Alexander Pope

Paul Baines

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415202459
• eBook ISBN: 9781134632626
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

So many questions surround the key figures in the English literary canon, but most books focus on one aspect of an author's life or work, or limit themselves to a single critical approach. Alexander Pope is a comprehensive, user-friendly guide which:
* offers information on Pope's life, contexts and works
* outline the major critical issues surrounding his works, from the time they were written to the present
*explains the full range of different critical views and interpretations
* offers guides to further reading in each area discussed.

PART I: LIFE AND CONTEXTS

(a) A CATHOLIC CHILDHOOD

Because Pope was not primarily a lyric poet like Donne, or an explorer of private mental experience like Wordsworth, we tend to think of him as essentially a public voice, the satirist of civil follies rather than the analyst of personal emotions. Many of the vices Pope attacked are forms of egotism: avarice, power-seeking, narcissism. The lack of a real or implied partner to address poems to also suggests a reticence about private life which disappoints a voyeuristic age. Nonetheless personal character remained for Pope a fundamental element of poetic voice. Satire has to have a position from which to criticise the world; and since Pope could not acquire the kind of state position which validated the work of his closest model, John Dryden (1631–1700), he developed a position of moral authority derived from his own status as a private, right-thinking citizen, living in principled independence of state patronage, willing to implicate the personal experience on which his voice as a social critic was based. While one could read through the complete poems of Dryden without learning much about his life, Pope insistently manages a particular kind of self-involvement even in his most public, apocalyptic works. Much criticism of him – plenty of it more venomous and scurrilous than anything he produced himself in criticizing others – was based on his own life, character, and body. A competent artist, he controlled the dissemination of portraits and other images of himself, and bestowed extraordinary care on the presentation and publication of his work, mastering book trade processes as no writer had ever done before to produce a meticulous version of his ‘corpus’ in print [189–99]. In these ways, he seems a very modern figure. This first section will give an account of the main features of what we know of Pope’s biography, and of how he turned his personal experience into public poetry.

Pope had, and has continued to have, several biographers. During his lifetime he befriended Joseph Spence, a minor poet and critic who compiled a large body of ‘anecdotes’ from Pope’s conversation, indicating his views on various critical matters but also recording such facts as Pope could remember, or wished to be remembered, about his own life. ‘Mr. Pope was born on the twenty-first of May, 1688’, Spence ascertained (Spence 1966: 3); the time was 6: 45 p.m. and the place is thought to have been no. 2 Plough Court, just off Lombard Street, London, in what was fast becoming the financial centre of England. His father (also Alexander, 1646–1717) ‘was an honest merchant and dealt in Hollands wholesale’ (Spence 1966: 7): that is, he dealt in linens, exporting them as far afield as Virginia. The poet’s mother, Edith (née Turner, d.1733), was just short of forty-five when he was born; the poet was her only child, though there was a surviving half-sister, Magdalen, from his father’s earlier marriage (a half-brother, Alexander again, had died in infancy).

Though Pope’s father was the son of an Anglican vicar, he converted to Catholicism, perhaps during European travels; his mother was from a family which divided along Catholic and Protestant lines. Catholicism caused the family many problems. Though the Civil War itself ended with the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the issues which had caused it continued to divide the nation for another century. Rumours of a Catholic plot to assassinate Charles in 1679 (the ‘Popish Plot’) had been used to foment some bitter anti-Catholic sentiment during the first half of the 1680s, and the accession of the Catholic James II in 1685 brought the threat of a renewed Civil War much closer. Three weeks after Pope’s birth, James II’s wife gave birth to a son, providing a Catholic heir to the kingdom. Shortly afterwards James was forced to abandon the throne in favour of his daughter Mary and her Protestant husband William of Orange, a ‘Glorious Revolution’ as it was known to its supporters, which paved the way for the Protestant succession, though a number of attempts to restore the Catholic line would be made, the last and most serious occurring a year after Pope’s death.

In London especially, heavily punitive measures against Catholics were enforced immediately on the arrival of William and Mary. Pope’s father had amassed about £10,000 from his business, a fortune large enough to enable him to retire from business in the face of this on-slaught, thus greatly diminishing the effects of the legislation on Pope’s boyhood: Pope’s family vacated Plough Court for Hammersmith some time around 1692, and the main danger to his early life seems to have come from a wild cow which attacked him while he was, rather picturesquely, ‘filling a little cart with stones’ (Spence 1966: 3). He retained great affection for the women of his close and protective household: his nurse, Mary Beach, his aunt Elizabeth Turner, and especially his mother, who lived with him until her death in 1733. A priest who knew him told Spence that Pope ‘was a child of a particularly sweet temper and had a great deal of sweetness in his look when he was a boy’ (Spence 1966: 5–6). Johnson reports that ‘His voice, when he was young, was so pleasing that he was called in fondness the “little Nightingale”’ (Johnson 1905: 83).

As a Catholic Pope could not attend mainstream schools and could not attend university. He was taught to read by his aunt, and had developed a very precise calligraphy by imitating the typography of printed books, a talent which he often used in designing his books in later life (Spence 1966: 12). At the age of about eight Pope began to learn Latin and Greek from a priest. He subsequently attended clandestine Catholic schools, one in Twyford, from where he was removed after being punished for writing a satire on his master (his earliest satiric venture), and one near Hyde Park Corner, from which he is supposed to have on occasion visited the theatre; he also saw his hero, John Dryden, once (Spence 1966: 25). Pope was dismissive of his formal schooling: ‘God knows, it extended a very little way’ (Spence 1966: 8). Indeed, he seems to have valued his independent exploration of literature as a positive escape from the prison-house of grammar-based education, a formal trap which he would later denounce more publicly (Spence 1966: 21–2). At the age of eight he had ‘discovered’ Homer through translation (much as Keats was to do more than a century later): John Ogilby’s Iliad (1660) and Odyssey (1665) were huge volumes ‘Adorn’d with Sculptures’ (engravings), and Pope always ‘spoke of the pleasure it then gave him, with a sort of rapture only on reflecting on it’ (Spence 1966: 14). With George Sandys’s illustrated Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished (1626), and Statius’s Thebaid, the Homer texts formed a rich repository of Greek and Latin mythology and narrative which stimulated Pope’s imagination through his early career and beyond.

(b) FOREST RETREATS

In 1698 Pope’s father bought a house at Binfield, Berkshire, from his son in law, Charles Rackett, who had married Pope’s half-sister Magdalen. This residence on an estate of some nineteen acres of land, close to Windsor with the forest, castle and river Thames to explore, had a determining influence on Pope, turning enforced removal from the capital into the very model of principled retreat, an idyll never entirely besmirched by later events. Though Pope’s early works such as the Pastorals (1709) and Windsor-Forest (1713) derive much from literary models, they derive something from an acute observation of the heraldic colouring within the castle and the exercise of agriculture and rural sports in the forest.

Here Pope was free to educate himself: his father’s library was well-stocked, and he began to purchase books on his own account, acquiring early editions of Chaucer, Herbert and Milton. His half-sister told Spence that he ‘did nothing but write and read’, and his own image of himself spending whole days reading under trees, nicely suggests the twin influences of reading and nature: ‘I followed everywhere as my fancy led me, and was like a boy gathering flowers in the woods and fields just as they fall in his way’ (Spence 1966: 12, 13, 20). Having already developed a taste for English poets such as Waller, Spenser and Dryden, courtly and fantastic by turns, he described his years from the age of thirteen to twenty as ‘all poetical’, a voracious if sporadic ‘ramble’ through Greek, Latin, Italian and French poetry and criticism (Spence 1966: 19–20). At some point around 1703–04 he studied French and Italian in London, against the wishes of his family, concerned for his already insecure health (Spence 1966: 12–13).

The prelapsarian freedom which Pope remembered so fondly began to be eroded by two potent forces: illness, and a growing political sense [163–71]. About the time of the move to Binfield, Pope had the first major attack of the disease which was eventually to cripple him. Thought to be spinal tuberculosis, contracted through infected milk, ‘Pott’s disease’ restricted his height to about four foot six, caused progressive curvature of the spine, and left him subject to severe headaches, fits, eye inflammations and respiratory problems. Though he surmounted these difficulties with exercise and fresh air, and experimented with various comic versions of his illness in private letters and in public poems, his sense of himself was deeply affected by his physical appearance. At the same time, the family’s Catholicism (low-key and quietistic as it was) became a second marker of internal exile. His father’s library contained much literature from the religious controversies of the seventeenth century, which Pope read, finding himself ‘a Papist and a Protestant by turns, according to the last book I read’ (Letters I: 453). The humanistic tolerance, self-knowledge and irony of Erasmus and Montaigne, both Catholics but men of principled independence of thought, offered an attractive route out of the morass of sectarian debate.

Pope’s adolescence was also nurtured by a number of much older men with whom Pope became friendly and whom he impressed with his precocious reading and ‘maddish way’ (Spence 1966: 13). John Caryll, a local Catholic who was to play an important role in the genesis of The Rape of the Lock [65–77], had a wide circle of literary acquaintance and it was probably he who introduced Pope to the most brilliant actor of the Restoration stage, Thomas Betterton (1635–1710), as well as that stage’s most uncompromising dramatist, William Wycherley (1640–1716). Pope resisted the blandishments of both to write for the stage, but assisted both men in ‘correcting’ their verses, a troublesome task but one which testifies to the closeness of the literary friendships and Pope’s rapid rise to esteem. His earliest surviving correspondence is with Wycherley, in whose company he roamed London (he was mocked as ‘Wycherley’s Crutch’ by unsympathetic observers: Spence 1966: 35). Pope also knew Dr Samuel Garth (1661–1719), patron of Dryden, physician, and wit, whose mock-heroic The Dispensary (1699) is one of the best models for comparison with Pope’s own work in the genre, and Sir William Trumbull, a diplomat who had served with distinction under kings of violently different persuasions and who was now one of the twelve verderers of Windsor Forest. Benign, well-read and generous, Trumbull was an active nurturing force in Pope’s development; they rode in the forest and talked literature ‘almost every day’ (Spence 1966: 31). William Walsh (1663–1708), similarly, showed Pope that it was possible to maintain a well-bred moderation in literature and politics, acting as a Whig M.P. under both William III and Anne, and being hailed by the Tory Dryden as the best critic of the age (Spence 1966: 32).

It was this circle of men to whom Pope submitted his early publishable literary efforts, for ‘correction’; there is considerable surviving evidence of the close practical and technical attention Walsh in particular exercised over the Pastorals, the Essay on Criticism and Sapho to Phaon. Walsh had told Pope: ‘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 1966: 32). Pope’s one criticism of his master Dryden was that he wrote too quickly (Spence 1966: 24). Not that Pope spurned spontaneity: he claimed ‘I began writing verses of my own invention farther back than I can remember’. But he had always been used to revising; his father set him verse exercises and was ‘pretty difficult in being pleased and used often to send him back to new turn them’ (Spence 1966: 7, 15). While still at school Pope wrote a play based on speeches from the Iliad for his schoolfellows to act, and completed another based on ‘a very moving story in the legend of St Genevieve’, as well as an epic poem, Alcander, in which, he smilingly recalled, he attempted ‘to collect all the beauties of the great epic writers into one piece’. This four-book epic he later burned, ‘not without some regret’; some lines were salvaged for other work (Spence 1966: 15–18).

Pope practised the craft of writing by imitating that which pleased him most in his reading. His earliest surviving poem is a verse paraphrase of a prayer from the Christian mystic Thomas a Kempis, not published in his lifetime and a rare indication of his religious background. Most of his early translations are from pre-Christian writers, notably Ovid, from whose Metamorphoses he produced some tales of monstrous or misdirected sexual activities when he was about fourteen (the most interesting of these, the story of the cyclops Polyphemus’s love for Galatea, remained unpublished in his lifetime). It was also from Ovid that he translated, about 1707, Sapho to Phaon [172, 194], an intriguingly expressive poem in which the Lesbian poetess Sappho, abandoned by the youth Phaon with whom she has fallen in love, laments her confused sexual longings and reviews her languishing life as a poet. His version of Statius’ Thebaid, book I, was written about 1703 (published 1712), and gave him confidence in the use of heroic couplets in ‘high’ style; the story itself, which deals with the internecine wars of succession after the resignation of the incestuous parricide Oedipus from the throne of Thebes, is a monstrous and gory exploration of politics, sex and death: there is nothing tame about Pope’s interest in classical mythology. Pope also began translating sections of Homer, probably about 1707.

He also practised a form of ‘imitation’ or stylistic mimicking; around 1701 he was impersonating the polished amatory verses of Waller, the metaphysical conceits of Cowley, and the anti-feminist lyrics of the Earl of Dorset in particular. A short pastiche of Chaucer allowed him to tell a bawdy joke; ‘The Alley’, an imitation of Spenser, took the stanza form of The Faerie Queene and applied it mockingly to the filthy pathways of contemporary London. ‘On Silence’, a substantial imitation of Rochester’s ‘Upon Nothing’, points forward to the sceptical social satire of his mature work. This work was all complete before 1709, but Pope later edited some of it as evidence of his poetic development, or simply as makeweights in anthologies.

(c) LITERARY LONDON

Pope was twenty when his first poems were published, in May 1709, significantly enough adjacent to the first full ‘Copyright Act’ which defined authorial property in ways which were to allow Pope to make more money from writing than any poet before him. The Pastorals appeared in Poetical Miscellanies, The Sixth Part, an anthology published by Jacob Tonson the elder, the most eminent publisher of the day: he had acquired the rights to Milton, Shakespeare, and Dryden, and ran a Whig club of authors known as the Kit-Cat Club. Pope contributed three works to the anthology (which also included work by Swift, later to become one of Pope’s closest friends). Two of these emerged from Pope’s self-imposed apprenticeship in translating and imitating: January and May was a rewriting in modern idiom of Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, written about 1704 and giving Pope the opportunity to be elegant and witty about sex and marriage; The Episode of Sarpedon was a translation from Homer’s Iliad. The Chaucer imitation was to some degree also an imitation of Dryden, whose Fables (1700) had established the utility of ‘polishing’ the medieval poet into smoother and more moralistic form (though the story itself remains ribald enough, and Pope was later to add a version of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, also written about 1704, to his oeuvre). In the Episode of Sarpedon, comprising passages from Iliad XII and XVI, Pope explored a high heroic language in speeches of glory and death; again, the imitation is double, for one of the passages had been previously translated by John Denham, another of Pope’s models. The two pieces are therefore both homage to earlier great poets, and the beginnings of a contest with them.

In the Pastorals, Pope announced his intention to challenge for such fame, since pastoral was the genre on which the epic poet cut his teeth (the examples of Virgil, Spenser and Milton were particularly in Pope’s mind). ‘First in these Fields I try the Sylvan Strains’, the series opens, asserting originality and naturalism in the midst of imitation and the most ‘artificial’ literary genre around. Flaunting his allegiance to well-known pastorals such as Virgil’s Eclogues and Theocritus’s Idylls, Pope splices the allegorical and mythological song into English settings. Excising the comic rusticity which pervaded earlier English pastoral, Pope claims for England successorship to the enchanted ground of classical literature. Pope’s virtuoso displays indeed are some of the last exercises in the genre, which had been hugely popular in the Renaissance but was beginning to run out of variations. In these painterly landscapes, shepherds pursue nymphs, vie with each other in poetical or musical skill, and invoke the aid of deities, with little or no attention to the actual business of rearing sheep.

Pope had been anticipating publication of Poetical Miscellanies for a few years and in his correspondence with Wycherley struck poses of aristocratic indifference to the squalid world of literary fame and of comic reluctance to appear in print. In London he made the acquaintance of Henry Cromwell, an idle dandy with a poetical turn with whom Pope exchanged some correspondence of flamboyant maleness: Pope felt able to play at being a rake-about-town, perhaps in compensation for his sense of being denied sexual enjoyment by his physical limitations. Never to be Alexander the Great in any heroic sense, he knew he was ‘that little Alexander the women laugh at’ (Letters I: 114). In 1707 he had met Martha and Teresa Blount, granddaughters of Anthony Englefield, one of Pope’s Catholic neighbours; from 1711 the intimacy became more conspicuous. A few elegantly bawdy poems survive from this period, suggesting that the poet who had imitated the Cavalier mode of Waller, Denham and Cowley, was still exploring the erotic potential of verse. More seriously, Pope showed Cromwell, a solid Latinist in spite of his rakish pose, versions of Statius and Ovid for his revision. Pope kept busts of authors such as Dryden, Milton and Shakespeare in his chamber as perpetual reminders of literary greatness (Letters I: 120); he was also working on a poem called The Temple of Fame, based on a somewhat more austere poem of Chaucer’s than those to which Pope had hitherto given attention, The Hous of Fame. Here Pope once again produced homage and challenge to the literature of the past, attempting to envision in what was becoming a favourite form of artistic expression, neoclassical architecture, some secure means of recording greatness for posterity.

Pope had been working on An Essay on Criticism [49–57] since about 1707, and it had passed through his usual revisers. It was published on 15 May 1711, the first of his works to appear independently. Full of quotation, allusion and example, it offers a mediation between extreme critical positions and points towards an accessible community of judgement. Homer is celebrated as the pre-critical fount of Western literature, with Virgil as a sort of post-critical example of how one might recapture ‘nature’ by observing the rules formulated by the classical critics. The fragmentary Poetics of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC) laid down guidelines for the successful ‘imitation’ of nature in poetry and drama. The Roman poet Horace (65–8 BC) had turned Aristotelian principles into a more conversational and personal form of advice in the ‘Epistle to the Pisos’, commonly known as the Ars Poetica or ‘Art of Poetry’. These works had formed the basis for most critical theorizing of the seventeenth century; in drama especially, the guidelines had become fossilised into ‘Rules’ in which truth to nature could only be achieved by very close forms of imitation – limiting the action of plays to one plot, in one location, on one day. There was much debate about the applicability of these rules in an English tradition, and Pope’s master Dryden adopted the ‘Rules’ with much misgiving. Some relief from the Rules came in the shape of the treatise known as Peri Hypsous or On the Sublime, ascribed to ‘Longinus’ (written probably in the first century AD, and translated into English in 1652 (more influentially, into French by Nicholas Boileau in 1674); this concentrated on ‘poetic fire’, flights of the imagination, inspirational visions of boundles...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• THE COMPLETE CRITICAL GUIDE TO ALEXANDER POPE
• THE COMPLETE CRITICAL GUIDE TO ENGLISH LITERATURE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCING
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: LIFE AND CONTEXTS
• PART II: WORK
• PART III: CRITICISM
• CHRONOLOGY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY