Classicism is characterised by aesthetic forms of expression that claim as their model the art, literature and architecture of Greek and Roman Antiquity. But every classicism constitutes its own universe. Every era and every place have seen in Antiquity what they themselves want to see, created a classical view of the past in their own image, or sometimes have not really cared so much about the past at all but simply chosen a few shapes and styles and created something of their own from these.

Compare the cool elegance of Sweden’s Gustavian furniture and manor houses with St Petersburg at the same time, its colourful pilaster facades and gilded furniture – a classicism that neither could nor wanted to shake of the carnivalesque excesses of the Rococo. In St Petersburg, Derzhavin sat writing passion-filled, energetically vibrating imitations of Horace, as far from the caustic restraint of Kellgren as Rastrelli is from Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz. The imposing Mitteleuropa Baroque; Napoleon’s empire; the Hellenophile infatuations of Englishmen like Swinburne, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde – all radically different styles and temperaments that, in one way or another, can be said to be “classical.”

Another classicism, one seldom treated as the relatively homogeneous current it actually was, both in art and literature, is that which held sway in the early 20th century. This aesthetic has been neglected, at least to the extent it is viewed as classicism, as it is usually categorised under modernism in the history of literature, more specifically in the pigeonhole sometimes called “high modernism.” In art history, the categories are somewhat more refined, and one finds terms like 1920s classicism and Nordic classicism in architecture and Neue Sachlichkeit and Retour à l’ordre in the visual arts.

Art historians too, however, especially those specialising in the 20th century, would like to keep within the framework of the great narrative of modernism and its enemies, and thus usually describe 20th century classicism as a “reaction” to this. But that is an explanation after the fact: 20th century classicism is as old as modernism itself, and rather than being a reaction to modernism lets itself be described as a modern current (though not “modernistic”) that takes an antagonistic position to an old, seemingly unconquerable hydra, that is, Romanticism.

One can imagine that artists and writers in the early 20th century felt almost endless ennui over Romanticism, the keynote governing aesthetic life in the West for over a hundred years. Despite attempts to resist it with currents like realism and naturalism, the movement repeatedly reclaimed the initiative, with two new heads for every one chopped off, new variants of the subjective pathos that seemed almost indistinguishable from art itself. Late Romanticism included Symbolism and the “decadent” style which had in some strange way managed to embody the entire naturalist view of the world with a Romantic paradigm, with stylised Romantic imagery (art nouveau). Impressionism and expressionism can be described as new variants of Romantic subjectivism, as can to some extent the early weird modernisms: Dadaism, Futurism and so on.

What people did not understand was that one cannot rebel against something whose essence embraces the idea of rebellion. Every aesthetic rebellion is immediately absorbed by this body of Romanticism and becomes part of itself: rebellion is by definition Romantic. It was Nietzsche who most influentially prescribed a different mode of attack: not realist or modernist, but classicist. He noted that one can attack Romanticism with a classical arsenal, that is, if one sees classicism as something other than the ornamentation of the 18th century and the Platonic transcendence of the 19th. These weapons were order, objectivity, simplicity, concreteness and metaphysical minimalism. Nietzsche himself attached particular importance to the last factor, and it fell to the English, or more precisely, to Anglicised Americans, to apply a strictly classical programme of this kind to literature.

In 1911 Ezra Pound describes his fiancée Hilda Doolittle’s (“H. D.”) poetry as “objective – no slither – direct, no excessive use of adjectives; no metaphors that won’t permit examination. It’s straight talk, straight as the Greek!!” and calls it “imagism,” which also became his own aesthetic programme in the years to come: a classical poetry of economy and concreteness, which at the same time entailed a new approach to Antiquity: a classicism that broke free from the yoke of Romanticism and idealism.

We find the same classicist tenets in T. S. Eliot’s critical essays, for instance, in a review of a translation of Euripides done by England’s foremost classical philologist of the time (1920), the Oxford professor Gilbert Murray. I quote a longer extract of the review here, one that is especially illustrative of this tendency I want to describe. Eliot takes it for granted that his reader can decipher Greek quotations and compare them with Murray’s English:

That the most conspicuous Greek propagandist of the day should almost habitually use two words where the Greek language requires one, and where the English language will provide him with one; that he should render  [‘shadow’] by “grey shadow”; and that he should stretch the Greek brevity to fit the loose frame of William Morris, and blur the Greek lyric to the fluid haze of Swinburne; these are not faults of infinitesimal insignificance…

This thing undreamed of, sudden from on high/Hath sapped my soul: I dazzle where I stand, The cup of all life shattered in my hand….

Again, we find that the Greek is …

Professor Murray has simply interposed between Euripides and ourselves a barrier more impenetrable than the Greek language. We do not reproach him for preferring, apparently, Euripides to Æschylus. But if he does, he should at least appreciate Euripides. And it is inconceivable that anyone with a genuine feeling for the sound of Greek verse should deliberately elect the William Morris couplet, the Swinburne lyric, as a just equivalent.

The classical thus entails a movement from out of the Romantic fog, toward clarity and light. Eliot continues his review with a classicist pamphlet in which he distances Antiquity – as well as its modern, post-Victorian successors – from Goethe, Winkelmann and Schopenhauer on the one hand and Pater and Wilde on the other, who he thinks are children of the same idealistic and Romantic spirit. He instead recommends H. D’s austere translations of Euripides and Pound’s poetic approach.

I would like to provoke a little controversy with respect to Roger Scruton’s article “The flight from beauty” in the July 2008 edition of Axess. Scruton is clearly on the right track when he identifies a traditionalist aesthetic in the early modernists but makes a serious mistake when he tries to establish a transcendent idealism in writers like Pound and Eliot, when he wants their view of beauty to agree with Plato’s and Kant’s. Not that Eliot and Pound would have believed that beauty did not exist, but their position was precisely the antithesis of the Romantic idealistic: beauty is a material phenomenon and consists of poetic metre, colour, rhythm, diction. That is the credo of modern classicism. Admittedly, T. S. Eliot was Christian, and both he and to some extent Era Pound saw the Catholic Church as the steward of the classical tradition in Western Europe.

It is simply that beauty even in the Thomist tradition of thought of the High Middle Ages is profane and empirical, as it is for Aristotle. Beauty is that “of which the very apprehension gives pleasure” (cuius apprehensio placet); the beauty of a body consists “in the harmony of several colours and lines” (in proportione membrorum et colorum), Thomas Aquinas writes. “[The] search for orthodoxy,” that Scruton ascribes to Eliot entails a connection with the Catholic tradition of Christian culture, but if one wants to view this as being relevant to Eliot’s aesthetic, one should draw a conclusion radically opposite Scruton’s, and note that the Catholic tradition of thought following Aristotle was in fact presented more or less as an anti-Platonic, empirical aesthetic.

To return to the 20th century, anti-idealistic classicism is not limited to England and the imagist movement, but was a current that pervaded Europe during the first few decades of the 20th century.

We return to some of the Swedish and German names. In Russia in the 1910s, there were the Acmeist poets (from the Greek akmé, ‘acme,’ ‘zenith,’ ‘flowering’), in particular Akhmatova, Gumilyov and Mandelstam, representatives of the same classical aesthetic, whose austere materialistic tendencies are reflected in the title of Mandelstam’s debut collection, Stone (1912). The Acmeists also used the term “clarity” for an aesthetic that, with its emphasis on “the exact expression” and “the objective” was similar in detail to English imagism. In an interesting way, Mandelstam combines the classicist tradition with the Russian passion for the Byzantine Greek, which had previously been relegated to the Christian heritage, for example, in a poem about Hagia Sofia in Constantinople, where “Ephesian Diana” may accord her classical columns to “new gods” (the columns were taken to Hagia Sofia from the demolished Temple to Artemis at Ephesus). St Petersburg, named “Petropolis” in the classical manner, is the centre of Mandelstam’s Russian-classicist conceptual world, one not entirely liberated from Romanticism:

“In transparent Petropolis we will leave only bone/ here where we are ruled by Proserpina. / We drink the air of death, each breath of the wind’s moan/ and every hour is our death-hour’s keeper.” (From “Petropolis,” 1916, trans. A.S. Kline)

In France, the home of classicism, people had long been occupied with the tension field between Romantic and classical. Repeated classicist frontal attacks had been made on Romanticism, as early as the 1860s and 1870s with the Parnassian school, which with its French-classical formalism had turned against what was considered romantic sentimentality and misguided social pathos à la Victor Hugo. This current was repelled by Romantic symbolism, but the Greek-born symbolic poet Jean Moréas (1856–1910), once again changing sides in the nineties, formed the “Ecole romane,” the Roman school, which now with a clear chauvinistic accent promoted the Mediterranean-Greco-Latin heritage in contrast to northern European, especially German, Romanticism.

That movement drowned in the wake of yet another form of Romanticism, for that is really what one should call early French modernism, with Guillaume Apollinaire leading the way, which has come to overshadow most of literary life in the early 20th century in the official description of the history of literature.

In 2009, we really need not devote much more attention to modernist hijinks, in my view. It is more interesting that at the same time, in the first few decades of the 20th century, artists and writers in France were working, absorbed by the problems of the classical form and the archetypes of classical mythology. It was not the case of a few insignificant epigones, but rather people like Proust, in his Boulevard Haussmann chambers. The attentive reader of In Search of Lost Time will find that Homer, Horace and Racine are the poets who play the most prominent roles in the Narrator’s consciousness, that the arch-classicist Poussin alongside Vermeer and “Elstir” is the painter mentioned most frequently, and that the gods and heroes of Antiquity are as alive in the Narrator’s chain of associations as the characters in Dostoyevsky’s novels.

A more direct example is Paul Valéry. Like Proust, he worked in isolation, published a few poems and a couple of esoteric books of prose in the 1890s, but then did nothing more until 1917 when, apparently paying no heed to the alarm of that era, he published La jeune parque, “The Young Fate,” a five-hundred line poem in rhymed Alexandrine couplets about a Roman Fate, or rather consciousness emblematically cloaked in this form. The poem takes as its motto a few lines of classical 17th century Corneille: Le Ciel a-t-il formé cet amas de merveilles / Pour la demeure d’un serpent? (“Did Heaven form this mass of marvels/To be a serpent’s dwelling-place?”). This can be read as a theodicy problem but also as a moral summons, which from Valéry’s perspective, may have had in mind the horrors of the first world war or some of that era’s thinkers, obsessed with action and transformation: “Go! I no longer need your simple kind,/Dear snake. . . I coil, vertiginous being on myself!/ Lend me no longer your enwound confusion. . .”

In one fell swoop, La jeune parque turned Valéry into France’s most highly regarded poet. Apollinaire and his armour-bearers were dumbstruck. Or perhaps they were not so taken by surprise: they too had not escaped getting caught up in the new spirit. The same year that La jeune parque was published, 1917, Apollinaire’s manifesto “The New Spirit and the Poets” appeared. In it, bewildering cultural radicalism sat juxtaposed with blazing red-cheeked patriotism, with terms like “heritage,” “classics,” “national literature,” “old disciplines” and “early Greek realism.”

It is almost as if Moréas’ tenets were being reincarnated, albeit with a tinge of modernism. Apollinaire now tried to affirm the new by using classical mythological overtones; for instance, the flight of Icarus and the birth of Minerva from the head of Jupiter became emblems of the surprising and of modern technology. Rather than promoting offensive radicalism, the manifesto offers an apology for a modernism on the defensive: Apollinaire emphasised that he and his circle were indeed also part of the new – classicism. Symptomatically, Apollinaire speaks of “ancient Greek realism,” thus, like Pound and Eliot, maintaining the classical as an antagonistic principle counter to (German) idealism and Romanticism, which after the Great War became – if possible – even more odious. This way of thinking was also seen a year later in a letter to his friend and modernist weapons-bearer Pablo Picasso:

I am trying to renew the accent of poetry by retaining a classical rhythm. But I do not want to repeat what Moréas has done. … Nor do I want to be reactionary or start with pastiches. …Who is there today who is newer, more modern, more revealed, more genuine, more varied than Pascal? …He affects us far more than a Claudel, who simply fills out theological standard concepts with political and social truisms with a dose of good old Romanticism.

Apollinaire nonetheless suggested Poussin and Le Nain as model painters to Picasso in this period. He never managed to realise his new aesthetic tenets, dying just a few months later, in November 1918. Picasso, on the other hand, distanced himself from Cubism – a movement that had developed in the 1910s in a classically decorative, stylised direction – and went from austere portrait compositions in the style of a mysterious Roman villa to producing classical themes, women and boys in trappings of Antiquity and stylised poses in the 1920s.

The style Picasso developed is usually described as plastic: his figures become massive, radiating physicality, weight, matter. This was entirely in line with the spirit of the times, where sculpture for once had taken the initiative in the visual arts, and where Constantin Brancusi, with his austere, classically well-defined figures – still largely figurative in the 1910s – had assumed the leading role from the more naturalistic and airily impressionistic sculptors Rodin and Degas. What is classical in the new sculptural style can be viewed as a drive for universal expression, in contrast to the Romantic individual. In Ezra Pound’s circles in London, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who died in the war at the age of 23, displayed the same tendency.

In Italy, the art magazine Valori plastici, whose name summarises the spirit of the age, was started in 1918. Its main task is usually described as reactionary, but in fact it took its name from a text by Apollinaire in an exhibition catalogue ten years earlier, where he argued, hardly in a negative way, that “the three plastic virtues” were “purity, unity and truth.” The periodical Valori plastici was linked to the Retour à l’ordre movement, “return to order,” where (the overrated) Giorgio de Chirico but also post-Cubist artists like Amédée Ozenfant, Gino Severini and Albert Gleizes made their mark in the years around 1920.

When people wanted to do the same thing in Germany, the classical heritage was so intimately intertwined with 19th idealism that it was almost useless for that purpose. This return to a more realistic figurative style was called Neue Sachlichkeit, “new objectivity.” Nonetheless, it suffered from the German tendency to select what is most conspicuously grotesque, using exaggerated “honesty” where objectivity was concerned – Jan Myrdal has written well about the view of humankind evinced by the grotesqueness of Otto Dix and George Grosz, the most famous of Germany’s New Objectivity artists. Among painters with more lyrical qualities are Rudolf Dischinger (1904–1988) and Carlo Mense (1886–1965), with the latter not shying away from either mythological themes or Giorgione-inspired Mediterranean landscapes.

The counterparts of objectivity in poetry are Gottfried Benn and Berthold Brecht, but they too used the classical heritage at times. In such cases, it is possible to see influences from two not very surprising directions: Friedrich Nietzsche (Benn) and Karl Marx (Brecht). In Brecht’s highly readable post-war poetry, one finds titles like “Reading a Late Greek Poet” and “Reading Horace.”

Reading manuals of modern art can put one in a bad mood, because it is apparent how much knowledge about the classical form has been lost in the academic history of art as a result of modernistic ideologising. The classical streams of the twenties and thirties are described almost without exception as “reaction” and “pastiche” – when one is not trying to rescue one’s idols from negativism, like Elizabeth Cowling in her award-winning book Picasso: Style and Meaning (2002). With doctrinaire negativism, Cowling maintains that Picasso was actually “undermining” the classical ideal and takes as proof letters and conversations in which he and Apollinaire made an assault on the 19th century German classicists Winkelmann and Lessing. What she fails to mention, or quite simply does not grasp, is that it is precisely German idealism’s concept of the classical that the English and French idealists of the time were turning their backs on, without consequently wanting to “undermine” the classical per se. They believed they had their own, more correct concept of the classical, liberated from the sentimentality of Romanticism.

On the whole, art historians seem to have lost the ability to distinguish between classical and Romantic, even if one thinks they should know their Nietzsche by now. The inability to distinguish between Aristotle and Plato is symptomatic. There is a need to always see Plato in the wings when an artist is absorbed in the problems of form. One can read in another relatively new guidebook on modern art, Art Since 1900 (2004), about Ezra Pound’s early interest in Brancusi. Pound says that Brancusi’s works are “master keys to the world of form.”

The book explains this by arguing that he takes a “Platonic” approach to Brancusi’s sculpture and maintains that Pound saw “Brancusi’s sculptural genius for liberating the eidetic form – the pure ‘idea’ – from the physical material of the original block.”

But the Aristotelian form, as Pound alludes, is not the same thing as the Platonic ideal! The exact opposite relation holds, at least on the philosophical level of the layman that Pound was operating from. Aristotle’s “forms” are based on matter, applied to matter, and have no need for Platonic ideals. Aristotle in fact literally turned against Platonic idealism and claimed to refute it. Nor is neo-classicist talk about form idealistic, but is in fact Aristotelian, physical. This is true of all classicism taking form in art and literature in the 1920s: it was a question not of an anti-modernist retreat or reaction so much as a realisation of the classical, anti-Romantic currents from the turn of the century.

In the liberal arts, this classicism also enjoyed great popular success at this time and up until the 1950s. All the Art Deco style in industrial design and architecture is based on the classical idea of form as it was formulated in the first few decades of the 20th century. At our latitude, one can also see “Nordic classicism” in architecture, with names like Ivar Tengbom and Gunnar Asplund representing a very severe and streamlined classical style, sometimes called “Swedish grace” abroad – or why not automotive design from the 1940s and 1950s, where Volvo’s PV and Amazon models, for instance, brought together user-friendliness with classical lines in a manner worthy of the Roman aqueducts.

To round it up with poetry, I am not alone in noting that modernism in Swedish literature language up until the 1950s is intimately linked to classicism. To name just a few: Edith Södergran, Vilhelm Ekelund, Gunnar Ekelöf, Gunnar Björling, Erik Lindegren, Rabbe Enckell, Karl Vennberg, Lars Forssell and Tomas Tranströmer work with classical concepts and forms in their poetry, and a number of them use classical metre. So-called traditionalists, on the other hand, Österling, Selander, Silfverstolpe and others, instead have Romantic rather than classical models. This is also true of Hjalmar Gullberg, despite his solid classical training. On the other hand, Johannes Edfelt embarks on an ambitious project to unite the Swedish Romantic tradition with rigorous classicism in the spirit of Ezra Pound. Among high modernists, the classical could serve as a poetic corollary to spleen-producing prosaic modernity. But it is not always as devoid of humour as their critics might maintain. Read, for instance, Erik Lindegren, dressed in the guise of Zeus, lamenting an unjustified headache in a way that is almost of our times (from “Zeus kunskapsteori” [‘Zeus’s Theory of Art’], 1954):

Trefalt förbannade Intermittenta, trefalt förbannade Impertinenta Pallas Athene! Som varje morgon fullrustad springer fram ur Vårt huvud. … [‘Threefold accursed Intermittent,/threefold accursed Impertinent/Pallas Athene!/Which every morning fully armed springs forth/ from Our head…’]