Pope, Alexander (1688–1744)

POPE, ALEXANDER (1688–1744)

POPE, ALEXANDER (1688–1744), English poet, translator, and critic. A celebrity not only in fact but also by profession, Alexander Pope was the unmatched superstar of English neoclassical literature and arguably the first author in England to make his living exclusively through literary talent. During a comparatively short life focused on literary and cultural activities, Pope alternately defined, improved, invented, satirized, critiqued, and reformed the genres and conventions of early-eighteenth-century British verse.

Born in 1688 amidst a "Glorious Revolution" that put an end to the absolutist claims of Stuart monarchs and set Britain on a course for a constitutional if not altogether secular government, Pope's life was characterized by the contradictions of new gentility and chastised affluence. Despite their urban origins and their mercantile vocation, Pope and his forebears drifted in Tory, royalist circles; despite physical deformity and entrenchment in the upper middle classes, Pope affected the stylish, rakish ways of high life; despite profiting handsomely from his publications and living like a conforming country squire on his suburban Twickenham estate, Pope persisted in Catholicism (enduring heavy economic and political sanctions) and enjoyed provoking persecution from an officialdom that was also his audience and customer. The story of Pope's meteoric rise—from the publication of his Pastorals (1709) at the age of twenty through the runaway success of his versified critical treatise, The Essay on Criticism (1711), at twenty-three through his best-selling translations of Homer (1715–1726) through his unlikely versified philosophical hit, An Essay on Man (1733–1734), and on through his snarling but astonishingly successful Dunciad (1743)—may read like the contrived biography of some twentieth-century movie idol, but it also points up Pope's lucky historical position at a moment when an enlarged readership and an expanding urban culture were transforming the "literary career" from a private preserve for gentlemen to an open public spectacle. So powerful and pervasive was this new idiom of the public writer that Pope could maintain influential friends across the political and cultural spectrum, from the conservative Jonathan Swift to the snappy Joseph Addison and from Richard Boyle, the Whiggish earl of Burlington, to Tory movers-and-shakers such as Robert Harley, earl of Oxford and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke.

Pope routinely presents himself as a conservative spokesman (and satirist) for sound common sense and as a sturdy pillar of English classicism. His works, however, are emphatically neoclassical. They stress what the period called "imitation," a speculative, psychological, and altogether modern attempt to write "as if" one were an ancient author who happened to be living and writing in Augustan London. "Wit," "genius," "grace," and other eighteenth-century literary values vie for hegemony with assorted classical "rules." Pope's works advocate experimentation and adaptation, applying putatively classical norms to eighteenth-century contexts, topics, and genres. Pope's early Pastorals (1709) apply Virgilian techniques to English landscapes to produce a modern Georgics. An Essay on Criticism (1711) borrows from Horace's Ars Poetica (Art of poetry) to characterize and to spoof Augustan rhetorical miscarriages. The Rape of the Lock (1714) fuses contemporary mockery (as practiced by John Dryden, John Philips, Samuel Garth, and John Gay) with Homeric heroism to produce a ridiculous mock-heroic "epic" about domestic adventures in the boudoir. Not unlike the Rape is Windsor Forest (1713), a more sober but no less historically mixed attempt to combine Elizabethan versified history with Augustan heroic couplets to produce an epic story of the British monarchy, an epic that somewhat preposterously culminates in the coronation of Queen Anne.

Pope's later works preserve his commitment to this unabashedly transhistorical classicism while also negotiating between the differing demands of moral, satiric, and heroical writing, three strands that intertwine but never completely braid in Pope's increasingly tense later verse. The Essay on Man (1733–1734) flutters nervously if brilliantly between versified popularizations of philosophical optimism (as preached by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and others) and broad satiric indictments of human shortsightedness. Several verse essays and epistles in imitation of Horace, collectively known as the Moral Essays (1733–1738), along with the companion An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), tackle a range of philosophical topics, from architectural aesthetics to the character of women, in a sometimes theatrical, sometimes compassionate, sometimes deliberative, generally satiric voice. Pope's last large work, The Dunciad (1743), a re-issue and extension of his earlier Dunciad Variorum (1729), deploys crashingly gigantic heroic couplets to record, judge, and satirize a veritable encyclopedia of "dunces," poetasters, and seekers after literary fame who, in Pope's mind, have succeeded only in sucking the life out of neoclassicism.

In addition to his poetic offerings, Pope made substantial contributions to literary criticism (mostly through the seemingly simple but always subtle witticisms in An Essay on Criticism [1711]), to the rise of bibliography and textual studies (through his not always competent production of an edition of Shakespeare [1725] and through his relentless, ravaging attacks on other editors), and to the rise of the private epistle as a literary form (through his audacious publication of his own correspondence [1735]). Pope was a major figure in the history of the print culture and of the publishing industry through his lively interactions with eighteenth-century publishing magnates such as Jacob Tonson, Bernard Lintot, and the scandalous Edmund Curll. Pope's opinions on naturalistic landscape gardening are definitive for their period. These and many other contributions mark him as a quintessential if not always representative figure in early eighteenth-century English culture.

See also Addison, Joseph ; English Literature and Language ; Glorious Revolution ; Steele, Richard ; Swift, Jonathan .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Source

Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope. Edited by John Butt. London, 1963. A one-volume edition of the Twickenham text with selected annotations.

Secondary Sources

Brower, Reuben. Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion. Oxford, 1959. Classic study of Pope's poetic technique and topical allusions.

Brownell, Morris R. Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England. Oxford, 1978.

Griffin, Dustin H. Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems. Princeton, 1978. Analysis of Pope, Pope's persona, and the role of the author in neoclassical verse.

Mack, Maynard. Alexander Pope: A Life. New Haven, 1985. Standard, highly detailed biography of Pope.

Quintero, Ruben. Literate Culture: Pope's Rhetorical Art. Newark, Del., 1992. Updated account of the rhetorically attuned culture in which Pope flourished.

Kevin L. Cope