Unit Six - Satire’s Apotheosis

Lesson 13: Pope

Important Texts

Jack, Ian. Augustan Satire: intention and idiom in English poetry, 1660-1750. Oxford: Clarendon, 1964.

Sutherland, James R. A Preface to 18th Century Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1948.

Tillotson, Geoffrey. On the Poetry of Pope. Oxford: Clarendon, 1950.

Pound’s Definitions for Poetry

Logopoeia - words you use, process of your argument

Phonopoeia - matter of imagery. What pictures does the poet evoke?

Melopoeia - sounds of poetry

Changes with Pope

Imagery goes way down in the period leading to Pope, and then it balloons after him.

Logopoeia increases rapidly with Pope then practically disappears. Same with Melopeoia.

Pope’s Aesthetic

The poetic ideal Pope presents is very much like haiku.

– Come as close as you can to boredom and monotony.

Pope’s poetry is deceptively simple.

He always writes in heroic couplets

– each one is incredibly distilled.

Characteristics of Heroic Couplet

Each couplet must be a unit of sense detachable

Each line must end with a definite pause. Enjambment is very rare in Pope, and if you see it, look at why he uses it.

The Caesura The caesura must be handled with great

care to avoid monotony Caesura is the pause in a line of verse

dictated not by metrics but by the natural cadence of the language.

There is usually a caesura in verses of ten syllables or more, and the handling of this pause to achieve metrical variety is a test of the poet’s skill.

Pope’s Use of Caesura Note Pope’s skill in shifting the caesura

in this passage:• A little learning / / is a dangerous thing;

• Drink deep,/ / or taste not of the Pierian spring;

• These shallow draughts / / intoxicate the brain,

• But drinking largely / / sobers us again.

• An Essay on Criticism

More on the Heroic Couplet Usually iambic. Trochees and

spondees will show up sometimes. Monosyllables only get the stress if they need it rhetorically.

Rhymes must be exact rhymes.

– Preferably on nouns or verbs.

Sounds must echo sense.

Alexander Pope

Pope was born in 1688, the year William and Mary come over to take the throne.

He dies in 1744.

Early Achiever Most of his major poems were written,

in one form at least, by the time he was 25.

Moving during Childhood When young Pope was born, his father was a

cloth merchant living in the City (a part of London)

At some point (ca. 1700) in Alexander's childhood, the Pope family was forced to relocate– in compliance with a statute forbidding Catholics from

living within ten miles of London or Westminster. They moved to Binfield in Berkshire.

Education

Very poor formal education partly because his family was Roman Catholic in a time of intense anti-Catholic feeling.

Once they moved to Binfield, he was self-taught.

As a Catholic, would be barred from Oxford and Cambridge.

Ill Health

Pope's disease--apparently tuberculosis of the bone--became evident when he was about twelve.

Later in Pope's life, Sir Joshua Reynolds described him as "about four feet six high (132 cm); very humpbacked and deformed."

From Maynard Mack’s Biography

Pope was "afflicted with constant headaches, sometimes so severe that he could barely see the paper he wrote upon, frequent violent pain at bone and muscle joints...shortness of breath, increasing inability to ride horseback or even walk for exercise...."

Early Reputation William Wycherley, impressed by some of

Pope's early poetry, introduced him into fashionable London literary circles (in 1704 when he was 16).

Public attention came with the publication of Pastorals in 1709.

The Rape of the Lock helped secure Pope's reputation as a leading poet of the age.

Twickenham Pope moved to his villa in Twickenham

in 1717– outside the city limits thanks to restrictions

on where Catholics could live. He moved in Catholic circles and

remained a Catholic all of his life.

Contemporary sketch of Pope in his grotto in Twickenham. His house is no longer there.

Country Life While there he received visitors (just about

everyone)

attacked his literary contemporaries (just about eveyone, although notable exceptions were Swift and Gay, with whom he had close friendships)

Continued to publish poetry.

He died on his birthday, 1744, at Twickenham.

Literary Heroes

Pope loved the work of Dryden (who died when Pope was almost 12). He had his picture on the wall, alongside that of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton.

Hatred of Self

He had a real hatred of his physical body, and by the time he retired to Twickenham, he could no longer sit or stand unsupported due to his weak spine.

As ugly as his physical body was, he was said to have a very expressive face. People who knew him usually really loved him.

Unrequited Loves

Lady Mary Wortley Montegu (1689-1762)

Martha Blount

Subject of “Epistle to a Lady” The National Portrait Gallery, London,

has a portrait, but it’s not available on-line right now!

Pope left her in his will £1000, many books, all his household goods, and made her residuary legatee

Critical Response Although such late eighteenth-century

tastemakers as Samuel Johnson acknowledged Pope as a gifted satirist, translator, and poet, none thought of his major poems as poetry of the highest degree.

These appraisals foreshadowed Victorian critical views on Pope's canon, when romantic aesthetics flourished, which marked his poetic style as dated, even prosaic, and his themes as petty and ill-advised.

Changes in the 20th Century

These attitudes persisted well into the twentieth century, when the critical strategies that define New Criticism revived interest in Pope's body of works, renewing appreciation of his poetics in terms of its own art.

Proto-Romantic

Modern scholarship also has refuted the common perception that Pope's later satire detracts from the grace of his early poetry. In recognition of the poet's keen intellect and emotional sensitivities, some critics have explored his verse for prototypical elements of Romanticism.

More Biographical Information

With the mid-twentieth-century publication of the definitive edition of his complete correspondence, critical biographers emerged to fill the gaps in our knowledge of Pope's life.

Feminist Interest

By the close of the twentieth century, feminist scholars and cultural critics have investigated Pope's writings for signs of emerging modern ideologies surrounding diverse issues.

Post-modernist Interest Postmodern commentators have begun to

negotiate the role gender played in the poet's and culture's imaginative life as well as gauge the influence of colonial ideology on formation of the professional writer and mark out changes in the social obligations of literature.

Others have described the relation between burgeoning print and mercantile cultures, deconstructed linguistic ambiguities, and analyzed political implications of Pope's texts.

The Rape of the Lock

Written over a literal event

in order to deflate it.

Contemporary sketch of Pope

Qualities of the Epic Pope Uses Invoking the Muse

Heroes of wonderful proportion

– Belinda

– The Lord

Battles

– cards

– slyphs

– Belinda--her bodkin has a heritage

More Epic Qualities

Supernatural elements

Trip to the Underworld

Catalogues of names

Long speeches

Elevated language

More Epic Qualities

In medias res

– “in the middle of things”

Episodic with digressions

Divisions--books, cantos

Gives a picture of society

Zeugma

Putting two completely disparate objects with the same verb

– “Stain her honor, or her new brocade”

Found throughout the poem. Look for them.

Perfectly Circular Poem

Begins with Belinda opening her eyes and ends with her closing them in death.

She doesn’t really die--the narrator alludes to her death in the future.

Bringing More to the Poem

Having important things--ideals, goals in life--is more important than beauty

Might want to be something other than beautiful

Milton’s Influence The main structural design of the poem

seems to depend on its sequences of allusions and parallels to Milton's Paradise Lost:

the "Morning-Dream" summoned to the sleeping Belinda by Ariel, her "Guardian Sylph," which not only warns her of some impending "dread Event" and encourages her to know her "own Importance," but also recalls the dream, similarly encouraging of excessive self-esteem, insinuated into Eve's mind by Milton's Satan;

Other Miltonic influence

The scene at Belinda's dressing table, where she appears to worship her own image in her mirror, is reminiscent of the newly created Eve's narcissistic admiration of her self as reflected in the Edenic pool;

More Borrowing from Milton Just before the Baron's cutting of Belinda's

lock, the moment when Ariel seeks out the "close Recesses of the Virgin's Thought" and finds an "Earthly Lover lurking at her Heart" clearly recalls the scene in Paradise Lost when, after Adam's fall of his own free will, his angelic guardians, "mute and sad," depart from him, as powerless as Ariel finds himself to be before Belinda's own free choice of an earthly rather than a sylphic lover. (which we didn’t read in PL)

Belinda’s “Fall”

Belinda's fall, in one sense, appears merely to be part of the normal human process of "falling" in love, or a maiden's innermost and private decision not to spurn so attractive and eligible a suitor as the Baron.

Rape vs. Deflowering From this point of view the state of her heart

at her moment of choice deserves sympathy more than censure: neither she nor the world in general would wish her to remain a virgin forever (as the poem later says, "she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid").

But if she secretly acquiesces to the Baron's courtship she has no right to consider the cutting of her lock equivalent to a "rape" of her person: it is a desired rather than a forced "deflowering."

Hypocritical Prude? In light of Belinda's apparent

compliance in the Baron's act, her immediate response to the loss of a lock seems utterly prudish and hypocritical, particularly since her outraged and tearful denial of any complicity in the event is made in defense of an "Honour" at whose "unrival'd Shrine," in the words of her friend Thalestris, "Ease, Pleasure, Virtue, All, our Sex resign”.

Influence of Horace Smoothness of language

Use humor and irony

Less threatening that Juvenalian mode

Not hostile to the subjects

Urbane and witty

Influence of Juvenal

Angry (Clarissa’s speech)

Verbal jabs--darker, more sarcastic

– “At every word, a reputation dies”

Not as Innocent as It Seems:

Throughout the poem, there are many double-edged usages.

This is a society grounded on pretence. There are also sexual notions.

“Epistle to a Lady”

The imaginary setting for part of the poem is an art gallery, with the speaker conducting the reader past portraits of various female characters exemplifying the notion that, – "good as well as ill, / Woman's at best a

Contradiction still."