93-) English Literature

93-) English Literature

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope (born May 21, 1688, London, England—died May 30, 1744, Twickenham, near London) was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, Pope is best known for his satirical and discursive poetry including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism, and for his translations of Homer.

Alexander Pope, best known for his poems An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), The Dunciad (1728), and An Essay on Man (1733–34). He is one of the most epigrammatic of all English authors.

Pope is often quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, some of his verses having entered common parlance (e.g. "damning with faint praise" or "to err is human; to forgive, divine").

The acknowledged master of the heroic couplet and one of the primary tastemakers of the Augustan age, British writer Alexander Pope was a central figure in the Neoclassical movement of the early 18th century. He is known for having perfected the rhymed couplet form of his idol, John Dryden, and turned it to satiric and philosophical purposes. His mock epic The Rape of the Lock (1714) derides elite society, while An Essay on Criticism (1711) and An Essay on Man (1733–34) articulate many of the central tenets of 18th-century aesthetic and moral philosophy. Pope was noted for his involvement in public feuds with the writers and publishers of low-end Grub Street, which led him to write The Dunciad (1728), a scathing account of England’s cultural decline, and, at the end of his life, a series of related verse essays and Horatian satires that articulated and protested this decline.

Pope is also remembered as the first full-time professional English writer, having supported himself largely on subscription fees for his popular translations of Homer and his edition of the works of William Shakespeare. Although a major cultural figure of the 18th century, Pope fell out of favor in the Romantic era as the Neoclassical appetite for form was replaced by a vogue for sincerity and authenticity. Interest in his poetry was revived in the early 20th century. He is recognized as a great formal master, an eloquent expositor of the spirit of his age, and a representative of the culture and politics of the Enlightenment.

Life

Alexander Pope was born in London on 21 May 1688 during the year of the Glorious Revolution, to a wealthy Catholic linen merchant, Alexander Pope, and his second wife, Edith Turner. In the same year, the Protestant William of Orange took the English throne. Because Catholics were forbidden to hold office, practice their religion, attend public schools, or live within 10 miles of London, Pope grew up in nearby Windsor Forest and was mostly self-taught, his education supplemented by study with private tutors or priests. At the age of 12, he contracted spinal tuberculosis, which left him with permanent physical disabilities. He never grew taller than four and a half feet, was hunchbacked, and required daily care throughout adulthood. His irascible nature and unpopularity in the press are often attributed to three factors: his membership in a religious minority, his physical infirmity, and his exclusion from formal education. However, Pope was bright, precocious, and determined and, by his teens, was writing accomplished verse.

His father (Alexander Pope, 1646–1717) was a successful wholesale linen merchant in the Strand, London, retired from business in the year of his son’s birth and in 1700 went to live at Binfield in Windsor Forest.. His mother, Edith (née Turner, 1643–1733), was the daughter of William Turner, Esquire, of York. Both parents were Roman Catholics. His mother's sister, Christiana, was the wife of famous miniature painter Samuel Cooper.

The Popes were Catholics, and at Binfield they came to know several neighbouring Catholic families who were to play an important part in the poet’s life. Pope’s religion procured him some lifelong friends, notably the wealthy squire John Caryll (who persuaded him to write The Rape of the Lock, on an incident involving Caryll’s relatives) and Martha Blount, to whom Pope addressed some of the most memorable of his poems and to whom he bequeathed most of his property. But his religion also precluded him from a formal course of education, since Catholics were not admitted to the universities. He was trained at home by Catholic priests for a short time and attended Catholic schools at Twyford, near Winchester, and at Hyde Park Corner, London, but he was mainly self-educated. He was a precocious boy, eagerly reading Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, which he managed to teach himself, and an incessant scribbler, turning out verse upon verse in imitation of the poets he read. The best of these early writings are the “Ode on Solitude” and a paraphrase of St. Thomas à Kempis, both of which he claimed to have written at age 12.

Pope's education was affected by the recently enacted Test Acts, a series of English penal laws that upheld the status of the established Church of England, banning Catholics from teaching, attending a university, voting, and holding public office on penalty of perpetual imprisonment. Pope was taught to read by his aunt and attended Twyford School circa 1698. He also attended two Roman Catholic schools in London. Such schools, though still illegal, were tolerated in some areas.

In 1700, his family moved to a small estate at Popeswood, in Binfield, Berkshire, close to the royal Windsor Forest. This was due to strong anti-Catholic sentiment and a statute preventing "Papists" from living within 10 miles (16 km) of London or Westminster. Pope would later describe the countryside around the house in his poem Windsor Forest. Pope's formal education ended at this time, and from then on, he mostly educated himself by reading the works of classical writers such as the satirists Horace and Juvenal, the epic poets Homer and Virgil, as well as English authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and John Dryden. He studied many languages, reading works by French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets. After five years of study, Pope came into contact with figures from London literary society such as William Congreve, Samuel Garth and William Trumbull.

At Binfield he made many important friends. One of them, John Caryll (the future dedicatee of The Rape of the Lock), was twenty years older than the poet and had made many acquaintances in the London literary world. He introduced the young Pope to the ageing playwright William Wycherley and to William Walsh, a minor poet, who helped Pope revise his first major work, The Pastorals. There, he met the Blount sisters, Teresa and Martha (Patty), in 1707. He remained close friends with Patty until his death, but his friendship with Teresa ended in 1722.

From the age of 12 he suffered numerous health problems, including Pott disease, a form of tuberculosis that affects the spine, which deformed his body and stunted his growth, leaving him with a severe hunchback. His tuberculosis infection caused other health problems including respiratory difficulties, high fevers, inflamed eyes and abdominal pain. He grew to a height of only 4 feet 6 inches (1.37 metres). Pope was already removed from society as a Catholic, and his poor health alienated him further. Although he never married, he had many female friends to whom he wrote witty letters, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. It has been alleged that his lifelong friend Martha Blount was his lover. His friend William Cheselden said, according to Joseph Spence, "I could give a more particular account of Mr. Pope's health than perhaps any man. Cibber's slander (of carnosity) is false. He had been gay [happy], but left that way of life upon his acquaintance with Mrs. B."

In May 1709, Pope's Pastorals was published in the sixth part of bookseller Jacob Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies. This earned Pope instant fame and was followed by An Essay on Criticism, published in May 1711, which was equally well received.

Around 1711, Pope made friends with Tory writers Jonathan Swift, Thomas Parnell and John Arbuthnot, who together formed the satirical Scriblerus Club. Its aim was to satirise ignorance and pedantry through the fictional scholar Martinus Scriblerus. He also made friends with Whig writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. In March 1713, Windsor Forest[6] was published to great acclaim.

During Pope's friendship with Joseph Addison, he contributed to Addison's play Cato, as well as writing for The Guardian and The Spectator. Around this time, he began the work of translating the Iliad, which was a painstaking process – publication began in 1715 and did not end until 1720.

In 1714 the political situation worsened with the death of Queen Anne and the disputed succession between the Hanoverians and the Jacobites, leading to the Jacobite rising of 1715. Though Pope, as a Catholic, might have been expected to have supported the Jacobites because of his religious and political affiliations, according to Maynard Mack, "where Pope himself stood on these matters can probably never be confidently known". These events led to an immediate downturn in the fortunes of the Tories, and Pope's friend Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, fled to France. This was added to by the Impeachment of the former Tory Chief Minister Lord Oxford.

Pope lived in his parents' house in Mawson Row, Chiswick, between 1716 and 1719; the red-brick building is now the Mawson Arms, commemorating him with a blue plaque.

The money made from his translation of Homer allowed Pope to move in 1719 to a villa at Twickenham, where he created his now-famous grotto and gardens. The serendipitous discovery of a spring during the excavation of the subterranean retreat enabled it to be filled with the relaxing sound of trickling water, which would quietly echo around the chambers. Pope was said to have remarked, "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 the grotto survives beneath Radnor House Independent Co-educational School. The grotto has been restored and will open to the public for 30 weekends a year from 2023 under the auspices of Pope's Grotto Preservation Trust.

Life at Twickenham

Pope and his parents had moved from Binfield to Chiswick in 1716. There his father died (1717), and two years later he and his mother rented a villa on the Thames at Twickenham, then a small country town where several Londoners had retired to live in rustic seclusion. This was to be Pope’s home for the remainder of his life. There he entertained such friends as Swift, Bolingbroke, Oxford, and the painter Jonathan Richardson. These friends were all enthusiastic gardeners, and it was Pope’s pleasure to advise and superintend their landscaping according to the best contemporary principles, formulated in his “Epistle to the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Burlington” (1731). This poem, one of the most characteristic works of his maturity, is a rambling discussion in the manner of Horace on false taste in architecture and design, with some suggestions for the worthier employment of a nobleman’s wealth.

Pope now began to contemplate a new work on the relations of man, nature, and society that would be a grand organization of human experience and intuition, but he was destined never to complete it. An Essay on Man (1733–34) was intended as an introductory book discussing the overall design of this work. The poem has often been charged with shallowness and philosophical inconsistency, and there is indeed little that is original in its thought, almost all of which can be traced in the work of the great thinkers of Western civilization. Subordinate themes were treated in greater detail in “Of the Use of Riches, an Epistle to Bathurst” (1732), “An Epistle to Cobham, of the Knowledge and Characters of Men” (1733), and “Of the Characters of Women: An Epistle to a Lady” (1735).

Pope was deflected from this “system of ethics in the Horatian way” by the renewed need for self-defense. Critical attacks drove him to consider his position as satirist. He chose to adapt for his own defense the first satire of Horace’s second book, where the ethics of satire are propounded, and, after discussing the question in correspondence with Dr. John Arbuthnot, he addressed to him an epistle in verse (1735), one of the finest of his later poems, in which were incorporated fragments written over several years. His case in “An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” was a traditional one: that depravity in public morals had roused him to stigmatize outstanding offenders beyond the reach of the law, concealing the names of some and representing others as types, and that he was innocent of personal rancour and habitually forbearing under attack.

The success of his “First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated” (1733) led to the publication (1734–38) of 10 more of these paraphrases of Horatian themes adapted to the contemporary social and political scene. Pope’s poems followed Horace’s satires and epistles sufficiently closely for him to print the Latin on facing pages with the English, but whoever chose to make the comparison would notice a continuous enrichment of the original by parenthetic thrusts and compliments, as well as by the freshness of the imagery. The series was concluded with two dialogues in verse, republished as the “Epilogue to the Satires” (1738), where, as in “An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” Pope ingeniously combined a defense of his own career and character with a restatement of the satirist’s traditional apology. In these imitations and dialogues, Pope directed his attack upon the materialistic standards of the commercially minded Whigs in power and upon the corrupting effect of money, while restating and illustrating the old Horatian standards of serene and temperate living. His anxiety about prevailing standards was shown once more in his last completed work, The New Dunciad (1742), reprinted as the fourth book of a revised Dunciad (1743), in which Theobald was replaced as hero by Colley Cibber, the poet laureate and actor-manager, who not only had given more recent cause of offense but seemed a more appropriate representative of the degenerate standards of the age. In Dunciad, Book IV, the Philistine culture of the city of London was seen to overtake the court and seat of government at Westminster, and the poem ends in a magnificent but baleful prophecy of anarchy. Pope had begun work on Brutus, an epic poem in blank verse, and on a revision of his poems for a new edition, but neither was complete at his death.

Early works

Windsor Forest was near enough to London to permit Pope’s frequent visits there. He early grew acquainted with former members of John Dryden’s circle, notably William Wycherley, William Walsh, and Henry Cromwell. By 1705 his “Pastorals” were in draft and were circulating among the best literary judges of the day. In 1706 Jacob Tonson, the leading publisher of poetry, had solicited their publication, and they took the place of honour in his Poetical Miscellanies in 1709.

This early emergence of a man of letters may have been assisted by Pope’s poor physique. As a result of too much study, so he thought, he acquired a curvature of the spine and some tubercular infection, probably Pott’s disease, that limited his growth and seriously impaired his health. His full-grown height was 4 feet 6 inches (1.4 metres), but the grace of his profile and fullness of his eye gave him an attractive appearance. He was a lifelong sufferer from headaches, and his deformity made him abnormally sensitive to physical and mental pain. Though he was able to ride a horse and delighted in travel, he was inevitably precluded from much normal physical activity, and his energetic, fastidious mind was largely directed to reading and writing.

When the “Pastorals” were published, Pope was already at work on a poem on the art of writing. This was An Essay on Criticism, published in 1711. Its brilliantly polished epigrams (e.g., “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” “To err is human, to forgive, divine,” and “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread”), which have become part of the proverbial heritage of the language, are readily traced to their sources in Horace, Quintilian, Boileau, and other critics, ancient and modern, in verse and prose; but the charge that the poem is derivative, so often made in the past, takes insufficient account of Pope’s success in harmonizing a century of conflict in critical thinking and in showing how nature may best be mirrored in art.

The well-deserved success of An Essay on Criticism brought Pope a wider circle of friends, notably Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, who were then collaborating on The Spectator. To this journal Pope contributed the most original of his pastorals, “The Messiah” (1712), and perhaps other papers in prose. He was clearly influenced by The Spectator’s policy of correcting public morals by witty admonishment, and in this vein he wrote the first version of his mock epic, The Rape of the Lock (two cantos, 1712; five cantos, 1714), to reconcile two Catholic families. A young man in one family had stolen a lock of hair from a young lady in the other. Pope treated the dispute that followed as though it were comparable to the mighty quarrel between Greeks and Trojans, which had been Homer’s theme. Telling the story with all the pomp and circumstance of epic made not only the participants in the quarrel but also the society in which they lived seem ridiculous. Though it was a society where

Britain’s statesmen oft the fall foredoom

Of foreign tyrants, and of nymphs at home;

As if one occupation concerned them as much as the other, and though in such a society a young lady might do equally ill to

…Stain her honour , or her new brocade;

Forget her pray’rs, or miss a masquerade;

Pope managed also to suggest what genuine attractions existed amid the foppery. It is a glittering poem about a glittering world. He acknowledged how false the sense of values was that paid so much attention to external appearance, but ridicule and rebuke slide imperceptibly into admiration and tender affection as the heroine, Belinda, is conveyed along the Thames to Hampton Court, the scene of the “rape”:

But now secure the painted vessel glides,

The sunbeams trembling on the floating tides:

While melting music steals upon the sky,

And soften’d sounds along the waters die;

Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play,

Belinda smil’d , and all the world was gay.

A comparable blend of seemingly incompatible responses—love and hate, bawdiness and decorum, admiration and ridicule—is to be found in all Pope’s later satires. The poem is thick with witty allusions to classical verse and, notably, to Milton’s Paradise Lost. The art of allusion is an element of much of Pope’s poetry.

Pope had also been at work for several years on “Windsor-Forest.” In this poem, completed and published in 1713, he proceeded, as Virgil had done, from the pastoral vein to the georgic and celebrated the rule of Queen Anne as the Latin poet had celebrated the rule of Augustus. In another early poem ,“Eloisa to Abelard,” Pope borrowed the form of Ovid’s “heroic epistle” (in which an abandoned lady addresses her lover) and showed imaginative skill in conveying the struggle between sexual passion and dedication to a life of celibacy.

Literary Career

His rise to fame was swift. Publisher Jacob Tonson included Pope’s Pastorals, a quartet of early poems in the Virgilian style, in his Poetical Miscellanies (1709), and Pope published his first major work, An Essay on Criticism, at the age of 23. He soon became friends with Whig writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, editors of the Spectator, who published his essays and poems, and the appearance of The Rape of the Lock made him famous in wider circles.

An Essay on Criticism is a virtuosic exposition of literary theory, poetic practice, and moral philosophy. Bringing together themes and ideas from the history of philosophy, the three parts of the poem illustrate a golden age of culture, describe the fall of that age, and propose a platform to restore it through literary ethics and personal virtues. The work showcases Pope’s mastery of the heroic couplet, in which he was capable of making longer arguments in verse as well as of producing such memorable phrases as “The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense” and “To Err is humane; to Forgive, Divine.” The mock epic The Rape of the Lock made Pope known to a general audience. Based on an actual incident in 1711, when Robert Lord Petre (“The Baron”) publicly cut a lock of hair from the head of Arabella Fermor (“Belinda”), and said to have been written at the request of a friend to encourage a rapprochement between the families, the poem nimbly depicts the foibles of high society. At once light-hearted and serious, addressing both the flimsiness of social status and the repercussions of public behavior, the poem is an in-depth study of contemporary social mores and the reasons for their existence. The Rape of the Lock was followed by “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717), which lyrically explored the 12th-century story of the passionate love of Heloïse d’Argenteuil and her teacher, the philosopher Peter Abelard.

In the mid-1720s, Pope became associated with a group of Tory literati called the Scriblerus Club, which included John Gay, Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot, and Thomas Parnell. The club encouraged Pope to release a new translation of Homer’s Iliad (circa 8th century BCE) via subscription, a publication method whereby members of the public gave money in advance of a text’s appearance with the agreement that they would receive handsome, inscribed editions of the completed volumes. The Iliad was a tremendously popular publishing venture, and it made Pope self-supporting. He followed with subscription editions of the Odyssey (circa 8th to 7th centuries BCE) and of Shakespeare’s works. After these successes, Pope could afford a lavish lifestyle and moved to a grand villa at Twickenham. The estate’s grounds included miniature sculptured gardens and a famous grotto, an underground passageway decorated with mirrors that connected the property to the London Road. Here, Pope feted friends and acquaintances, cultivated his love for gardening, and wrote increasingly caustic essays and poems. Frequently maligned in the press, he responded publicly with The Dunciad (1728), an attack on the Shakespearean editor Lewis Theobald; The Dunciad, Variorum (1729), which appends a series of mock footnotes vilifying other London publishers and booksellers; and another edition of The Dunciad that articulates the writer’s concern over the decline of English society. Using the term “duncery” to refer to all that was tasteless, dull, and degraded in culture and literature, Pope mocked certain contemporary literary figures while making a larger point about the decline of art and culture. In the 1730s, Pope published two works on the same theme: An Essay on Man and a series of “imitated” satires and epistles of Horace (1733-38). After the final edition of The Dunciad was released in 1742, Pope began to revise and assemble his poetry for a collected edition. Before he could complete the work, he died of dropsy (edema) and acute asthma on May 30, 1744.

An Essay on Man is didactic and wide-reaching and was meant to be part of a larger work of moral philosophy that Pope never finished. Its four sections, or “epistles,” present an aesthetic and philosophical argument for the existence of order in the world, contending that we know the world to be unified because God created it. Thus, it is only our inferior vision that perceives disunity, and it is each man’s duty to strive for the good and the orderly.

Pope’s literary merit was debated throughout his life, and successive generations have continually reassessed the value of his works. Pope’s satires and poetry of manners did not fit the Romantic and Victorian visions of poetry as a product of sincerity and emotion. He came to be seen as a philosopher and rhetorician rather than a poet, a view that persisted through the 19th and early 20th centuries. The rise of modernism, however, revived interest in pre-Romantic poetry, and Pope’s use of poetic form and irony made him of particular interest to the New Critics. In the latter half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, Pope remained central to the study of what scholars deem the long 18th century, a period loosely defined as beginning with publication of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and extending through the first generation of the Romantics in the 1820s.

Modern scholars have evaluated Pope as a major literary voice engaged with both high and low cultural scenes, a key figure in the sphere of letters, and an articulate witness to the rise of the commercial printing age and the development of modem English national identity. Howard D. Weinbrot (1980) read Pope’s late satires in the context of 18th-century neoclassicism, arguing that he did not simply imitate Horace but worked with elements from Juvenal and Persius as well. Pope, Weinbrot asserted, had a far wider satiric range than modem readers assume: he was “more eclectic, hostile, and both sublime and vulgar.” John Sitter (2007) concentrated on the range of voices employed by Pope in his poetry, offering an alternative to prevailing views on rhyme and the couplet form. Sophie Gee (2014) argued that The Rape of the Lock is important because of its emphasis on character and identity, a focus that she identified as novelistic, while Donna Landry (1995) placed Pope in the context of the critical history of landscape poetry, maintaining that he was a central figure in the 18th-century invention of the concept of the “countryside.” The transformation of the physical country into the aesthetic object of the countryside, Landry explained, is enacted through Pope’s ideology of stewardship and control, which imagines a landscape halfway between the country and the city that Landry called an early version of suburbia.

Other recent criticism has interpreted Pope’s work in the contexts of gender and authorial identity. Claudia N. Thomas (1994) analyzed female readings of and commentary on Pope’s writings as a way of documenting the experience of women in the 18th century, while J. Paul Hunter (2008) showed that Pope’s later career choices emphasized his honesty and integrity and the connection between those characteristics and masculinity. Catherine Ingrassia (2000) argued that Pope’s literary attacks allowed him to respond to criticism and keep his name before the public. In their study of Pope’s self-representation as an artist, Paul Baines and Pat Rogers (2008) characterized Pope’s poisoning of Edmund Curll—he placed an emetic in the bookseller’s drink—as the poet’s “first Horatian imitation,” situating the event within a history of literary revenge.