The Line of Wit

doi:10.1017/9781009180047.007

Chapter 6 - The Line of Wit

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2023

Stephanie Burt

Edited by

Daniel Morris

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Daniel Morris: Affiliation:
Purdue University, Indiana

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Summary

Critics and poets who talk about wit most often describe the eighteenth century, the decades of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith, of discursive, pointed, end-stopped couplets. “True wit is nature to advantage dressed; / What oft is thought but ne’er so well expressed,” as Pope concluded in “An Essay on Criticism” (1711). Eighteenth-century wit meant a way for superior, well-read equals to speak and write with one another, a means of communication that displayed humor, intelligence, and proportion, even calm; it could also mean indirection, double meanings, humorous ways to say or imply what a poet could not highlight or say outright, from a monarch’s indiscretions to the ridiculousness of an entire social system.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900 , pp. 100 - 117

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009180047.007 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023

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Chapter 6 - The Line of Wit

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