaunt authorities in the manner of Dennis and the nit-picking "Dutch commentator(s)" Dryden had taught Addison to deride.[14] But those texts Addison does mention by name, or which can be identified from circumstantial details in his allusions to them, all date from between 1689 and 1692. I explain how it was that Addison effectively invented eighteenth-century aesthetics not in I The Spectator i but fifteen years earlier - and in an essay on Virgil's I Georgics i , the most Augustan poet's most Augustan poem. i. notes on ovid Two dates for the composition of Addison's "Notes on Ovid" are current in modern scholarship: 1697 and 1704. [Extracted from the article]