Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
18th c. satirical tradition; Swift: human failure to live up to ideal norms vs.
scientific optimism
- Satire based on Roman models and Drydens apogee in Pope and Swift
- cultivation of technique precision, propriety
- ambition to define/refine tastes and ideas; contributed to The Spectator and
moved for a time in Addisonian circles; but from about 1711 onward, his moreinfluential friendships were with Tory intellectuals
- experimentations, revisions of modes/forms, imitations, translation; a humble
catholic, paradoxical politics (Tory, Whig)
- satire as a weapon against Hectors (bullies), Thieves, Supercargoes, Sharpers
and Directors: political and economic explanations
- corruption in life/letters time-serving rivals
- satire against the acrimony of 18th c. cultural discourse; range, sophistication,
energy
- begins with imitations of Greek/Roman/English models the highest
characters for sense and learning (Milton, Dryden) - essays; Latinate chastity of
diction and disciplined lyric
- Windsor Forest English landscape of Olympian deities; goes beyond an
Arcadian vision to revise a painful past and envisage a glorious future (royal
and literary); evocations of a painful, savage past in images of hunting as
England is devastated by invaders (Savage beasts and savage laws/Kings more
furious than they); sportive tyrants (William I, II); usurping modern invader in
William III); vision of a peaceful England with a great destiny in united Britain
and its commercial hegemony; blessings as the unbounded Thames shall flow
for all Mankind/Whose nations enter with each swelling Tyde/And Oceans join
whom they did first divide; achieving an ingenious, late-Stuart variation on the
17th-century mode of topographical poetry
- An Essay on Criticism, 1711
- aphoristic verse, less pictorial; criticism as an extension of common sense;
combining ambition of argument with great stylistic assurance
- the prime focus of his labours between 1713 and 1720 was his energetically
sustained and scrupulous translation of Homers Iliad (to be followed by the
Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a
considerable sum of money
- From the 1720s on, Popes view of the transformations wrought in Robert
Walpoles England by economic individualism and opportunism grew
increasingly embittered and despairing. In this he was following a common
Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the writings of his friend, the
politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
- An Essay on Man, 1733-4
1
- grand systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained, perfectly
ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created things
- contemporary moral philosophy in popular accessible verse 4 books on the
relationship of humankind to the Newtonian Universe (a mighty make but not
without a plan); observations on human limitations, passion, intelligence,
society, potential for happiness; universal order in nature in a vast chain of
being; epigrammatic quality of the verse (epistle); whatever is, is right; dire
effects of intellectual pride; human ambiguity and deficiency; Man the glory,
jest and riddle of the world: optimism vs. pessimism
-4 Moral Essays, 1731-5 - his most probing and startling writing
- less universally general 4 epistles addressed to friend Martha Blount and
Lords Cobham, Banthurst, Burlington figures and arbiters of taste; idea of
balance in personality; the first 2 about passions; 3rd on the sue of riches; 4th on
aesthetic sense and expense; harmony between the contemplative and the
architectural; Burlington satirical vignettes on follies of excess (Timons
villa); moral and aesthetic errors (all Brobdignag before your thought); waste,
show, pomp; verbal and moral detailing
- An Epistle from Mr Pope to Mr Arbuthnot, 1735
- vexations; right/wrong actions; good/bad literature; verbal assaults on and
indictment of shabby corrupt society of detached artists; bitter wit in portraying
Addison (Eternal smiles his emptiness betray; Toad half Froth, half Venom,
spits himself abroad); social and aesthetic malaise
- The Rape of the Lock (1712-4)
- savage assaults on society and its shortcomings; criticism of the manners of
the aristocracy; dire offence from trivial things; domesticizes the epic, debunks
the heroic; the mighty angels as the light Militia of the lower sky the
complicated love games of human actors; the ceremonial arming of Homer and
Virgil is parodied in Belinda at the dressing table Cave of Spleen in Canto 4;
sly, sexually knowing variation on the classical visions of the Underworld;
undermines pomposity, exposes false, inverted values; relationship men/women
as social conventions battle with beauty as a weapon and reputation as
defence; an astonishing feat, marrying a rich range of literary allusiveness and a
delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social world with a potent
sense of suppressed energies threatening to break through the civilized veneer. It
explores with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of fivestress rhyming lines)
- The Dunciad, 1728-42/3
- he turns to anatomize with outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy
and perversion of once-hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the commercial
society in which he must perforce live
- battle for souls and minds, trivial causes with serious and universal
consequences; anti-heroic, mock epic parody of Drydens translation of the
Aeneid; 3 + 1 books up-ended debunked heroic triumph; symbolic implication
2
of epic procession (Lord Mayor); vision of the coronation of the Goddess of
Dullness, the patron of Dunces destroyer of order and intellect; apocalyptic
vision; shabby literary values of Grub Street, City money and the
court/ministers corruption; ideals of reason, sense and balance are overthrown
by dunces; ignorance and the threat of Chaos; Dullness as the mother of
Arrogance and Source of Pride, the genius of pride in selfishness and stupidity
the anti Logos, disorder of divinely tidy universe; horror at undoing heaven and
earth
- Much of the wit of Popes verse derives from its resources of incongruity,
disproportion, and antithesis
- Epilogue to the Satires, 1738
- earlier dialogue poem the strong antipathy of Good to Bad, truth, virtue;
darkness of ignorance undoing the Newtonian universe
