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Alexander
Pope |
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Alexander
Pope (1688-1744) was born to Catholic parents in May
1688. His father retired from business as linen draper in
1700, and settled at Binfield, in Windsor Forest, moving again
in 1716 to Chiswick on the Thames. Being Catholic,
the younger Pope was barred
from university education and public employment. He was taught
the elements of reading by an aunt, two Catholic schools,
and then by private tutors, but for the most part Pope was
self-educated. He never became a scholar, but knew the English
poets well, and studied French, Italian, Latin, and Greek.
After his father's death in 1717, Pope leased a house
and five acres of land at Twickenham,
where he lived with his mother
and then until his own death in 1744. When ten, Pope incurred
Pott's disease, a tuberculosis of the bones, and grew up a
4' 6" hunchback.
The illness, his incessant study and lack of formal education,
added to a hypersensitive nature, made Pope quick to take
offence, and slow to forget injury, imaginary or not. He wrote
steadily and to plan, through blinding headaches and physical
pain, but the translations
which made his name and secured him an independent income
also hardened
his character. He quarrelled with many writers and public
figures of his day, but he was greatly devoted to his mother
and maintained a close friendship with chosen friends: Arbuthnot,
Gay,
and Swift. |
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Pope's
poetry |
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Pope
was a precocious writer, producing a translation of the Thebaïs
of Statius in 1702, an epic entitled Alexander
(burned in 1717) and Pastorals
(1706, published 1709), where his smooth and melodious verse
attracted attention. There followed the works
by which Pope is still read: Essay
on Criticism (1711), Windsor Forest (1713)
the Rape
of the Lock (1712-4) and the poems Epistle
of Eloisa to Abelard and the Elegy
on an Unfortunate Lady (1717). His translation of
the Iliad
(six volumes, 1715–20) made his name, but the later Odyssey
(1725-26) was largely the work of collaborators. Pope then
turned on the hack writers of Grub Street with Bathos,
or the Art of Sinking in Poetry in Miscellanies
(1728-9, written in conjunction with Swift and Arbuthnot)
and the Dunciad (1728-9). Lewis Theobald was first
enthroned as the supreme dunce for (rightly)
criticising Pope's edition of Shakespeare, but a fourth book
in 1742 replaced him by Colley Cibber.
Pope concluded his career with Moral
Essays (1731–38, including the Essay
on Man) and a group of satires called Imitations
of Horace (1733–38, which has the well-known
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot). Pope was the most faultless
of English verse writers, a master of epigram, satire and
the mock epic. To the Romantic poets with their stress on
imagination and impassioned language Pope did not appeal —
though Byron admired him —
and nineteenth
century critics doubted
whether he was poet at all. In fact, like Milton,
whose style can also alienate readers, Pope was a far more
complex, sensitive and generous character than first appears.
The later work can indeed be acrid and unforgiving, but the
satire in the Rape of the Lock is shot through with
more understanding of women's foibles and needs than the Romantics
displayed (apart, again, from Byron), and Pope always had
the courage
of his convictions, writing strongly to the end. |
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Eighteenth
century styles |
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Pope
brought to perfection the heroic couplet of Dryden, and
set a standard from which later poets developed as needed:
Goldsmith,
Churchill,
Cowper
and George
Crabbe. Heroic couplets are end-stopped pentameters,
rhymed aa bb cc, have a marked caesura, and prominent stress
on the line end. As expected in an age of commerce and politeness,
Pope strove for metrical correctness, but his acute ear
and unremitting industry allowed for enormous variety within
this self-imposed ideal. The centrally-placed caesura created
subunits of expression, where the second subunit could support
or contrast with the first in various ways. Pope is often
denied originality of thought, but it may be fairer to call
his thought conventional but nuanced by metrical variety
and apt illustration — a very different tradition to
Romanticism and its present-day derivatives. The poetry
was also modelled on the classical authors, dealing with
matters of public or perennial concern — truth, friendship,
patriotism — which again can sound remote or inauthentic
now. Pope was not straightforward in his business dealings,
and made enemies too quickly, however, and the later satires
need an exact understanding of eighteenth century mores,
and knowledg of its personalities, to come alive. They may
be ungenerous, but are also more telling and deadly than
what could be published today. But in all periods, amongst
the biting scorn and epithet, are passages of great lyrical
beauty, written with an exactness of observation and tenderness
of heart that show that Pope was not venomous by nature
but driven to these extremes by the manifest
absurdity
and
cruelty
of the world
around him. He was part of that world, and met it head on,
not taking the Romantic routes into private musings or rural
fantasy. Pope is a poet of society, sometimes only the moralising
gossip writer, but often with a reach, indignation and expressive
power that make his work permanently worth reading.
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Eighteenth century background |
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It will help to see Pope in his
historical
setting:
the Enlightenment
in general,
and in England
the success and corruption of Walpole's
government, the Whig
and Tory
machinations that spilled over into street riots,
the influence of queen
and court
on parliament,
as of
women
generally,
and the lurking Jacobite
threat. Theatres fought for independence from censorship,
and changed in Pope's lifetime from licentious
comedies to the moralising
and sentimental. Much of this material is scholarly but
fascinating: for bibliographies see Morris,
Marsha
and Keller.
Individual works are also the focus of continuing scholarship.
For Essay on Criticism see: rpo,
de
bruyn, poem
hunter, burris,
encyclopedia.com
and vos.
For Rape of the Lock see: rpo,
ipl,
wet,
humbul,
homepage, journal
articles constantine
and gordon.
For The Dunciad see:
rpo, davis,
gordon,
lynch,
ritchie,
hubeart
and wikipedia.
Pope scholarship requires a detailed understanding of the
period, but among books for the general reader are E. Sitwell's
Alexander Pope (1948), R.K. Root's The Poetical
Career of Alexander Pope (1938), W. C. Brown's The
Triumph of Form: A Study of the Later Masters of the Heroic
Couplet (1948), J. Sutherland's A Preface to Eighteenth
Century Poetry (1948), and M.A. Doody's The Daring
Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (1985), and
many
others.
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