Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope (May 22, 1688 – May 30, 1744) is considered one of the greatest English poets of the eighteenth century. Along with Dryden, Pope exemplified the classicism—the dogged adherence to forms and traditions laid out in the classical texts of ancient Greece and Rome—that was characteristic of his age. In this respect, Pope, like many other English poets of the eighteenth century, may strike the modern reader as antiquated in his sentiments and uninventive in his vision. Certainly Pope's classicism, which dominated the century in which he lived, was viewed distastefully by the Romantic poets who were to succeed him in the century following his death. The reasons some say Pope is difficult to read are that his allusions are dense and his language, at times, is almost too strictly measured. However, his skill with rhyme and the technical aspects of poetry makes him one of the most accomplished poets of the English language.
Pope wrote primarily as a satirist and this, too, has contributed to his reputation. His poetry was written generally to either spoof the mores of society as in The Rape of the Lock or to satirize and mock his literary rivals as in The Dunciad and much of his published shorter poems. There is very little seriousness in Pope and this led many of his immediate successors to regard him as little more than a sort of court jester—full of wit, but lacking wisdom. This criticism cannot entirely by allayed, although Pope, at the end of his life, turned towards the composition of a tragic and deeply serious epic (Brutus), modeled on Shakespeare and Milton, but which, unfortunately, he never completed.
It is important to recall the Zeitgeist (“the spirit of the times”) in which Pope lived and the circumstances under which he published. The English public of the eighteenth century had just come through the English Civil War, executed a king (the first in European history), only to turn against the revolution and reinstate the monarchy. In view of this political history, they were a people who had had quite enough gloominess for one generation. The mood of eighteenth century literature is predominantly comic in the sense expressed by Northrop Frye. It has endured the worst of times, and Pope was a member of those times. He suffered trials of his own for being a Catholic among Anglicans, and an independent writer living in a time when writing was not considered viable as a self-sustaining career. Whether despite or because of these difficulties, Pope is considered by many to be one of the greatest poets of the eighteenth century.
Life
Born in London to a Roman Catholic family in 1688, Pope was educated mostly at home, in part due to laws in force at the time protecting the status of the established Church of England which disallowed Catholics from studying at universities. From early childhood, young Pope suffered numerous health problems, including Pott's disease (a form of tuberculosis affecting the spine), which deformed his body and stunted his growth—no doubt helping to end his life at the relatively young age of 56 in 1744. His height never eclipsed 1.37 meters (4 feet 6 inches).
Although he began writing poetry at the age of 12 when his family moved to a small estate at Binfield in Berkshire, An Essay on Criticism, which was published in 1711 (when Pope was 23), is generally considered to be his first major contribution to the literary world. This was followed by The Rape of the Lock (1712, revised 1714), his most popular poem; Eloisa to Abelard and Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (1717). He published several shorter works, including the epistles to Martha Blount.
Pope found an ally and friend in Jonathan Swift. In about 1713, he formed the Scriblerus Club with Swift and other friends including John Gay, and together the group would publish a variety of serials and other works jointly, eventually becoming the most formidable group of writers in the eighteenth century. From 1715 to 1720, Pope worked on a translation of Homer's Iliad. Encouraged by the very favorable reception of this translation, Pope translated the Odyssey during 1725 and 1726 with William Broome and Elijah Fenton. The commercial success of his translations made Pope the first English poet who could live off the income from the sales of his work alone, "indebted to no prince or peer alive," as he put it.
During this period Pope also completed an edition of Shakespeare, which silently "regularized" the original meter and rewrote Shakespeare’s verse in several places. Lewis Theobald and other scholars attacked Pope's edition, incurring Pope's wrath and inspiring the first version of his satire The Dunciad (1728), a poem which coined the term "dunce" and which would be the first of the moral and satiric poems of his last period of works. His other major poems of this period were Moral Essays (1731–1735), Imitations of Horace (1733–1738), the Epistle to Arbuthnot (1735), the Essay on Man (1734), and an expanded edition of the Dunciad (1742), in which Colley Cibber took Theobald's place as the 'hero.'
Poetry
Pope directly addressed the major religious, political and intellectual problems of his time. He developed the heroic couplet beyond the achievement of any previous poet, and major poets after him used it less than those before, as he had decreased its usefulness for them.
Pope also wrote the famous epitaph for Sir Isaac Newton:
"Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said 'Let Newton be' and all was light."
to which Sir John Collings Squire later added the couplet
"It did not last: the devil, shouting 'Ho.
Let Einstein be' restored the status quo."
Pope's works were once considered part of the mental furniture of the well-educated person. One edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations includes no less than 212 quotations from Pope. Some, familiar even to those who may not know their source, are three from the Essay on Criticism: "A little learning is a dang'rous thing"; "To err is human, to forgive, divine"; "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread"; and "The proper study of mankind is man" (from Essay on Man).
Pope's reputation declined precipitously in the nineteenth century, but has recovered substantially since then. Some poems, such as The Rape of the Lock, the moral essays, the imitations of Horace, and several epistles, are regarded as highly now as they have ever been. Others, such as the Essay on Man, have not endured very well, and the merits of two of the most important works, the Dunciad and the translation of the Iliad, are still disputed. The nineteenth century critics considered his diction artificial, his versification too regular, and his satires insufficiently humane. Various twentieth century critics including William Empson have disputed the third charge, and the first does not apply at all to his best work. That Pope was constrained by the demands of "acceptable" diction and prosody is undeniable, but Pope's example shows that great poetry could be written within these constraints.
A quote from Pope's Eloisa to Abelard (lines 206-210) was used in the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:
"How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r fulfilled, and each wish resign'd...".
The Rape of the Lock
Pope's most popular and influential poem, The Rape of the Lock, is a mock epic. That is, it describes the events of a mundane and ordinary courtship in a tone reminiscent of the heroic epics of Homer and Virgil—thus producing high comedy.
The poem was written for an incident involving friends of Pope. Arabella Fermor and her suitor, Lord Petre, were both from aristocratic Catholic families during a period when Catholicism was legally proscribed. Petre, lusting for Arabella, had cut off a lock of her hair without permission, and the consequent argument had created a breach between the two families. Pope wrote the poem at the request of friends in an attempt to "comically merge the two." Pope utilizes the character Belinda to represent Arabella and introduces an entire system of "sylphs," or guardian spirits of virgins, a parodic version of the gods and goddesses of conventional epic. Pope satirizes a petty squabble by comparing it to the epic world of the gods.
Pope could be criticizing the over-reaction of contemporary society to trivial things.
- What dire offence from am'rous causes springs,
- What mighty contests rise from trivial things
- — Canto I
But while describing the flamboyance of contemporary society in epic terms does ironically juxtapose the extreme triviality of this state of affairs with the seemingly more grave circumstances of the epic heroes, it is also possible that Pope was making an implicit comparison between the relative difficulty for a woman to succeed in life by marrying well in the society of his time and the more traditionally heroic deeds performed in the classic epics.
The humor of the poem comes from the juxtaposition of the apparent triviality of the subject matter with the elaborate, formal verbal structure of an epic poem. When the Baron, for example, goes to snip the lock of hair, Pope writes,
- The Peer now spreads the glittering Forfex wide,
- T' inclose the Lock; now joins it, to divide.
- Ev'n then, before the fatal Engine clos'd,
- A wretched Sylph too fondly interpos'd;
- Fate urged the Sheers, and cut the Sylph in twain,
- (But Airy Substance soon unites again)
- The meeting Points the sacred Hair dissever
- From the fair Head, for ever and for ever!
- — Canto III
Works
- (1709) Pastorals
- (1711) An Essay on Criticism
- (1712) The Rape of the Lock
- (1713) Windsor Forest
- (1717) Eloisa to Abelard
- (1717) Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady
- (1728) The Dunciad
- (1734) Essay on Man
- (1735) The Prologue to the Satires (see the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot and Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?)
External links
- University of Toronto "Representative Poetry Online" page on Pope
- Various biographies [1], [2], [3], [4]
- A copy of "An Essay on Criticism", [5]
- Project Gutenberg e-text of An Essay On Man
- The Twickenham Museum - Alexander Pope
- Alexander Pope in Twickenham
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