The Restoration and 18th Century
It is perhaps ironic that Paradise Lost, a story of fallen pride, was the first major poem to appear in England after the Restoration. The court of Charles II had, in its years in France, learned a worldliness and sophistication that marked it as distinctively different from the monarchies that preceded the Republic. Even if Charles had wanted to reassert the divine right of kingship, the Protestantism and taste for power of the intervening years would have rendered it impossible.
Read more about this topic: English Poetry
Famous quotes containing the words restoration and/or century:
“The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.”
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“Justice is simply the advantage of the stronger.”
—Thrasymachus 5th century B.C., Greek philosopher. The Presocratics, p. 259, ed. Philip Wheelwright, The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc. (1960)