From The Landscape, a Didactic Poem

Abstract

Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824), who was twice a member of Parliament and became a trustee of the British Museum in 1814, made significant contributions to classical scholarship, to the study of coins, and to various debates in philosophical aesthetics. His first book, An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus (1786), examined erotic symbolism in ancient Greek and Roman culture and traced its afterlife in the Christian world, earning him some notoriety for his explicit treatment of the subject. His next major work, The Landscape, a Didactic Poem (1794), is an example of the poetic essay (didactic meaning ‘to instruct’) and shares the use of heroic couplets with Alexander Pope’s (1688–1744) Essay on Criticism (1711) and Essay on Man (1734), the eighteenth century’s best-known examples of a genre which typifies how philosophical, scientific, and other forms of theoretical discussion were often conducted through what would today be considered ‘literary’ forms. The Landscape addresses the controversy about ‘the picturesque’ in painting and landscape design, ongoing since the publication in 1782 of William Gilpin’s (1724–1802) Observations on the River Wye (for more on the picturesque, see the introduction to this section). The poem is dedicated to Payne Knight’s friend and neighbour, Uvedale Price (1747–1829), whose Essay on the Picturesque (1794) argued against the formal, ‘improving’ tendencies of landscape gardening pioneered by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1715–1783) and in favour of a more ‘natural’ appearance. Payne Knight’s poem, which supports Price’s theories, therefore participates in the wider movement away from Neoclassicism and towards Romanticism in the late eighteenth century. His primary antagonist, in this source, is the landscape architect Humphry Repton (1752–1818) who, along with Brown, had been responsible for laying out formal Neoclassical gardens for a large number of country estates in Britain. As well as theoretical ideas about nature and the natural, Payne Knight grounds his discussion in the precedents of Classical sculpture and Dutch Golden Age painting.

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