Everybody Loves Alexander Pope

Even Those Who Hate Him

In my earlier post about Alexander Pope, I didn’t mention how important he has been in my life. I first read his poetry in the State Library of New South Wales, and found in his lines a dazzling splendour and clarity to match that of the nearby Sydney Harbour. His couplets have a reputation for being cold and stiff, but to me they sparkled like marble in the sun. On that afternoon in the library, I knew I would be reading Pope for a long time. But, at that point, I had no idea that a promise to study Pope would win me a place at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

I bring this up to highlight the unfairness of it all. Pope was the genius. I was the stubborn Aussie — yet I was given a place at an ancient university which, while he was alive, never would have admitted him on account of his Catholicism. Already alienated from society because of his religion, Pope had a tubercular spine and only grew to a height of 4 feet 6 inches.

A portrait of Alexander Pope by Michael Dahl (source)

Despite this, Pope became one of the first professional poets in English history; he made enough money from his translations of Homer to buy a villa in Twickenham. He was also an early example of a talent exploited to make opportunists rich. The 1751-4 edition of his collected works made more profit than those of Shakespeare and Milton combined. The problem was: he died in 1744.

As one of the dominant literary figures of the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope (along with his illustrious predecessor John Dryden) was bound to be a target for ambitious young poets who wanted to evade his influence.

Robert Southey: “The time which elapsed from the days of Dryden to those of Pope, is the dark age of English poetry.”

Matthew Arnold: “Though they may write in verse, though they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose.”

William Blake: “I do not condemn Pope or Dryden because they did not understand Imagination but because they did not understand Verse.”

Introductory courses to English poetry often claim that Romanticism began as a reaction against Enlightenment poets such as Pope and Dryden. Poetry moved away from presenting rational arguments to expressing genuine emotion.

As Duncan Wu points out in his informative book 30 Great Myths about The Romantics, this claim is a drastic simplification. The word “Romanticism” has no precise meaning, and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the word “Enlightenment” is even less definite.

The myth states that Romanticism started in 1798 with the publication of William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. The preface to this collection cites Pope’s Messiah (among other works) as having “extravagant and absurd diction.”

But Wordsworth was a lifelong admirer of some of Pope’s work. True, he hated Pope’s translations of Homer (which were mandatory schoolboy reading) but praises his other poems. Here’s a letter Wordsworth wrote to Walter Scott, 18 January 1808:

“I have a very high admiration of the talents both of Dryden and Pope, and ultimately, as from all good writers of whatever kind, their Country will be benefited greatly by their labours. But thus far I think their writings have done more harm than good. It will require yet half a century completely to carry off the poison of Pope’s Homer…”

Here’s one he wrote to Alexander Dyce, 10 May 1830:

“Pope, in that production of his Boyhood, the ode to Solitude, and in his Essay on Criticism, has furnished proofs that at one period of his life he felt the charm of a sober and subdued style, which he afterwards abandoned for one that is to my taste at least too pointed and ambitious, and for a versification too timidly balanced.”

And one he wrote to Viscount Mahon, 11 April 1842:

“Mr M. [Macaulay] made a great parade of his biographical knowledge in Literature. It is true, as I observed in my former Letter to you upon the subject, that many of the best works in Poetry were produced when their respective authors were far advanced in life. But in several cases he is mistaken, and particularly in Spenser and Pope. The most poetical works of the Latter, namely the Winsor [Windsor] Forest, and especially the Rape of the Lock and the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, were composed about his 25^th and 26^th year…”

In my view, scholars haven’t made enough of the fact that Wordsworth singles out Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard, because in it we find the qualities that are now associated with Romanticism: individual thought and intense personal feeling. It recounts the story of the French nun Héloïse d'Argenteuil’s forbidden love for and secret marriage to her teacher Peter Abelard. The affair discovered, and Eloise having been forced into a nunnery, she receives a letter from her beloved:

In these deep solitudes and awful cells,
Where heavenly-pensive contemplation dwells,
And ever-musing melancholy reigns;
What means this tumult in a vestal's veins?
Why rove my thoughts beyond this last retreat?
Why feels my heart its long-forgotten heat?
Yet, yet I love!—From Abelard it came,
And Eloisa yet must kiss the name.

She tries to forget her lover and turn her mind to God:

Ah wretch! believed the spouse of God in vain,
Confessed within the slave of love and man.
Assist me, Heaven! but whence arose that prayer?
Sprung it from piety, or from despair?
Even here, where frozen chastity retires,
Love finds an altar for forbidden fires.
I ought to grieve, but cannot what I ought;
I mourn the lover, not lament the fault;
I view my crime, but kindle at the view,
Repent old pleasures, and solicit new;
Now turned to Heaven, I weep my past offence,
Now think of thee, and curse my innocence.
Of all affliction taught a lover yet,
'Tis sure the hardest science to forget!
How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense,
And love the offender, yet detest the offence?
How the dear object from the crime remove,
Or how distinguish penitence from love?
Unequal task! a passion to resign,
For hearts so touched, so pierced, so lost as mine.
Ere such a soul regains its peaceful state,
How often must it love, how often hate!
How often hope, despair, resent, regret,
Conceal, disdain—do all things but forget.
But let Heaven seize it, all at once 'tis fired;
Not touched, but rapt; not wakened, but inspired!
Oh come! oh teach me nature to subdue,
Renounce my love, my life, myself—and you.
Fill my fond heart with God alone, for he
Alone can rival, can succeed to thee.

In the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, Pope further anticipates the values of the Romantic poets when he praises his father, a model of unpretentious virtue:

Unlearned, he knew no Schoolman’s subtle Art,
No language, but the Language of the Heart.

What, then, did Coleridge think of Alexander Pope? In his 1813 lectures, Coleridge says:

“I have been supposed by some persons to have spoken disrespectfully of that great and admirable writer, Pope—I have not perhaps determined whether or not he deserves the name of poet, but in many cases I think that if the words ‘excellent and delightful writer’ were substituted, persons disputing the merits of individual authors would agree in confessing the instance of Pope that they never looked into his writings without pleasure or laid them down without instruction.”

Coleridge denies Pope the status of “poet,” but concedes

“it is impossible to deny to Pope the character of a delightful writer; but whether he be a poet, must depend upon our definition of the word; and, doubtless, if everything that pleases be poetry, Pope’s satires and epistles must be poetry.”

The strongest support of Pope comes from the poster-boy of the Romantic period, Lord Byron. In fact, Byron didn’t think of himself as “Romantic” at all, but saw himself in the “Augustan” tradition of Pope and Dryden (this might explain why he’s the only Romantic poet with a sense of humour.) Byron was strongly critical of his contemporaries because they had failed to follow Pope’s example. Here’s a letter Byron wrote to his publisher, John Murray:

“With regard to poetry in general I am convinced the more I think of it — that he and all of us — Scott — Southey — Wordsworth — Moore — Campbell — I — are all in the wrong — one as much as another — that we are upon a wrong revolutionary poetical system — or systems — not worth a damn in itself — & from which none but Rogers and Crabbe are free — and that the present & next generations will finally be of this opinion. — I am the more confirmed in this — by having lately gone over some of our Classics — particularly Pope — whom I tried in this way — I took Moore’s poems & my own & some others — & went over them side by side with Popes — and I was really astonished — (I ought not to have been so) and mortified — at the ineffable distance in point of sense — harmony — effect — and even Imagination Passion — & Invention – between the little Queen Anne’s Man — & us of the lower Empire…”

In another letter to Murray, Byron argued that Pope

“is the moral poet of all Civilization—and as such let us hope that he will one day be the National poet of Mankind.—He is the only poet that never shocks—the only poet whose faultlessness—has been made his reproach. Cast your eye over his productions—consider their extent—and contemplate their variety. —Pastoral—Passion—Mock-heroic—Translation—Satire—Ethics—all excellent—and often perfect.—If his great charm be his melody—how comes it that foreigners adore him even in their diluted translations?”

In his masterpiece Don Juan, Lord Byron scolds the callow diction of Wordsworth and appeals to the ghosts of better poets:

‘Pedlars,’ and ‘Boats,’ and ‘Waggons!’ Oh! ye shades
    Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this?

Byron wasn’t the only heir of Alexander Pope to publish during the Regency period. Pope’s common themes are self-love, disorienting emotions, the uses and abuses of money, the troubles between the sexes, the sundry and manifold types of human stupidity — and all of these are elegantly expressed with Popean wit in the novels of Jane Austen.