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Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Portrait by Charles Jervas (1675-1739), circa 1714 (detail). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 - 30 May 1744) was an English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer.
Life[]
Overview[]
Pope was born in London, of Roman Catholic parentage. His father was a linen-merchant, who married as his second wife Edith Turner, a lady of respectable Yorkshire family, and of some fortune, made a competence, and retired to a small property at Binfield, near Windsor. Pope received a somewhat desultory education at various Roman Catholic schools, but after the age of 12, when he had a severe illness brought on by over-application, he was practically self-educated. Though never a profound or accurate scholar, he had a good knowledge of Latin, and a working acquaintance with Greek. By 1704 he had written a good deal of verse, which attracted the attention of Wycherley, who introduced him to town life and to other men of letters. In 1709 his Pastorals were published in Tonson's Miscellany, and 2 years later the Essay on Criticism appeared, and was praised by Addison. The Rape of the Lock, which came out in 1714, placed his reputation on a sure foundation, and thereafter his life was an uninterrupted and brilliant success. His industry was untiring, and his literary output almost continuous until his death. In 1713 Windsor Forest (which won him the friendship of Swift) and The Temple of Fame appeared. In 1715 the translation of the Iliad was begun, and the work published at intervals between that year and 1720. It had enormous popularity, and brought the poet £5000. It was followed by the Odyssey (1725-26), in which he had the assistance of Broome and Fenton, who, especially the former, caught his style so exactly as almost to defy identification. It also was highly popular, and increased his gains to about £8000, which placed him in a position of independence. While engaged upon these he moved to Chiswick, where he lived 1716-1718, and where he issued in 1717 a collected edition of his works, including the "Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady" and the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard. In 1718, his father having died, he again moved with his mother, to his famous villa at Twickenham, the adornment of the grounds of which became a chief interest, and where, now the acknowledged chief of his art, he received the visits of his friends, who included the most distinguished men of letters, wits, statesmen, and beauties of the day. His next task was his edition of Shakespeare (1725), a work for which he was not well qualified, though the preface is a fine piece of prose. The Miscellanies, the joint work of Pope and Swift, were published in 1727-1728, and drew down upon the authors a storm of angry comment, which in turn led to the production of The Dunciad, 1st published in 1728, and again with new matter in 1729, an additional book (the 4rth) being added in 1742. In it he satirised with a wit, always keen and biting, often savage and unfair, the small wits and poetasters, and some of a quite different quality, who had, or whom he supposed to have, injured him. Between 1731 and 1735 he produced his Epistles, the last of which, addressed to Arbuthnot, is also known as the "Prologue to the Satires," and contains his ungrateful character of Addison under the name of "Atticus;" and also, 1733, the Essay on Man, written under the influence of Bolingbroke. His last, and in some respects best, works were his Imitations of Horace, published between 1733 and 1739, and the 4th book of The Dunciad (1742). A naturally delicate constitution, a deformed body, extreme sensitiveness, over-excitement, and overwork did not promise a long life, and Pope died on May 30, 1744, aged 56.[1]
His extreme vanity and sensitiveness to criticism made him often vindictive, unjust, and venomous. They led him also into frequent quarrels, and lost him many friends, including Lady M. Wortley Montagu, and along with a strong tendency to finesse and stratagem, of which the circumstances attending the publication of his literary correspondence is the chief instance, make his character on the whole an unamiable one. On the other hand, he was often generous; he retained the friendship of such men as Swift and Arbuthnot, and he was a most dutiful and affectionate son.[1]
Youth and education[]
Pope was born in Lombard Street, London, on 21 May 1688. His father, Alexander Pope, a Roman Catholic, was a linen-draper who afterwards retired from business with a small fortune, and fixed his residence about 1700 at Binfield in Windsor Forest.[2]
Pope's education was desultory. His father's religion would have excluded him from the public schools, even had there been no other impediment to his being sent there. Before he was 12 he had obtained a smattering of Latin and Greek from various masters, from a priest in Hampshire, from a schoolmaster at Twyford near Winchester, from Thomas Deane, who kept a school in Marylebone and afterwards at Hyde Park Corner, and finally from another priest at home.[2]
Between his 12th and his 17th years excessive application to study undermined his health, and he developed the personal deformity which was in so many ways to distort his view of life. He thought himself dying, but through a friend, Thomas (afterwards the abbé) Southcote, he obtained the advice of physician John Radcliffe, who prescribed diet and exercise. Under this treatment the boy recovered his strength and spirits. “He thought himself the better,” Spence says, “in some respects for not having had a regular education. He (as he observed in particular) read originally for the sense, whereas we are taught for so many years to read only for words.” He afterwards learned French and Italian, probably in a similar way. [2]
He read translations of the Greek, Latin, French and Italian poets, and by the age of 12, when he was finally settled at home and left to himself, he was not only a confirmed reader, but an eager aspirant to the highest honors in poetry. There is a story, which chronological considerations make extremely improbable, that in London he had crept into Will's coffee-house to look at John Dryden, and a further tale that the old poet had given him a shilling for a translation of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe; he had lampooned his schoolmaster; he had made a play out of John Ogilby's Iliad for his schoolfellows; and before he was 15 he had written an epic, his hero being Alcander, a prince of Rhodes, or, as he states elsewhere, Deucalion.[2]
There were, among the Roman Catholic families near Binfield, men capable of giving a direction to his eager ambition, men of literary tastes, and connections with the literary world. These held together as members of persecuted communities always do, and were kept in touch with each other by the family priests. Pope was thus brought under the notice of Sir William Trumbull, a retired diplomatist living at Easthampstead, within a few miles of Binfield. Thomas Dancastle, lord of the manor of Binfield, took an active interest in his writings, and at Whiteknights, near Reading, lived another Roman Catholic, Anthony Englefield, “a great lover of poets and poetry.” Through him Pope made the acquaintance of William Wycherley and of Henry Cromwell, who was a distant cousin of the Protector (a gay man about town), and something of a pedant. Wycherley introduced him to William Walsh, then of great renown as a critic.[2]
Before the poet was 17 he was admitted in this way to the society of London “wits” and men of fashion, and was cordially encouraged as a prodigy. Wycherley's correspondence with Pope was skilfully manipulated by the younger man to represent Wycherley as submitting, initially humbly and then with an ill-grace, to Pope's criticisms. The publication (Elwin and Courthope, vol. v.) of the originals of Wycherley's letters from manuscripts at Longleat showed how seriously the relations between the 2 friends, which ceased in 1710, had been misrepresented in the version of the correspondence which Pope chose to submit to the public.[2]
Walsh's contribution to his development was the advice to study “correctness” “About fifteen,” he says, “I got acquainted with Mr. Walsh. He used to encourage me much, and used to tell me that there was one way left of excelling; for, though we had several great poets, we never had any one great poet that was correct, and he desired me to make that my study and aim ” (Spence, p. 280). Trumbull turned Pope's attention to the French critics, out of the study of whom grew the Essay on Criticism; he suggested the subject of Windsor Forest; and he started the idea of translating Homer.[2]
It says something for Pope's docility at this stage that he recognized so soon that a long course of preparation was needed for such a magnum opus, and began steadily and patiently to discipline himself. The epic was put aside and afterwards burnt; versification was industriously practised in short “essays”; and an elaborate study was made of accepted critics and models. He learnt most, as he acknowledged, from Dryden, but the harmony of his verse also owed something to an earlier writer, George Sandys, the translator of Ovid.[2]
At the beginning of the 18th century Dryden's success had given great vogue to translations and modernizations. The air was full of theories as to the best way of doing such things. What Dryden had touched Pope did not presume to meddle with-Dryden was his hero and master; but there was much more of the same kind to be done. Dryden had rewritten 3 of The Canterbury Tales; Pope tried his hand at the "Merchant's Tale" and the Prologue to the "Wife of Bath's Tale," and produced also an imitation of the House of Fame. Dryden had translated Virgil; Pope experimented on the Thebais of Statius, Ovid's Heroides and Metamorphoses, and 'The Odyssey. He knew little Latin and less Greek, but there were older versions in English which helped him to the sense; and, when the correspondents to Whom he submitted his versions pointed out mistranslations, he could answer that he had always agreed with them, but that he had deferred to the older translators against his own judgment.[2]
It was Pope's little vanity to try to give the impression that his metrical skill was more precocious even than it was, and we cannot accept his published versions of Statius and Chaucer (published in Miscellanies at intervals between 1709 and 1714) as incontrovertible evidence of his proficiency at the age of 16 or 17 (the date, according to his own assertion, of their composition). But it is indisputable that at the age of 17 his skill in verse astonished a veteran critic like Walsh, and some of his pastorals were in the hands of Sir George Granville (afterwards Lord Lansdowne) before 1706. His metrical letter to Cromwell, which Elwin dates in 1707, when Pope was 19, is a brilliant feat of versification, and has turns of wit in it as easy and spirited as any to be found in his mature satires. Pope was 21 when he sent the “ Ode on Solitude ” to Cromwell, and said it was written before he was 12 years old.[2]
Precocious Pope was, but he was also industrious; and he spent some 8 or 9 years in arduous and enthusiastic discipline, reading, studying, experimenting, taking the advice of some and laughing in his sleeve at the advice of others, “poetry his only business,” he said, “and idleness his only pleasure, ” before anything of his appeared in print. In these preliminary studies he seems to have guided himself by the maxim formulated in a letter to Walsh (dated July 2, 1706) that “ it seems not so much the perfection of sense to say things that had never been said before, as to express those best that have been said oftenest.”
Early career[]
Pope's earliest publication was his “Pastorals.” Bookseller Jacob Tonson had seen these pastorals in the hands of Walsh and Congreve, and sent a polite note (April 20, 1706) to Pope asking that he might have them for a miscellany. They appeared accordingly in May 1709 at the end of the 6th volume of Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies (also containing contributions from Ambrose Philips, Sheffield, Garth and Rowe), with “ January and May, ” Pope's version of Chaucer's “Merchant's Tale.”
Pope's next publication was the Essay on Criticism (1711), written 2 years earlier, and printed without the author's name. Pope's aim was simply to condense, methodize, and give as perfect and novel expression as he could to floating opinions about the poet's aims and methods, and the critic's duties, to “what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed” (l. 298). “The town” was interested in belies lettres and given to conversing on the subject; Pope's essay was simply a brilliant contribution to the fashionable conversation. The youthful author said that he did not expect the sale to be quick because “not one gentleman in sixty, even of liberal education, could understand it.” The sales were slow until Pope caused copies to be sent to Lord Lansdowne and others, but its success was none the less brilliant for the delay. The town was fairly-dazzled by the young poet's learning, judgment, and felicity of expression. Many of the admirers of the poem doubtless would have thought less of it if they had not believed all the maxims to be original. “ I admired, ” said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, “Mr Pope's Essay on Criticism at first very much, because I had not then read any of the ancient critics, and did not know that it was all stolen.”[3]
Pope gained credit for much that might have been found, where he found it, in the Institutes of Quintilian, in the numerous critical writings of René Rapin, and in René le Bossu's treatise on epic poetry. Joseph Addison has been made responsible for the exaggerated value once set on the essay, but Addison's paper (Spectator, No. 253) was not unmixed praise. He deprecated the attacks made by Pope on contemporary literary reputations, although he did full justice to the poet's metrical skill. Addison and Pope became acquainted, and Pope's sacred eclogue, “ Messiah, ” was printed as No. 378 of the Spectator.[3]
In the Essay on Criticism Pope provoked a bitter personal enemy in critic John Dennis by a description of him as Appius, who “stares, tremendous, with a threat'ning eye.” Dennis retorted in Reflections . upon a late Rhapsody . . (1711), abusing Pope among other things for his personal deformity. Pope never forgot this brutal attack, which he described in a note inserted after Dennis's death, as late as 1743, as written "in a manner perfectly lunatic.”[3]
"The Rape of the Lock" in its earliest form appeared in 1712 in Lintot's Miscellanies; the “machinery” of sylphs and gnomes was an afterthought, and the poem was republished as we now have it early in 1714.[3]
Windsor Forest, modelled on Sir John Denham's Cooper's Hill, had been begun, according to Pope's account, when he was 16 or 17. It was published in March 1713 with a flattering dedication to the secretary for war, George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, and an opportune allusion to the peace of Utrecht. This was a nearer approach to taking a political side than Pope had yet made. His principle had been to keep clear of politics, and not to attach himself to any of the sets into which literary men were divided by party. Although inclined to the Jacobites by his religion, he never took any part in the plots for the restoration of the Stuarts. and he was on friendly terms with the Whig coterie, being a frequent guest at the coffee-house kept by Daniel Button, where Addison held his “ little senate.” He had contributed his poem, “ The Messiah ” to the Spectator; he had written an article or 2 in the Guardian, and he wrote a prologue for Addison's Cato. Nevertheless he induced Lintot the bookseller to obtain from John Dennis a criticism of Cato. On the publication of Dennis's remarks, the violence of which had, as Pope hoped, made their author ridiculous, Pope produced an anonymous pamphlet, 'The Narrative of Dr Robert Norris concerning the ... Frenzy of Mr John Dennis (1713), which, though nominally in defence of Addison, had for its main purpose the gratification of Pope's own hostility to Dennis. Addison disavowed any connivance in this coarse attack in a letter written on his behalf by Steele to Lintot, saying that if he noticed Dennis's attack at all it would be in such "a way as to allow him no just cause of complaint." Coolncss between Addison and Pope naturally followed this episode. When the Rape of the Lock was published, Addison, who is said to have praised the poem highly to Pope in private, dismissed it in the Spectator with 2 sentences of patronizing faint praise to the young poet, and, coupling it with Tickell's “Ode on the Prospect of Peace, ” devoted the rest of the article to an elaborate puff of “the pastorals of Mr Philips.”[3]
When Pope showed a leaning to the Tories in Windsor Forest, the members of Addison's coterie made insidious war on him. Within a few weeks of the publication of the poem, and when it was the talk of the town, there began to appear in the Guardian (Nos. 22, 23, 28, 30, 32) a series of articles on “Pastorals." Not a word was said about Windsor Forest, but everybody knew to what the general principles referred. Modern pastoral poets were ridiculed for introducing Greek moral deities, Greek flowers and fruits, Greek names of shepherds, Greek sports and customs and religious rites. They ought to make use of English rural mythology-hob thrushes, fairies, goblins and witches; they should give English names to their shepherds; they should mention flowers indigenous to English climate and soil; and they should introduce English proverbial sayings, dress, and customs. All excellent principles, and all neglected by Pope in Windsor Forest. The poem was fairly open to criticism in these points; there are many beautiful passages in it, showing close though somewhat professional observation of nature, but the mixture of heathen deities and conventional archaic fancies with modern realities is incongruous, and the comparison of Queen Anne to Diana was ludicrous. But the sting of the articles did not lie in the truth of the oblique criticisms. The pastorals of Ambrose Philips, published 4 years before, were again trotted out. Here was a true pastoral poet, the eldest born of Spenser, the worthy successor of Theocritus and Virgil![3]
Pope took an amusing revenge, which turned the laugh against his assailants. He sent Steele an anonymous paper in continuation of the articles in the Guardian on pastoral poetry, reviewing the poems of Mr. Pope by the light of the principles laid down. Ostensibly Pope was censured for breaking the rules, and Philips praised for conforming to them, quotations being given from both. The quotations were sufficient to dispose of the pretensions of poor Philips, and Pope did not choose his own worst passages, accusing himself of actually deviating sometimes into poetry. Although the Guardian's principles were also brought into ridicule by burlesque exemplifications of them after the manner of Gay's Shepherd's Week, Steele, misled by the opening sentences, was initially unwilling to print what appeared to bc a direct attack on Pope, and is said to have asked Pope's consent to the publication, which was graciously granted.[3]
The links that attached Pope to the Tory party were strengthened by a new friendship. His earliest letter to Jonathan Swift, who became warmlv attached to him, is dated 8 December 1713. Swift had been a leading member of the Brothers Club, from which the famous Scriblerus Club seems to have been an offshoot.[3] The leading members of this informal literary society were Swift, Arbuthnot, Congreve, Bishop Atterbury, Pope, Gay and Thomas Parnell. Their chief object was a general war against the dunces, waged with great spirit by Arbuthnot, Swift and Pope.[4]
The estrangement from Addison was completed in connection with Pope's translation of Homer. This enterprise was definitely undertaken in 1713. The work was to be published by subscription, as Dryden's Virgil had been. Men of all parties subscribed, their unanimity being a striking proof of the position Pope had attained at the age of 25. It was as if he had received a national commission as by general consent the foremost poet of his time. But the unanimity was broken by a discordant note. A member of the Addison clique, Thomas Tickell, attempted to run a rival version. Pope suspected Addison's instigation; Tickell had at least Addison's encouragement. Pope's famous character of Addison as “ Atticus ” in the Epistle to Dr Arbulhuot (ii. 193-215) was, however, inspired by resentment at insults that existed chiefly in his own imagination, though Addison was certainly not among his warmest admirers. Pope afterwards claimed to have been magnanimous, but he spoiled his case by the petty inventions of his account of the quarrel.[4]
Middle career[]
The translation of Homer was Pope's chief employment for 12 years. The new pieces in the miscellanies published in 1717, his “Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady,” and his “Eloisa to Abelard,” were probably written some years before their publication. His “Eloisa to Abelard” was based on an English translation by John Hughes of a French version of the Letters, which differed very considerably from the original Latin.[4]
The Iliad was delivered to the subscribers in instalments in 1715, 1717, 1718 and 1720. Pope's own defective scholarship made help necessary. William Broome and John Jortin supplied the bulk of the notes, and Thomas Parnell the preface. For the translation of the Odyssey he took as coadjutors Elijah Fenton and Broome, who between them translated 12 out of the 24 books. It was completed in 1725. The profitableness of the work was Pope's chief temptation to undertake it. His receipts for his earlier poems had totalled about £150, but he cleared more than £8000 by the 2 translations, after deducting all payments to coadjutors — a much larger sum than had ever been received by an English author before.[4]
In 1722 he edited the poems of Thomas Parnell, and in 1725 made a considerable sum by an unsatisfactory edition of Shakespeare, in which he had the assistance of Fenton and Gay.[4]
Pope, with his economical habits, was rendered independent by the pecuniary success of his Homer, and enabled to live near London. The estate at Binfield was sold, and he removed with his parents to Mawson's Buildings, Chiswick, in 1716, and in 1719 to Twickenham, to the house with which his name is associated. Here he practised elaborate landscape gardening on a small scale, and built his famous grotto, which was really a tunnel under the road connecting the garden with the lawn on the Thames.[4] Pope decorated the grotto with alabaster, marbles, and ores such as mundic and crystals. He also used Cornish diamonds, stalactites, spars, snakestones and spongestone. Here and there in the grotto he placed mirrors, expensive embellishments for the time. A camera obscura was installed to delight his visitors, of whom there were many. The serendipitous discovery of a spring during its excavations enabled the subterranean retreat to be filled with the relaxing sound of trickling water, which would quietly echo around the chambers. Pope was said to have remarked that: "Were it to have nymphs as well - it would be complete in everything." Although the house and gardens have long since been demolished, much of this grotto still survives. The grotto now lies beneath Radnor House Independent Co-ed School, and is occasionally opened to the public.[5][6]
Pope was constantly visited at Twickenham by his intimates Arbuthnot, Gay, Bolingbroke (after his return in 1723), and Swift (during his brief visits to England in 1726 and 1727), and by many other friends of the Tory party. With Atterbury, bishop of Rochester, he was on terms of affectionate intimacy, but he blundered in his evidence when he was called as a witness on his behalf in 1723.[4]
In 1717 Pope's father died, and he appears to have turned to the Blounts for sympathy in what was to him a very serious bereavement. He had early made the acquaintance of Martha and Teresa Blount, both of them intimately connected with his domestic history. Their home was at Mapledurham, near Reading, but Pope probably had met them at the house of his neighbour, Mr Englefield of Whiteknights, who was their grandfather. He begun to correspond with Martha Blount in 1712, and after 1717 the letters are much more serious in tone. He quarrelled with Teresa, who had apparently injured or prevented his suit to her sister; and although, after her father's death in 1718, he paid her an annuity, he seems to have regarded her as a dangerous enemy. His friendship with Martha lasted all his life. So long as his mother lived he was unwearying in his attendance on her, but after her death in 1733 his association with Martha Blount was more constant. In defiance of the scandal-mongers, they paid visits together at the houses of common friends, and at Twickenham she spent part of each day with him. His earlier attachment to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was apparently a more or less literary passion, which perished under Lady Mary's ridicule.[4]
Satires and essays[]
The year 1725 may be taken as the beginning of the 3rd period of Pope's career, when he made his fame as a moralist and a satirist. It may be doubted whether Pope had the staying power necessary for the composition of a great imaginative work, whether his crazy constitution would have held together through the strain. He toyed with the idea of writing a grand epic. He told Spence that he had it all in his head, and gave him a vague (and it must be admitted not very promising) sketch of the subject and plan of it. But he never put any of it on paper. He shrank as with instinctive repulsion from the stress and strain of complicated designs. Even his prolonged task of translating weighed heavily on his spirits, and this was a much less formidable effort than creating an epic. He turned rather to designs that could be accomplished in detail, works of which the parts could be separately laboured at and put together with patient care, into which happy thoughts could be fit that had been struck out at odd moments and in ordinary levels of feeling.[4]
Edward Young's satire, The Universal Passion, had just appeared, and been received with more enthusiasm than anything published since Pope's own early successes. This alone would have been powerful inducement to Pope's emulous temper. Swift was finishing Gulliver's Travels, and came over to England in 1726. The survivors of the Scriblerus Club — Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Gay — resumed their old amusement of parodying and otherwise ridiculing bad writers, especially bad writers in the Whig interest. 2 volumes of their Miscellanies in Prose and Verse were published in 1727. A 3rd volume appeared in 1728, and a 4th was added in 1732. According to Pope's own history of the Dunciad, an Heroic Poem in Three Books, which originally appeared on 28 May 1728, the idea of it grew out of this.[7]
Among the Miscellanies was a “Treatise of the Bathos or the Art of Sinking in Poetry,” in which poets were classified, with illustrations, according to their eminence in the various arts of debasing instead of elevating their subject. No names were mentioned, but the specimens of bathos were assigned to various letters of the alphabet, which, the authors boldly asserted, were taken at random. But no sooner was the treatise published than the scribblers proceeded to take the letters to themselves, and in revenge to fill the newspapers with the most abusive falsehoods and scurrilities they could devise. This gave Pope the opportunity he had hoped for, and provided him with an excuse for the personalities of the Dunciad, which had been in his mind as early as 1720. Among the most prominent objects of his satire were Lewis Theobald,[4] Colley Cibber, John Dennis, Richard Bentley, Aaaron Hill and Bernard Lintott, who, in spite of his former relations with Pope, was now classed with the piratical Edmund Curll.[7]
The Dunciad was published with the greatest precautions. It was anonymous, and professed to be a reprint of a Dublin edition. When the success of the poem was assured, it was republished in 1729, and a copy was presented to the king by Sir Robert Walpole. Names took the place of initials, and a defence of the satire, written by Pope himself, but signed by his friend William Cleland, was printed as “A letter to the Publisher.” Various indexes, notes and particulars of the attacks on Pope made by the different authors satirized were added. To avoid any danger of prosecution, the copyright was assigned to Lord Oxford, Lord Bathurst, and Lord Burlington, whose position rendered them practically unassailable.[7]
The 4 epistles of the Essay on Man (1733) were also intimately connected with passing controversies. They belong to the same intellectual movement with Butler's Analogy — the effort of the 18th century to put religion on a rational basis. But Pope was not a thinker like Butler; he himself had not comprehended the drift of the arguments he had adopted from Bolingbroke, and was alarmed when he found that his poem was generally interpreted as an apology for the free-thinkers. Warburton is said to have qualified its doctrines as “ rank atheism, ” and asserted that it was put together from the “ worst passages of the worst authors.” [7]
The essay was soon translated into the chief European languages, and in 1737 its orthodoxy was assailed by a Swiss professor, Jean Pierre de Crousaz, in an Examen de l'essay de M. Pope sur l'hpmme. Warburton now saw fit to revise his opinion of Pope's abilities and principles; for what reason does not appear. In any case he now became as enthusiastic in his praise of Pope's orthodoxy and his genius as he had before been scornful, and proceeded to employ his unrivalled powers of sophistry in a defence of the orthodoxy of the conflicting and in consequent positions adopted in the Essay on Man. Pope was wise enough to accept with all gratitude an ally who was so useful a friend and so dangerous an enemy, and from that time onward Warburton was the authorized commentator on his works.[7]
The Essay on Man was to have formed part of a series of philosophic poems on a systematic plan. The other pieces were to treat of human reason, of the use of learning, wit, education and riches, of civil and ecclesiastical polity, of the character of women, &c. Of the 10 epistles of the Moral Essays, the earliest 4, written between 1731 and 1735, are connected with this scheme, which was never executed.[7]
There was much bitter, and sometimes unjust, satire in the Moral Essays and the Imitations of Horace. In these epistles and satires, which appeared at intervals, Pope was often the mouthpiece of his political friends, who were all of them in opposition to Walpole, then at the height of his power, and chose the object of his attacks from among the minister's adherents. Epistle III., "Of the Use of Riches,” addressed to Allen Bathurst, Lord Bathurst, in 1732, is a direct attack on Walpole's methods of corruption, and on his financial policy in general; and the 2 dialogues (1738) known as the “Epilogue to the Satires,” professedly a defence of satire, form an eloquent attack on the court. Pope was attached to the prince of Wales's party, and he did not forget to insinuate, what was indeed the truth, that the queen had refused the prince her pardon on her deathbed.[7]
The “Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot” contains a description of his personal attitude towards the scribblers and is made to serve as a “prologue to the satires.” The gross and unpardonable insults bestowed on Lord Hervey and on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the first satire “ to Mr Fortescue ” provoked angry retaliation from both. The description of Timon's ostentatious villa in Epistle IV., addressed to the earl of Burlington, was generally taken as a picture of Canons, the seat of John Brydges, duke of Chandos, one of Pope's patrons, and caused a great outcry, though in this case Pope seems to have been innocent of express allusion. Epistle II., addressed to Martha Blount, contained the picture of Atossa, which was taken to be a portrait of Sarah Jennings, duchess of Marlborough. An extreme imputation on Pope's character was that he left this passage to be published when he had in effect received a bribe of £1000 from the duchess of Marlborough for its suppression through the agency of Nathanael Hooke (died 1763). As the passage eventually stood, it might be applied to Katherine, duchess of Buckingham, a natural daughter of James II. Pope may have altered it with the intention of diverting the satire from the original object. He was scrupulously honest in money matters, and always independent in matters of patronage; but there is some evidence for this discreditable story beyond the gossip of Horace Walpole (Works, ed. P. Cunningham, i. cxliv.), though not sufficient to justify the acceptance it received by some of Pope's biographers. To appreciate fully the point of his allusions requires an intimate acquaintance with the political and social gossip of the time.[7]
Character[]
If we are to judge Pope, whether as a man or as a poet, with human fairness, and not merely by comparison with standards of abstract perfection, there are 2 features of his times that must be kept steadily in view: the character of political strife in those days and the political relations of men of letters. As long as the succession to the Crown was doubtful, and political failure might mean loss of property, banishment or death, politicians, playing for higher stakes, played more fiercely and unscrupulously than in modern days, and there was no controlling force of public opinion to keep them within the bounds of common honesty. Hence the age of Queen Anne is preeminently an age of intrigue. The government was almost as unsettled as in the early days of personal monarchy, and there was this difference-that it was policy rather than force upon which men depended for keeping their position. Secondly, men of letters were admitted to the inner circles of intrigue as they had never been before and as they have never been since. A generation later Walpole defied them, and paid the rougher instruments that he considered sufficient for his purpose in solid coin of the realm; but Queen Anne's statesmen, whether from difference of tastes or difference of policy, paid their principal literary champions with social privileges and honourable public appointments. Hence men of letters were directly infected by the low political morality of the unsettled time. And the character of their poetry also suffered. The most prominent defects of the age-the lack of high and sustained imagination, the genteel liking for “ nature to advantage dressed, ” the incessant striving after wit-were fostered, if not generated, by the social atmosphere.[8]
Pope's own ruling passion was the love of fame, and he had no scruples where this was concerned. His vanity and his childish love of intrigue are seen at their worst in his petty manoeuvres to secure the publication of his letters during his lifetime. These intricate proceedings were unravelled with great patience and ingenuity by Charles Wentworth Dilke, when the false picture of his relations with his contemporaries which Pope had imposed on the public had been practically accepted for a century.[8]
Elizabeth Thomas, the mistress of Henry Cromwell, had sold Pope's early letters to Henry Cromwell to the bookseller Curll for 10 guineas. These were published in Curll's Miscellanea in 1726 (dated 1727), and had considerable success. This surreptitious publication seems to have suggested to Pope the desirability of publishing his own correspondence, which he immediately began to collect from various friends on the plea of preventing a similar clandestine transaction. The publication by Wycherley's executors of a posthumous volume of the dramatist's prose and verse furnished Pope with an excuse for the appearance of his own correspondence with Wycherley, which was accompanied by a series of unnecessary deceptions. After manipulating his correspondence so as to place his own character in the best light, he deposited a copy in the library of Edward, 2nd earl of Oxford, and then he had it printed. The sheets were offered to Curll by a person calling himself P.T., who professed a desire to injure Pope, but was no other than Pope himself. The copy was delivered to Curll in 173 5 after long negotiations by an agent who called himself R. Smythe, with a few originals to vouch for their authenticity. P. T. had drawn up an advertisement stating that the book was to contain answers from various peers. Curll was summoned before the House of Lords for breach of privilege, but was acquitted, as the letters from peers were not in fact forthcoming. Difficulties then arose between Curll and P. T., and Pope induced a bookseller named Cooper to publish a Narrative of the Method by which Mr Pope's Private Letters were procured by Edmund Curll, Bookseller (173 5). These preliminaries cleared the way for a show of indignation against piratical publishers and a “ genuine ” edition of the Letters of Mr Alexander Pope (1737, fol. and 4to).[8]
Unhappily for Pope's reputation, his friend Caryll, who died before the publication, had taken a copy of Pope's letters before returning them. This letter-book came to light in the middle of the 10th century, and showed the freedom which Pope permitted himself in editing. The correspondence with -Lord Oxford, preserved at Longleat, afforded further evidence of his tortuous dealings. V The methods he employed to secure his correspondence with Swift were even more discreditable. The proceedings can only be explained as the measures of a desperate man whose maladies seem to have engendered a passion for trickery. They are related in detail by Elwin in the introduction to vol. i. of Pope's Works. A man who is said to have “ played the politician about cabbages and turnips, ” and who “ hardly drank tea without a stratagem, ” was not likely to be straightforward in a matter in which his ruling passion was concerned.[8]
Against Pope's petulance and “ general love of secrecy and cunning ” have to be set, in any fair judgment of his character, his exemplary conduct as a son, the affection with which he was regarded in his own circle of intimates, and many well-authenticated instances of genuine and continued kindliness to persons in distress.[8]
Later life[]
Pope's wit had won for him the friendship of many distinguished men, and his small fortune enabled him to meet them on a footing of independence. He paid long visits at many great houses, especially at Stanton Harcourt, the home of his friend Lord Chancellor Harcourt; at Oakley, the seat of Lord Bathurst; and at Prior Park, Bath, where his host was Ralph Allen. With the last named he had a temporary disagreement owing to some slight shown to Martha Blount, but he was reconciled to him before his death.[8]
He died on 30 May 1744, and was buried in St. Mary's Church in Twickenham, Greater London.[9] He left the income from his property to Martha Blount till her death, after which it was to go to his half-sister Magdalen Rackett and her children. His unpublished MSS. were left at the discretion of Lord Bolingbroke, and his copyrights to Warburton.[8]
Writing[]
Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Portrait by Jean-Baptiste van Loo (1684-1745), circa 1742. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Pope's position as a poet has been the subject of much contention among critics, and on the whole is lower than that assigned him by his contemporaries and immediate successors. Of the higher poetic qualities, imagination, sympathy, insight, and pathos, he had no great share; but for the work which in his original writings, as distinguished from translations, he set himself to do, his equipment was supreme, and the medium which he used – the heroic couplet – he brought to the highest technical perfection of which it is capable. He wrote for his own age, and in temper and intellectual and spiritual outlook, such as it was, he exactly reflected and interpreted it. In the forging of condensed, pointed, and sparkling maxims of life and criticism he has no equal, and in painting a portrait Dryden alone is his rival; while in the Rape of the Lock he has produced the best mock-heroic poem in existence. Almost no author except Shakespeare is so often quoted.[1]
Essay on Criticism[]
In Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711), "In every Work regard the writer's end” (l. 255) is among the sensible precepts, but often neglected by critics of the essay, who comment upon it as if Pope's end had been to produce an original and profound treatise on fundamental principles.[2] Pope's aim was simply to condense, methodize, and give as perfect and novel expression as he could to floating opinions about the poet's aims and methods, and the critic's duties, to “ what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed” (l. 298). “The town” was interested in belies lettres and given to conversing on the subject; Pope's essay was simply a brilliant contribution to the fashionable conversation. The youthful author said that he did not expect the sale to be quick because “ not one gentleman in sixty, even of liberal education, could understand it.” The sales were slow until Pope caused copies to be sent to Lord Lansdowne and others, but its success was none the less brilliant for the delay. The town was fairly-dazzled by the young poet's learning, judgment, and felicity of expression. Many of the admirers of the poem doubtless would have thought less of it if they had not believed all the maxims to be original. “ I admired, ” said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, “Mr Pope's Essay on Criticism at first very much, because I had not then read any of the ancient critics, and did not know that it was all stolen.”[3]
Rape of the Lock[]
William, 4th Baron Petre, had surreptitiously cut off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair, and the liberty had been resented; Pope heard the story from his friend John Caryll, who suggested that the breach between the families might be healed by making the incident the subject of a mock-heroic poem like Boileau's Lutrin. Pope caught at the hint; the mock-heroic treatment of the pretty frivolities of fashionable life just suited his freakish sprightliness of wit, and his studies of the grand epic at the time put him in excellent vein.[3]
The Rape of the Lock is admitted to be a masterpiece of airiness, ingenuity, and exquisite finish. But the poem struck Taine as a piece of harsh, scornful, indelicate buffoonery, a mere succession of oddities and contrasts, of expressive figures unexpected and grinning, an example of English insensibility to French sweetness and refinement. Sir Leslie Stephen objected on somewhat different grounds to the poet's tone towards women. His laughter at Pope's raillery was checked by the fact that women are spoken of in the poem as if they were all like Belinda. The poem shows the hand of the satirist who was later to assert that “every woman is at heart a rake,” in the epistle addressed to Martha Blount.[3]
Homer[]
Pope's translation of Homer established his reputation with his contemporaries, and has endangered it ever since it was challenged. Opinions have varied on the purely literary merits of the poem, but with regard to it as a translation few have differed from Bentley's criticism, “ A fine poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” His collaboration with Broome and Fenton involved him in a series of recriminations. Broome was weak enough to sign a note at the end of the work understating the extent of Fenton's assistance as well as his own, and ascribing the merit of their translation, reduced to less than half its real proportions, to a regular revision and correction — mostly imaginary — at Pope's hands. These falsehoods were deemed necessary by Pope to protect himself against possible protests from the subscribers.[4]
Essay on Man[]
The subject of the Essay on Man was suggested to Pope by Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, who had returned from exile in 1723, and was a fellow-member of the Scriblerus Club. Bolingbroke is said — and the statement is supported by the contents of his posthumous works — to have furnished most of the arguments. Pope's contribution to the controversy consisted in brilliant epigram and illustration. In this didactic work, as in his Essay on Criticism, he put together on a sufficiently simple plan a series of happy sayings, separately elaborated, picking up the thoughts as he found them in miscellaneous reading and conversation, and trying only to fit them with perfect expression. His readers were too dazzled by the verse to be severely critical of the sense. Pope himself had not comprehended the drift of the arguments he had adopted from Bolingbroke, and was alarmed when he found that his poem was generally interpreted as an apology for the free-thinkers.[7]
Satires[]
Regarding The Dunciad, we may admit that personal spite influenced Pope at least as much as disinterested zeal for the honour of literature, but in the dispute as to the comparative strength of these motives, a 3rd is apt to be overlooked that was probably stronger than either. This was an unscrupulous elfish love of fun, and delight in the creations of a humorous imagination. Certainly to represent the Dunciad as the outcome of mere personal spite is to give an exaggerated idea of the malignity of Pope's disposition, and an utterly wrong impression of the character of his satire. He was not, except in rare cases, a morose, savage, indignant satirist, but airy and graceful in his malice, revengeful perhaps and excessively sensitive, but restored to good humour as he thought over his wrongs by the ludicrous conceptions with which he invested his adversaries.[7]
The most unprovoked assault was on Richard Bentley, whom he satirized in the reconstruction and enlargement of the Dunciad made in the last years of his life at the instigation, it is said, of William Warburton. In the earlier editions the place of hero had been occupied by Lewis Theobald, who had ventured to criticize Pope's Shakespeare. In the edition which appeared in Pope's Works (1742), he was dethroned in favour of Colley Cibber, who had just written his Letter from Mr Cibber to Mr Pope inquiring into the motives that might induce him in his satirical writings to be so frequently fond of Mr Cibber's name (1742). Warburton's name is attached to many new notes, and a preliminary dissertation by Ricardus Aristarchus on the hero of the poem seems to be by him.[7]
Apart from their value as a brilliant strongly-coloured picture of the time Pope's satires have a permanent value as literature. It is justly remarked by Mark Pattison that “these Imitations are among the most original of his writings.” The vigour and terseness of the diction is still unsurpassed in English verse. Pope had gained complete mastery over his medium, the heroic couplet, before he used it to express his hatred of the political and social evils which he satirized. The elaborate periphrases and superfluous ornaments of his earlier manner, as exemplified in the Pastorals and the Homer, disappeared; he turned to the uses of verse the ordinary language of conversation, differing from everyday speech only in its exceptional brilliance and point. It is in these satires that his best work must be sought, and by them that his position among English poets must be fixed.[7]
Critical introduction[]
by Mark Pattison
Pope is not only the foremost literary figure of his age, but the representative man of a system or style of writing which for 100 years before and after him pervaded English poetry. The writers in this style are sometimes spoken of as the "school of Pope." But the title is a misnomer. A school coexists along with other schools from which it is distinguished by some special characteristics; all the contemporaneous schools taken together bearing the common and more general stamp of their age.
Classicism[]
A better denomination for the period of our literature which extends from the Restoration to the French Revolution is "the classical period." And this is not to be taken to mean that English writers now imitated the Greek and Latin writers, or consciously formed themselves upon classical models, as the Latinists of the Renaissance imitated Cicero and Virgil.
English writers had begun to perceive that there was such an art as the art of writing; that it was not enough to put down words upon paper anyhow, provided they conveyed your meaning. They found that sounds were capable of modulation, and that pleasure could be given by the arrangement of words, as well as instruction conveyed by their import. The public ear was touched by this new harmony, and began imperatively to demand its satisfaction; and from that moment the rude volubility of the older time seemed to it as the gabble of savages.
A poem was no longer to be a story told with picturesque imagery, but was to be a composition in symmetry and keeping. A thought or a feeling was not to be blurted out in the first words that came, but was to be matured by reflection and reduced to its simplest expression. Condensation, terseness, neatness, finish—all qualities hitherto unheard of in English—had to be studied. It was found to be possible to please by your manner as well as by your matter. And having been shown to be possible, it became necessary. No writer who neglected the graces of style could gain acceptance by the public. This fastidiousness of the public ear required on the part of writers greatly increased labor. It was no longer possible to take a sheet of paper, and write out your thoughts as fast as the pen would move. "The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease" were distanced in the race. It was evident that, under the new standard thus set up, the prize would be to him who should be willing to take most trouble about his style.
Pope as classicist[]
Pope was willing. As a boy he took as his life’s lesson the advice given him by "knowing Walsh," who used to tell him "there was one way left of excelling; for though we had several great poets, we never had any one great poet that was correct; and desired me to make that my study and aim." De Quincey, misconstruing Walsh’s meaning, has been at the pains to show that Pope’s verses abound in grammatical incorrectnesses. "The language," he says, "does not realise the idea; it simply suggests or hints it." That conveyance by suggestion, instead of a perfect and plenary deliverance, is just what Pope aimed at, and what Walsh inculcated, though he may not have chosen the very best word for what he meant.
Pope at once took the lead in the race of writers because he took more pains than they. He laboured day and night to form himself for his purpose, that viz. of becoming a writer of finished verse. To improve his mind, to enlarge his view of the world, to store up knowledge—these were things unknown to him. Any ideas, any thoughts, such as custom, chance, society or sect may suggest, are good enough, but each idea must be turned over till it has been reduced to its neatest and most epigrammatic expression.
If this definition of the literary aim which dominated all writing during 100 years which followed 1660 be just, it follows from it that the period would be more favourable to prose than to poetry. What in fact came to pass was that a compromise was effected between poetry and prose, and the leading writers adopted as the most telling form of utterance prosaic verse, metre without poetry. It is by courtesy that the versifiers of this century from Dryden to Churchill are styled poets, seeing that the literature they have bequeathed us wants just that element of inspired feeling, which is present in the feeblest of the Elizabethans.
But if these versifiers are not poets in the noblest sense of the term, it does not follow that what they produced is destitute of value. In the romantic reaction at the beginning of this century, the worthlessness of 18th-century poetry was part of the revolutionary creed. Sheer lawlessness was then admired, while labor was disdained as the badge of an unimaginative and artificial school.
The sounder judgment of a riper period of criticism can now do justice to the writers of our classical period. What they had not got we know well enough. They wanted inspiration, lofty sentiment, the heroic soul, chivalrous devotion, the inner eye of faith—above all, love and sympathy. They could not mean greatly. But such meaning as they had they laboured to express in the neatest, most terse and pointed form which our language is capable of. If not poets they were literary artists. They showed that a couplet can do the work of a page, and a single line produce effects which in the infancy of writing would require sentences.
Of these masters of literary craft Pope is the most consummate. In 2 directions, in that of condensing and pointing his meaning, and in that of drawing the utmost harmony of sound out of the couplet, Pope carried versification far beyond the point at which it was when he took it up. Historical parallels are proverbially misleading. Yet the analogy between what Virgil did for the Latin hexameter as he received it from Lucretius, and Pope’s maturing the 10-syllable couplet which he found as Dryden left it, is sufficiently close to be of use in aiding us to realise Pope’s merit. Because, after Pope, his trick of versification became common property, and "every warbler had his tune by heart," we are apt to overlook the merit of the 1st invention.
Pope as society writer[]
But epigrammatic force and musical flow are not the sole elements of Pope’s reputation. The matter which he worked up into his verse has a permanent value, and is indeed one of the most precious heirlooms which the eighteenth century has bequeathed us. And here we must distinguish between Pope when he attempts general themes, and Pope when he draws that which he knew, viz. the social life of his own day.
When in the Pastorals he writes of natural beauty, in the Essay on Criticism he lays down the rules of writing, in the Essay on Man he versifies Leibnitzian optimism, he does not rise above the herd of 18th-century writers, except in so far as his skill of language is more accomplished than theirs. The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad have a little more interest, because they treat of contemporary manners. But even in these poems, because the incidents are trivial and the personages contemptible, Pope is not more than pretty in The Rape of the Lock, and forcible, where force is ludicrously misplaced, in The Dunciad.
It is where he comes to describe the only thing which he knew, and about which he felt sympathy and antipathy – the court and town of his time – in the Moral Essays, and the Satires and Epistles, that Pope found the proper material on which to lay out his elaborate workmanship. And even in these capital works we must distinguish between Pope’s general theorems and his particular portraits. Where he moralises, or deduces general principles, he is superficial, 2nd-hand, and 1-sided as the veriest scribbler. For example: in the splendid lines on the Duke of Wharton (Mor. Ess. 1. 174) we must separate the childish theory of "the ruling passion" from the telling accumulation of epigram on epigram which follows under that spurious rubric. Or again, we might instance his Epistle to Augustus (Ep. 5) sparkling with lines of wit and pregnant sense, and yet offering as our literary history the grotesque theory, that the French style, which came in with the Restoration, was a consequence of the conquest of France in the 15th century.
In short, Pope, wherever he recedes from what was immediately close to him, the manners, passions, prejudices, sentiments, of his own day, has only such merit — little enough — which wit divorced from truth can have. He is at his best only where the delicacies and subtle felicities of his diction are employed to embody some transient phase of contemporary feeling. Pope has small knowledge of books. Though he was, as Sir W. Hamilton says, "a curious reader," he read for style, not for facts. Of history, of science, of nature, of anything except "the town" he knows nothing. He just shares the ordinary prejudices of the ordinary "wit" of his day. He was a Tory-Catholic, like any other Tory-Catholic of George II’s day. His sentiments reflect the social medium in which he lived.
The complex web of society, with its indefinable shades, its minute personal affinities and repulsions, is the world in which Pope lived and moved, and which he has drawn in a few vivid lines, with the keenness and intensity of which there is nothing in our literature that can compare. Clarendon’s portraits in his gallery of characters are more complete and discriminating, and infinitely more candid. But they do not flash the personage, or the situation, upon the imagination, and fix it in the memory, as one of Pope’s incisive lines does. Like all the greatest poets, Pope is individual and local. He can paint with his full power only what he sees. When he attempts abstract truth, general themes, past history, his want of knowledge makes itself felt in feeble and distorted views.
Early poems[]
The 1st production of Pope to appear in print was his Pastorals, published 1709, when the author was 21, but written some years earlier. As the work of a youth of 17 they are a marvelous feat of melodious versification. In any other respect they are only worthy of mention as already exemplifying the false taste which Pope never got rid of when he attempted any other theme than manners.
Of this false taste his Messiah is an elaborate specimen. This poem is an adaptation of Virgil’s 4th Eclogue, Pollio, to Christ, grafting upon the lines of the Latin poet the images supplied by the prophecies of Isaiah. The ingenuity with which the double imitation is carried through is only surpassed by the mastery shown over the melody of the couplet, and the exhibition of a complete poetical vocabulary. These brilliant qualities carried by storm the admiration of Pope’s contemporaries, and continued to command the homage of the eighteenth century down to Johnson.
Language experience, enforced by the precept and example of Wordsworth, makes our age too keenly feel that the pathos and sublimity of the Hebrew prophet are destroyed by the artificial embroidery with which Pope has overlaid them. Pope’s Messiah reads to us like a sickly paraphrase, in which all the majesty of the original is dissipated. "Righteousness" becomes "dewy nectar"; "sheep" are the "fleecy care"; the call to Jerusalem to "arise and shine" is turned into an invocation to "exalt her tow’ry head." The "fir-tree and box-tree" of Isaiah are "the spiry fir and shapely box." In his translation of the prediction "the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice den," Pope makes the cockatrice a "crested basilisk," and the asp "a speckled snake"; they have both scales of a "green lustre," and a "forky tongue," and with this last the "smiling infant shall innocently play."
"The leopard," says Isaiah, "shall lie down with the kid, and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them"; Pope could not leave this exquisite picture undecorated, and with him "boys in flowery bands the tiger lead." The alternative is an example of the justice of De Quincey’s observation that "the Arcadia of Pope’s age was the spurious Arcadia of the opera theatre." (Elwin.)
Essay on Criticism[]
The Essay on Criticism appeared in 1711. This is a didactic poem of which the remote prototype is Horace’s Ars poetica, and the immediate, Boileau’s Art poétique. It differs from these models in its subject, which is the Art of Criticism. To Dr. Johnson this production appeared "to display such extent of comprehension, such nicety of distinction, such acquaintance with mankind, and such knowledge both of ancient and modern learning, as are not often attained by the matured age and the longest experience."
This verdict of Johnson may be cited to show the great advance which criticism has made in England in the course of a century. We should now say that the precepts of Pope’s Essay are conventional truisms, the ordinary rules of composition which may be found in all school manuals, and which are taught to boys as part of their prosody. "The Essay," says De Quincey, "is a mere versification, like a metrical multiplication table, of commonplaces the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps." It required very little reading of the French textbooks to find the maxims which Pope has here strung together. But he has dressed them so neatly, and turned them out with such sparkle and point, that these truisms have acquired a weight not their own, and they circulate as proverbs among us in virtue of their pithy form rather than their truth.
Pope told Spence that he had "gone through all the best critics"’ specifying Quintilian, Rapin and Le Bossu. But whatever trouble he took in collecting what to say, his main effort is expended upon how to say it. The Essay on Criticism abounds in those striking couplets which have lodged in all our memories, and given their last and abiding shape to dicta which have been extant in substance since literature began. A good example of this art is supplied by the couplet:–
- ‘True wit is nature to advantage dressed;
- What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.’
But though the Essay abounds with sparkle and point and memorable lines, it is very far from being composed throughout of nothing but such. Besides the general fault, which pervades all Pope’s longer efforts, of want of coherent texture and consecutiveness of argument, the Essay on Criticism offers too many weak lines, obscure expressions, and monotonous rhymes. Negligences of versification, such as no piece of Pope’s composition is entirely free from, abound in the Essay. One instance of this slovenliness is the want of variety in his endings. There are 12 couplets rhyming to wit, and 10 rhyming to sense.
- ‘Unhappy wit, like most mistaken things,
- Atones not for that envy which it brings.’
"Mistaken things" here means "things wrongly taken by others," which is not the natural sense of the words; and "atones" stands for "compensates."
- ‘But sense survived when merry jests were passed.’
It requires explanation that "were passed" here means "had passed away."
- ‘Critics …
- Form short ideas, and offend in arts
- As most in manners, from a love to parts.’
In this single couplet are 3 expressions, ‘short ideas,’ ‘offend in arts,’ and ‘love to parts,’ the meaning of which has to be guessed, or gathered from the context; it is not apparent on the face of the words used. In some styles of poetry enigmatical expression is not a fault; in an Aeschylean chorus it is of the essence of the charm that the revelations should be shrouded in clouds. But Pope’s verse, like French prose, is constructed on the principle of being immediately intelligible; the moment it is not so, its raison d’être is gone.
Rape of the Lock[]
The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic poem, the style of which was suggested to Pope by Boileau’s Lutrin. Pope followed his model in entitling his work "An heroicomical poem," the epithet employed by Boileau in the 1709 edition of his Lutrin. It was founded upon an incident which had caused great commotion in the circle of Catholic families in which Pope, though not himself a member of it, had friends.
Lord Petre, in a moment of youthful frolic, had cut off a lock of hair from Miss Arabella Fermor’s head, a liberty which was keenly resented, and had caused a violent quarrel between the families. Mr. Caryll, a Sussex squire, nephew to the Mr. John Caryll who had been Secretary to Mary, James II’s Queen, suggested to Pope to write a poem, which by treating the incident playfully, might induce the offended family to take a more lenient view of what they regarded as an outrage.
This was the motive of the 1st draft of the poem, as it was printed in [Lintot]’s Miscellany, 1712,[10] in 2 cantos, and no more than 330 lines. This 1st sketch was written off in a fortnight, but its author, pleased with the success of his work, elaborated it afterwards, and enlarged it especially by the introduction of what he calls the "machinery," or the agency of supernatural beings of the fairy species, whom he calls "sylphs." It is universally admitted that the later additions, and this invention especially, are great improvements, thus forming an exception to the rule that a poet should never recast, or supplement, a piece which he has turned out well in the 1st instance.
The heroine of the poem, Belinda, is Miss Fermor; the Baron is Lord Petre; Thalestris is Mrs. Morley; Sir Plume is Mrs. Morley’s brother, Sir George Brown of Keddington. Pope obtained permission to dedicate the poem to Miss Fermor; but notwithstanding that he takes care to tell her that "Belinda resembles her in nothing but in beauty," the lady was more offended than flattered by the representation given of her. Sir George Brown was indignant at being made to talk nothing but nonsense. In bringing about its professed aim, the reconciliation of the 2 families, the poem was entirely unsuccessful.
But with the public it was otherwise. On its 1st publication Addison pronounced it a delicious little thing; "merum sal." Criticism the most hostile to Pope, of which there has been abundance in the modern reaction against his influence, has agreed to spare the Rape. Macaulay pronounces it his best poem. De Quincey, who never spares Pope when he is weak, goes beyond Macaulay, and declares it "the most exquisite monument of playful fancy that universal literature offers." The Rape of the Lock, writes Hazlitt,– :is the most exquisite specimen of filigree work ever invented. It is made of gauze and silver spangles. The most glittering appearance is given to everything; to paste, pomatum, billets-doux, and patches. Airs, languid airs breathe around; the atmosphere is perfumed with affectation. A toilet is described with the solemnity of an altar raised to the goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction to set off the meanest things…. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and folly. It is the perfection of the mock-heroic. Conington thinks "there can be little to say about a poem so exquisite in its peculiar style of art as to make the task of searching for faults almost hopeless, that of commending beauties simply impertinent.
Such warmth of encomium as this is at least testimony to the admiration which the skill of the poet can still excite in the reader. But it is criticism which touches the workmanship rather than the work. Pope’s execution is so clever as always to charm us even when his subject is most devoid of interest. The secret of the peculiar fascination of The Rape of the Lock lies, I believe, not merely in the art and management, but in the fact that here, for the first time, Pope is writing of that which he knew, of the life he saw and the people he lived with.
For Windsor Forest, though he lived in it, he had no eyes; but a drawing-room, a fop, and a belle, these were the objects which had struck his young fancy when he emerged from the linen draper’s villa, and he had studied them. About these things he can be real and truthful; when he writes of Abelard and Heloise he is making believe, he is an actor trying to think himself into his part. Only in his Satires and Epistles and in the characters of his Moral Essays will he again succeed in hitting upon congenial matter on which to lay out his extraordinary power of versification.
Nor is the reflection of social life and manners which the Rape offers confined to superficial forms only. The most intimate sentiments of the time find their representation here. As an instance we may point to the mean estimation of women. Contempt veiled under the show of deference, a mockery of chivalry, its form without its spirit,— this is the attitude assumed towards women by the poet in this piece.
"The world of fashion is displayed in its most gorgeous and attractive hues, and everywhere the emptiness is visible beneath the outward splendour. The beauty of Belinda, the details of her toilet, her troops of admirers, are all set forth with unrivalled grace and fascination, and all bear the impress of vanity and vexation. Nothing can exceed the art with which the satire is blended with the pomp, mocking without disturbing the unsubstantial gewgaw. The double vein is kept up with sustained skill in the picture of the outward charms and the inward frivolity of women.
- ‘With varying vanities from every part
- They shift the moving toyshop of their heart’;
this is the tone throughout. Their hearts are toyshops. They reverse the relative importance of things; the little with them is great, and the great little."’ (Elwin.)
This feeling towards women is not the poet’s idiosyncrasy; here he is but the representative of his age. The degradation of woman in England does not date from the Restoration. It was complete before the Commonwealth, and is aptly symbolised in the behaviour of James I, who compelled all ladies to kneel on being presented to him. But the combination of the forms of chivalrous devotion with the reality of cynical contempt, was the peculiar tone of manners which came in with the court of Charles II, and gradually spread downwards through the lower social strata. The poem in our literature which gives the most finished representation of this sentiment is The Rape of the Lock.
Homer[]
It was to the translation of Homer, undertaken as a commercial speculation, that Pope owed, more than to anything else he produced, the great reputation he attained in his lifetime. The verdict of later times has reversed the decision of an age little versed in Greek, and whose artificial manners were alien from the primitive simplicity and savagery of Homer.
Pope translated from the Latin version, from the French of Dacier, from the English of Chapman. But it was less his ignorance of Greek, than his theory of poetical expression, which led him astray. His solicitude is entirely spent upon the words he is using, and not upon the thing he is describing. He introduced ornaments which are not only foreign, but false and out of keeping. He reproduced neither the naiveté nor the dignity of the original.
Pope’s moonlight scene provoked Wordsworth’s remark that "the eye of the poet had never been steadily fixed upon its object," and that "it shows to what a low state knowledge of the most obvious and important phenomena had sunk." In the moonlight scene from the 8th Book, we have in these few lines more than average infidelity to the original; we have unhomeric embroidery, such as "refulgent lamp of night"; but we have at the same time 24 lines (11 in the Greek) of finished versification, the rapid, facile, and melodious flow of which, concentrating all the felicities of Pope’s higher style, has never been surpassed in English poetry.
Dunciad[]
The translation of Homer occupied Pope during the 10 best years of his life. The Odyssey was finished in 1725, and Pope turned to very different work, the composition of The Dunciad. The Dunciad is a personal satire, or lampoon, directed against the small authors of the day, who are bespattered with much mud and little wit, without any pretence of disguise, and under their own names. The Dunciad has been the parent of a numerous progeny: The Scribleriad, The Baviad, The Pursuits of Literature, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, all of which have had much vogue in their day, and lost their savor when the generation they libelled has passed away.
It must not be concealed that critics of reputation have spoken with approbation of this amalgam of dirt, ribaldry and petty spite. De Quincey has allowed himself to say that The Dunciad is Pope’s "greatest work." Thackeray, who had no toleration for similar offences when Swift was the offender, thought that the conclusion of The Dunciad "shows the author to be the equal of all poets of all times"; and Conington considers the poem as "unquestionably a very great satire."
It certainly shows Pope’s peculiar skill as an artist in its perfection. He has now (1727) attained a complete mastery over the couplet, and can compel it to do the work he requires of it. To the literary historian the value of The Dunciad is great, as a chapter of contemporary life, a record of small celebrities, otherwise lost to fame. But of its absolute merit as a poem, a just taste must agree with Taine (Litt. Angl. t. 4), that "seldom has so much talent been expended to produce so much ennui."
The motive of the satire is not the desire of the moral reformer to improve mankind, but the rancour and malevolence of literary jealousy. And against whom is this petty irritation felt? Against feeble journalists, brutal pamphleteers, starving rhymesters, a crew of hackney authors, bohemians of ink and paper below literature. To sting and wound these unfortunates gave Pope pleasure as he sat, meditating stabs, in his elegant villa, the resort of the rich and the noble! By attacking these, he lowers himself to their level.
The premier poet of the age — of the century — chooses to hand himself down to posterity as bandying scurrilities with the meanest scribblers, hired defamers, the banditti of the printing-office, ready at the shortest notice to deliver half a crown’s worth of slander. To be even with these miserable outcasts Pope condescended to employ 1 of the worst of them, Richard Savage, as a spy and informer to bring him gossip from their haunts. When every other taunt fails him Pope can gibbet the poverty of these unsuccessful authors as a crime, and turn them into ridicule for wanting a dinner. The superfluous vehemence with which he rails against these insignificant enemies betrays the hollowness of the pretence that the satire was aimed not at individuals, but at the spirit of dullness or stupid conservatism.
Of Pope’s ignorance of everything, except society and the art of versifying, The Dunciad offers a signal instance. The foremost scholar in Europe, possessing a genius for criticism to which philologians of all countries still pay admiring homage, was an Englishman, and a contemporary of Pope. Pope looked on Richard Bentley but knew him not. The lines in which the great critic is quizzed, are a typical specimen of the fatal flaw in Pope’s writings, that the workmanship is not supported by the matter; a palpable falsehood is enshrined in immortal lines.
Essay on Man[]
- Main article: An Essay on Man
The composition of The Dunciad had revealed to Pope where his true strength lay, in blending personalities with moral reflection. During the next decade, 1730–40, he confined himself to the only style of composition upon which his reputation as an English poet must rest, and in which he has never had a rival. The pieces which appear in his collected works under the various titles of Moral Essays, Essay on Man, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Imitations of Horace, Epilogue to the Satires, were brought out singly at various times during these 10 years.
The most celebrated of these poems are the 4 epistles addressed to Lord Bolingbroke, and known by the collective title of the Essay on Man. It is a didactic or argumentative poem, not on Man, as the title bears, but a theodicy or vindication of the ways of Providence. The view attempted to be presented is that of Leibnitzian optimism; the end of the universe is the general good of the whole; it was impossible to realize this without admitting partial evil. Man is not the end of creation, but only 1 in a graduated scale of beings; it is his pride which leads him to complain when he finds that everything has not been ordered for his benefit.
The reasoning of the Essay on Man is feeble, the philosophy either trite or inconsistent, or obscure. But the less the intrinsic value of the argument, the more is our admiration excited by the literary skill and brilliant execution displayed in the management. The particular illustrations, the episodes and side-lights, always sparkle with wit, and are sometimes warm with feeling, when the main thesis is jejune and frigid. "Whilst Pope frequently wastes his skill in gilding refuse, he is really most sensitive to the noblest sentiments of his contemporaries, and when he has good materials to work upon, his verse glows with unusual fervour." (Leslie Stephen.) Ruskin points to the couplet –
- ‘Never elated, while one man’s oppressed;
- Never dejected whilst another ’s blessed’
– as "the most complete, concise, and lofty expression of moral temper existing in English words." "If the 'Essay on Man' were shivered into fragments, it would not lose its value; for it is precisely its details which constitute its moral as well as literary beauties." (A.W. Ward.)
Moral Essays[]
The Moral Essays consist of 5 epistles composed at different times, and placed in the works under a common title. Of these the same may be said as of the Essay on Man, that the ethical doctrine is not worthy of the exquisite workmanship. Our extract is from the first epistle, and includes the celebrated character of Philip Lord Wharton, a piece of portraiture which ranks with those of Addison, the Duchess of Marlborough, Lord Hervey, and the death-bed of Villiers Duke of Buckingham.
They are masterpieces of English versification, medals cut with such sharp outlines and such vigour of hand that they have lost none of their freshness by lapse of time. ‘When the poet engraves one of these figures, his compendious imagery, the surprises of his juxtaposition, the sustained and multiplied antitheses, the terse texture of each line, the incessant shocks from the play of his eloquence directed and concentrated continually upon one point, from these things the memory receives an impression which it never loses.’ (Taine.)
Satires and Epistles[]
Pope’s peculiar powers found their most perfect development in the pieces, which in the collected works are entitled Satires and Epistles of Horace imitated. Casually suggested by Bolingbroke in the course of conversation, and calling themselves an imitation, these "satires and epistles" are the most original of Pope’s writings, and the most natural and spontaneous outcome of his genius.
These pieces, 9 in number, including a Prologue, and 2 Epilogues, form a total of some 2,000 lines, and were the product of the 4 years 1735-1738, and therefore of Pope’s meridian period between his 40th and 50th year. The ferocity of Pope’s invective and the malice of his antipathies are here subdued, and though the coarser horse-laugh of the old time breaks out every now and then, yet on the whole the finer play of sarcasm and witty innuendo has taken the place of hard names and slander.
The "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot; or, Prologue to the Satires" may be singled out as Pope’s most characteristic piece.It contains the 2 famous portraits, that of Lord Hervey (Sporus) and that of Addison (Atticus).
The libel, for such it is, on Lord Hervey cannot be excused even by the rancor of political party. This accomplished nobleman was Vice-Chamberlain in the court of George II, a position easy enough to a mere fribble, but which was sure to mark out a man of parts and wit such as Lord Hervey, as the object of hatred to the tory and jacobite opposition. Even as art, Pope must be considered in this sketch to have failed from overcharging his canvas with odious and disgusting images. Yet "it is impossible not to admire, however we may condemn, the art by which acknowledged wit, beauty and gentle manners, the Queen’s favour, and even a valetudinary diet are travestied into the most odious defects and offences." (Croker.)
The satire on Addison, in a more refined style, but not less unjust in fact, had been written 20 years before, during Addison’s lifetime. Pope regarded the piece with the affection with which an author regards the product of much time and labor; and he had meditated each stab in this finished lampoon for years. Having printed it separately in 1727, he now finally adapted it into this "Prologue to the Satires," only suppressing the real name, but not concealing it under the thin disguise of ‘Atticus.’ The art of these malignant lines is much greater than that of those on Lord Hervey. Pope here not only avoids any images which were in themselves offensive, but allows his victim many virtues and accomplishments.[11]
Critical reputation[]
The death of Alexander Pope, from title page of William Mason, Museus: A monody to the memory of Mr. Pope, 1747. Diana holds the dying Pope, and John Milton, Edmund Spenser, and Geoffrey Chaucer prepare to welcome him to heaven. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
By the mid-18th century new fashions in poetry started to emerge. A decade after Pope's death, Joseph Warton claimed that Pope's style of poetry was not the most excellent form of the art. The Romantic movement that rose to prominence in early 19th-century England was more ambivalent towards his work. Lord Byron identified Pope as a major influence (believing his scathing satire of contemporary English literature English Bards and Scotch Reviewers a continuance of Pope's tradition), while William Wordsworth found Pope's style fundamentally too decadent to represent the human condition truly.[12]
It was the Homer chiefly that Wordsworth and Coleridge had in their eye when they began the polemic against the "poetic diction" of the 18th century, and struck at Pope as the arch-corrupter. They were historically unjust to Pope, who did not originate this diction, but only furnished the most finished examples of it. At the beginning of the 19th century Pope still had an ardent admirer in Lord Byron, whose earliest satires are written in Pope's couplet. The much abused pseudo-poetic diction in substance consisted in an ambition to “rise above the vulgar style," to dress nature to advantage-a natural ambition when the arbiters of literature were people of fashion. If One compares Pope's "Messiah" or "Eloisa to Abelard," or an impassioned passage from the Iliad, with the originals that he paraphrased, one gets a more vivid idea of the consistence of pseudo-poetic diction than could be furnished by pages of analysis. But Pope merely made masterly use of the established diction of his time, which he eventually forsook for a far more direct and vigorous style..[8]
A passage from the Guardian, in which Philips was commended as against him, runs: “It is a nice piece of art to raise a proverb above the vulgar style and still keep it easy and unaffected. Thus the old wish, 'God rest his soul,' is very finely turned:-
- “'Then gentle Sidney liv'd, the shepherd's friend,
- Eternal blessings on his shade attend!'"
Pope would have despised so easy a metamorphosis as this at any period in his career, and the work of his coadjutors in the Odyssey may be distinguished by this comparative cheapness of material; Broome's description of the clothes washing Nausicaa and her maidens in the 6th book may be compared with the original as a luminous specimen.[8]
In the 20th century an effort to revive Pope's reputation began and was successful. Pope's work was now found to be full of references to the people and places of his time and these aided individuals' understanding of the past. The postwar period stressed the power of Pope's poetry and recognised that Pope's immersion in Christian and Biblical culture gave great depth to his poetry. Maynard Mack thought very highly of Pope's poetry. He argued that Pope's humane moral vision demanded as much respect as his technical excellence. In the years 1953-1967 the production of the definitive Twickenham edition of Pope's poems was published in 10 volumes.[12]
The last decades of the 20th century brought further challenges to Pope's literary reputation. These critics were prompted by theoretical perspectives, such as Marxism, feminism and other forms of post-structuralism. Hence Hammond focused on Pope's singular achievement in making an independent living solely from his writing. Laura Brown's 'Alexander Pope' (1985) adopted a Marxist approach and accused Pope of becoming an apologist for the oppressive upper classes. A year after Brown's study, Brean Hammond published an article about Pope inspired by Cultural Materialism in the British context and the USA-based New Historicism. Following Hammond's approach, Raymond Williams explained art as a set of practices influenced by broad cultural factors rather than simply the vague ideas of genius alone.[12]
In 'Politics and Poetics of Transgression' (1985) Peter Stallybrass and Allon White claimed that Pope drew upon the low culture which he despised in order to produce his own 'high art'. They asserted that Pope was implicated in the very material he was attempting to exclude, an observation not far different from the arguments of Pope's contemporaries.[12]
Feminists also criticised Pope's works. Ellen Pollak's 'The Poetics of Sexual Myth' (1985) argued that Pope followed an anti-feminist tradition. Pollak believed that Pope regarded women as inferior to men both intellectually and physically. Carolyn Williams identified a crisis in the male role during the 18th century in Britain and discussed its impact on Pope as well as on his writing.[12]
Recognition[]
Pope's memorial stone, St. Mary's Church, Twickenham. Courtesy Poets' Graves.
3 of his poems ("On a certain Lady at Court," "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady," and "The Dying Christian to his Soul") were included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.[13]
Pope has a memorial panel in the stained glass window designed by Graham Jones and installed in 1994 above Chaucer's monument in Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey.[14]
In popular culture[]
Pope is the 3rd-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson.[15]
Pope's line, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread" was used in the title of E.M. Forster's debut novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). That line was also used as the opening line of "Fools Rush In," a Johnny Mercer/Rube Bloom pop song from the 1930s.
Publications[]
Poetry[]
- Pastorals. London: 1709; Manchester, UK: G. Nichollson, for T. Knott / Champante & Witrow, London, 1793
- An Essay on Criticism. London: W. Lewis, 1711, 1712, 1713; London: Bernard Lintot, 1716; Glasgow: R. Urie, 1754; Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1970
- Pope's Essay on Criticism (edited by John Churton Collins). London & New York: Macmillan, 1896.
- The Rape of the Lock: An heroicomical poem in two cantos in Miscellaneous Poems and Translations. London: Bernard Lintott, 1712;[10] Dublin: J. Thompson, 1729; New York: G. Dearborn, 1836
- (revised & expanded as) The Rape of the Lock: An heroicomical poem in five cantos. London: Bernard Lintott, 1714
- Windsor-Forest. London: Bernard Lintott, 1713.
- Ode for musick. London: Bernard Lintott, 1713.
- The Temple of Fame: A vision. London: Bernard Lintott, 1715.
- Eloisa to Abelard in Letters of Abelard and Heloise. London: J. Watt, 1718; London: T. Daniel / W. Thompson & J. Steele / A. Todd, 1758.
- The Dunciad. London: Lawton Gilliver, 1727
- The Dunciad variorum. London: A. Dod, 1729; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1929; Menston, UK: Scolars Press, 1968.
- An epistle to the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Burlington. London: L. Gilliver, 1731.
- The Impertinent; or, A visit to the court: A satyr. London: John Wileord, 1733.
- An Essay on Man: In four epistles. London: Bernard Lintott, 1733; London: J. Wright, for Lawton Gilliver, 1734; Dublin: S. Powell, for George Risk, George Ewing, & William Smith, 1733; Philadelphia: William Spottiswoode, 1798.
- An epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot. London: J. Wright, for Lawton Gilliver, 1734.
- Bounce to Fop: An heroick epistle from a dog at Twickenham to a dog at court; by Dr. S----t (with Jonathan Swift). London: T. Cooper, 1736.
- The Universal Prayer. London: R. Dodsley, 1738.
- Poetical Works. (2 volumes), London: C. Cooke, 1795.
- Shorter Poems. Manchester, UK: G. Nichollson, for T. Knott, & Champante & Witrow, London, 1797.
- Poetical Works (edited by George Gilfillan). (2 volumes), Boston: Little, Brown, 1856; London: Bell & Daldy, 1900. Volume I, Volume II
- The Rape of the Lock, and other poems (edited by Thomas Marc Parrott). Boston: Ginn, 1906.
- Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (edited by George Dunn). Oxford: Blackwell, 1913.
- The Poems (edited by John Bull). (11 volumes), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1939, 1969.
- Selected Poetry (edited by Pat Rogers). Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Poems (edited by Valerie Rumbold). Harlow, UK: Pearson Education, 2007.
Plays[]
- Three Hours After Marriage: A comedy (with John Gay & John Arbuthnot). London: Bernard Lintott, 1717.
Non-fiction[]
- Peri Bathous; or, Martinus Scriblerus, his treatise of The art of sinking in poetry (anonymous), in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, London: B. Motte, 1727
- The Art of Sinking in Poetry: Martinus Scriblerus' Peri Bathous [transliterated]; a critical edition (edited by Edna Leake Steeves). New York: Kings Crown Press, 1958.
Collected editions[]
- Works. London: W. Bowyer, for Bernard Lintot, 1717. Volume II,
- Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (with Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot, and John Gay). London: Benjamin Motte. Volume I (1727), Volume II (1727), Volume III (1728) Volume IV (1732)
- Miscellanies in Four Volumes. London: Charles Bathurst, 1742.
- Works. London: L. Gilliver, 1735. Volume II, Volume VI
- Works: In four volumes complete. (4 volumes), London: Printed for the Editor, 1778. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III, Volume IV.'
- Works: In nine volumes complete (with notes by Joseph Warton). (9 volumes), London: Printed for B. Law et al, 1797. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III, Volume IV, Vo lume V, Volume VI, Volume VII, Volume VIII, Volume IX.
- Works: In verse and prose (edited with a memoir by Rev. William Lisle Bowles). (10 volumes), London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1806. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III, Volume IV, Volume V, Volume VI, Volume VII, Volume VIII, Volume IX, Volume X.[16]
- Works (edited by William Roscoe). (10 volumes), London: J. Rivington, 1824.
- Works (edited by John Wilson Croker). (10 volumes), London: John Murray, 1871. Volume I, Volume II
- Prose Works (edited by Norman Ault & Rosemary Cowler). (2 volumes), Oxford: Blackwell, 1936, 1986.
- Selected Prose (edited by Paul Hammond). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Translated[]
- Homer, The Iliad. (6 volumes), London: W. Bowyer, for Bernard Lintot, 1720
- The Iliad of Homer (edited by Stephen Shankman). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1996.
- Homer, The Odyssey. London: Bernard Lintott, 1725.
- Horace, Horace his ode to Venus. Lib. IV. Ode I. Imitated by Mr. Pope. London: J. Wright, 1737.
- Horace, The first epistle of the first book of Horace imitated. London: R. Dodsley, 1737.
Edited[]
- Thomas Parnell, Poems on Several Occasions. London: B. Lintott, 1721.
- William Shakespeare, The Works of Shakespear. (6 volumes), London: Jacob Tonson, 1723-1725.
Letters[]
- Letters of the Late Alexander Pope, Esq: To a Lady. London: J. Dodsley, 1769.[17]
- Correspondence (edited by George Sherborne). (5 volumes), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.
- Selected Letters (edited by Howard Erskine-Hill). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.[18]
Poems by Alexander Pope[]
Alexander Pope Ode on Solitude poem with text
Rape of The Lock by Alexander Pope Canto 1
An Essay on Man, Philosophy Audiobook, by Alexander Pope, Philosophical Essay
See also[]
References[]
- 'Alexander Pope', Literature Online biography. Chadwyck-Healey: Cambridge, 2000.
- Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. 5th edition, Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Baines, Paul. The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope. Routledge Publishing, 2001, 67-90.
- Cassirer, Ernst. An essay on man; an introduction to a philosophy of human culture. Yale University Press, 1944.
- Gordon, Ian. 'An Epistle to a Lady (Moral Essay II)', The Literary Encyclopedia. 2002-01-24, accessed 2009-04-17.
- Erskine-Hill, Howard. 'Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, Sept 2004, online edn, Jan 2008. Accessed 18 April 2009.
- Mack, Maynard. Alexander Pope: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. (the definitive biography)
Minto, William, & Margaret Bryant (1911). "Pope, Alexander". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. 22 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 82-86.. Wikisource, Web, Feb. 6-8, 2020.- Nuttal, Anthony. Pope's Essay on Man. Allen & Unwin, 1984, 3-15, 167-188.
- Rogers, Pat. Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Rogers, Pat, ed. Major Works. Oxford University Press, 2006, 17-39.
Notes[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 John William Cousin, "Pope, Alexander," A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1910, 304-305. Wikisource, Web, Feb. 20, 2018.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 Minto & Bryant, 82.
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 Minto & Bryant, 83.
- ↑ 4.00 4.01 4.02 4.03 4.04 4.05 4.06 4.07 4.08 4.09 4.10 Minto & Bryant, 84.
- ↑ Gordon (2002)
- ↑ London Evening Standard, 2 November 2010.
- ↑ 7.00 7.01 7.02 7.03 7.04 7.05 7.06 7.07 7.08 7.09 7.10 7.11 Minto & Bryant, 85.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 Minto & Bryant, 86.
- ↑ Alexander Pope 1688-1744, Poets' Graves, Cameron Self. Web, June 23, 2013.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 Pope, Alexander. Miscellaneous Poems and Translations [The Rape of the Lock. Manhattan Rare Book Co. Web, Feb. 7, 2021.
- ↑ from Mark Pattison, "Critical Introduction: Alexander Pope (1688–1744)," The English Poets: Selections with critical introductions (edited by Thomas Humphry Ward). New York & London: Macmillan, 1880-1918. Web, Feb. 20, 2018.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 'Alexander Pope', Literature Online biography (2000)
- ↑ Alphabetical list of authors: Montgomerie, Alexander to Shakespeare, William, Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900 (edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch). Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1919. Bartleby.com, Web, May 19, 2012.
- ↑ Alexander Pope, People, History, Westminster Abbey. Web, July 12, 2016.
- ↑ Dictionary of Quotations (1999)
- ↑ William Lisle Bowles 1762-1850, Poetry Foundation, Web, Aug. 11, 2012.
- ↑ Letters of the Late Alexander Pope, Esq: To a Lady, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, Text Creation Partnership. Web, Feb. 27, 2016.
- ↑ Alexander Pope, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Feb. 7, 2021.
External links[]
- Poems
- Alexander Pope in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900: "On a certain Lady at Court," "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady," "The Dying Christian to his Soul"
- Alexander Pope 1688-1744 at the Poetry Foundation
- Alexander Pope profile & 6 poems at the Academy of American Poets
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) info & 10 poems at English Poetry, 1579-1830
- Pope in The English Poets: An anthology: Extract from the Essay on Criticism, Extract from The Iliad, Book VIII, "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady," Extract from Moral Essays, Epistle I, "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," from The First Epistle of The Second Book of Horace Imitated Extract from the Epilogue to The Satires
- The Rape of the Lock: Canto I, Canto III
- The Dunciad: Extract from Book IV, Conclusion
- Essay on Man: Book I, Book IV
- Alexander Pope at the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (16 poems)
- Pope, Alexander (1688-1744) (25 poems) at Representative Poetry Online
- Alexander Pope at PoemHunter (83 poems)
- Alexander Pope at Poetry Nook (274 poems)
- Prose
- Quotes
- Alexander Pope quotations at About.com
- Alexander Pope Quotes at BrainyQuote
- Alexander Pope Quotes at GoodReads
- Alexander Pope at the Quotations Page
- Audio/video
- Alexander Pope poems at YouTube
- BBC audio file. In Our Time, radio 4 discussion of Pope.
- Pope, slide show
- Books
- Works by Alexander Pope at Project Gutenberg
- Alexander Pope at Amazon.com
- Selected Bibliography: Alexander Pope (1688-1745) by Frans De Bruyn, University of Ottawa
- About
- Alexander Pope in the Encyclopædia Britannica
- Alexander Pope: A brief biography at the Victorian Web
- Alexander Pope at NNDB
- Alexander Pope at The Twickenham Museum
- Alexander Pope in the Catholic Encyclopedia
- Pope, Alexander (1688-1744) in the Dictionary of National Biography
- Alexander Pope (1688-1744) at Luminarium
- Alexander Pope at Poets' Graves
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Original article is at Pope, Alexander
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