The Augustan Poets

The Augustan age has been called the age of satire and the label suggests several important truths.Satire was the dominant mode of poetry. The outstanding poets were Dryden,Pope and Dr.Johnson.But the closing decades of the age saw the emergence into importance of meditative pastoral verse.the distinctive temper of the age can be termed critical and satire was an appropriate vehicle for it.the poets scrutinized society and man mainly as a social being.They criticized individuals and society in terms of norms generally accepted by their society.the norms were reason,truth,moderation,good sense,decorum and other values of same kind.

                                                                        The age has a standard mode of writing-the heroic couplet.its rhetoric was different from that of metaphysical poets like Donne.It is that of a "gentleman" addressing a society of "gentlemen",a kind of cultivated public utterance rather than impassioned personal argument.