Alexander Pope
gigatos | February 9, 2022
Summary
Alexander Pope (born May 21, 1688, London; died May 30, 1744, Twickenham) was a leading poet of the English Enlightenment, a devout Catholic, and a Tory.
Alexander Pope”s actual literary debut is considered to be the publication of his poem A Poem on Criticism, modeled on Nicolas Boileau”s Code of Eighteenth-Century Classicism. From then on, his work, though stylistically uniform and coherent in its outlook, encompassed the entire variety of literary genres and interests known at the time, from satire and the heroic poem of which he was a representative, to serious philosophical poems promoting faith in the goodness of God and even religious songs.
For over two hundred years Alexander Pope has been on the tongues of literary critics as the protagonist of one of the greatest disputes in the history of English poetry, in which some quarters downgrade his works and even deprive him of the title of poet. At the same time, as an aphorist, he is, next to William Shakespeare, the most quoted Islander. To this day he is also considered the greatest poet of his generation, the first master of English satire, and the most outstanding creator of the heroic poem.
Although Pope embodied all the characteristics of the English Enlightenment, an era that was somehow obsolete in terms of the emerging Romanticism, his works played an important role in the work of poets such as George Gordon Byron and Adam Mickiewicz, and modern scholars increasingly see in them a vague turn toward a “Romantic Revolution.” This theme provides yet another area of contention about Pope”s poetry.
Alexander Pope”s motto was to say: “Everything that is, is right.”
Alexander Pope was born on May 21, 1688 in London as the first-born son of devout Catholics – Alexander Pope senior and Edith Pope, née Turner. From the beginning the future poet was a sickly and physically weak child, which did not allow him to attend school. His somewhat haggard appearance from an early age took a toll on his interpersonal relationships. The gates of English universities were also closed to him because of his Catholic faith.
Despite his lack of a solid education, young Pope took an interest in literature on his own. The whole situation had a beneficial effect on the boy”s mind, and he grew in intellectual freedom and independence, in adulthood, especially in his years of literary splendor, earning him the title of “the most instinctive of classical poets.” At home on the edge of Windsor Forest, he absorbed considerable quantities of masterpieces of ancient poetry, and at about the age of twelve he also began to write his own works. “He read and wrote incessantly,” as he used to say, “rattling rhythmically,” then discussing the value of his compositions with his adult friends.
Pope emerged on the unusually lively literary scene of Augustan times as a teenage boy, an author, it was said, “of good promise,” praised by William Wycherley, who read several of the young poet”s poems. He finally made his debut in 1709 with the bucolic poem Pastorals. It is necessary to emphasize the insincerity of the author, who, apparently wanting to be considered a “child prodigy” of his time, publicly announced that he wrote the poem at the age of thirteen, although it is well known that he often meticulously corrected and supplemented its content in his older years. This incident became the first reason (among many) why Pope”s name is still associated with hypocrisy, insincerity, and malicious injustice.
This brilliant debut made the young Pope feel like a fish in water in the literary arena of his day, and he continued to climb the steps of English Parnassus. In 1711 the poet”s next work appeared in print, a rhymed treatise on poetic art with elements of a didactic poem, An Essay on Criticism. Pope – perhaps too bold in his restrictive literary judgments at such a young age – took inspiration from Nicolas Boileau when writing it. The work immediately caused a sensation and since then Alexander Pope”s literary life has been a continuous success story. The young poet even attracted the interest of one of the pillars of the culture of the time, Joseph Addison, publisher of the famous magazine “The Spectator”. Pope”s fame was further cemented in 1714 with the publication of his most famous work, The Kidnapped Knob. His friends were then joined by Jonathan Swift.
In 1717 Pope”s sudden fame was crowned by the first edition of his collected works, which included two new works: a love poem about passion, Eloisa to Abelard, which differed significantly from the poet”s previous work, and Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.
Pope from the beginning manifested a number of personal traits that are commonly referred to as a difficult character. The poet”s notorious jealousy and irritability, combined with constant relapses, became the cause of many battles with criticism in the future, often unfairly rejected, taken too personally, or simply delusional. Pope”s irony was effective, though not always subtle. There were times when the wronged writer resorted to the sharpest tools of satire, boasting of his “proper power of hurt. (proper power of hurt).
Little is known about Pope”s emotional life. It is believed that the love of his life was Martha Blount, who for many years accompanied the poet and took care of him during the days of relapse. Pope became intimate with Marthy not long after he proposed to his longtime friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and was violently ridiculed by her. Alexander had always been sensitive to the influence of women, and rumor has it that the bitterness caused by the incident aroused in him a hostility toward Lady Mary that also spilled over into the literary field. The works dedicated to Mrs. Blount had a completely different tone; in fact, the poet dedicated and dedicated all his most intimate poems to her.
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Aesthetic and religious poems (1709-1712)
1712 is the date of Pope”s publication of perhaps his most famous work. The Rape of the Lock, a heroic poem, has enjoyed a reputation as a true masterpiece for nearly three hundred years, regardless of party. Even at the time of its first publication, critics were drowning in admiration; they spoke of a genius for humor, a mastery of the pen, or an unparalleled degree of fantasy and subtlety. A little later, Henry Hazlitt called The Kidnapped Puff “a distinguished example of filigree work.” The work was divided into five songs, describing in sublime Homeric style an authentic social scandal: Lord John Caryll, in love with the beauty of Lady Arabelia Fermor, attempts to rape a lock of her hair. In addition to satirical elements, the poem also contains fantastic and fairy-tale ones, and in the last song, philosophical and moralistic ones. To this day, Pukiel porwany is regarded as the most outstanding example of a heroic poem in literature.
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Descriptive Poems (1713)
In 1713 Pope published another important work, this time belonging to the fashionable among the aristocracy group of descriptive poems, Windsor Forest. The work depicts the beauty of the forest located in the town of Windsor, Berkshire. At this point it is necessary to mention the aesthetic views of the English classicist. According to Pope, the so-called pure description, devoid of the human factor or any specific content emerging from long stretches of mimetically depicted nature, cannot constitute the whole text of a work. Such description, moreover, should not seek to reduce the poet”s self, or to turn it into an impersonal instrument, recording sensory impressions from contact with nature without drawing from it a sense of measure or intellectual meaning. To sum up, according to the English poet, pure descriptive poetry would spell nonsense. Such a work would be “like a feast consisting of sauces only,” and the conduct of the poet writing it would prevent him from putting the world in order, which is the main feature of art.
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Love Poems (?-1717)
Pope”s 1717 volume of collected works included two poems whose date of composition is uncertain: Eloisa to Abelard and Elegy to an Unfortunate Lady. The poet sought to include passion and pathos in these poems.
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Philosophical Poems (1731-1734)
One of the most important concepts running through Pope”s entire oeuvre was the word “Nature,” otherwise popular in the age of Enlightenment classicism, defined by the poet with truly philosophical precision, but representing at least three different meanings depending on the work and its date of composition.
Pope”s Enlightenment optimism, well evident in the poem Poem on Man, was somehow balanced and moderate in its assessment of the world and mortal life. The poet does not claim, as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did, that we live in the “best of all possible worlds,” but at the same time he is far from opposing this thesis so extreme as Voltaire represented. Pope recognized that man”s primary task in mortality (for he firmly believed in the resurrection) was to reason between the extremes so that his life”s path would lead to ever deeper self-knowledge. Between this self-knowledge and personal and social happiness, there would in turn be harmony; actions in accord with the rules of beauty, goodness and truth, according to the poet, unfailingly tend towards the elimination of evil and moral progress, or even spiritual self-realization in the world.
As a thorough comparative analysis of his works – both mystical and more realistic – shows, Adam Mickiewicz is closer to Pope”s poetics than to those of the Romantic school. It is also well known that the Bard wrote in part…
Byron, moreover, was Pope”s last great defender.
Despite the established opinion – not only by tradition, but above all by the unanimous verdict of literary scholars – that Alexander Pope is the most outstanding writer of English classicism and the author of the most outstanding example of a heroic poem, he still causes considerable problems for literary criticism. The passionate disputes continue to this day as one of the greatest problems of English literature, and they began with Pope”s literary debut. Roughly speaking, they are summed up in two points:
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The moral scandals surrounding Pope”s poetry
Alexander Pope already during his lifetime became among the literary elite a flashpoint of many scandals of the time. “Pope differed from Dryden in that, among other things, he could not accept criticism indifferently. He was generally reproached for his conceit, vanity, malice, vindictiveness, injustice in his satirical attacks, in short for his so-called difficult character (…) Pope liked to mock his opponents, “and Pope”s mockery was not always subtle.
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Discussions around the value of Pope”s poetry
“Few poets have been so admired and so fiercely attacked at the same time as Pope. As a result, the poet was and still is (after years of rejection, contemporary interest in him is growing) either loved or hated, and on both sides of the barricade stand the most eminent personalities of English literature. Among the strong critics was William Wordsworth, among the supporters – George Gordon Byron.
Some parties not only significantly lower the status of his works, but even deprive him of the title of poet, accusing Pope of a complete lack of lyricism (with eminently developed aphoristic qualities), the shallowness or absence of deeper intellectual content, the saturation of his works with themes from the poet”s private life, the limitation and derivativeness of his views, reducing a poem to an elaborated form rather than a felt one (even when its subject was passion), in addition burdened with the so-called “Pope”s diction”, which for many years embroiled the literary style of English poetry and became something shameful. The poet”s “Pope”s diction”, which affected the literary style of English poetry for many years, became a disgrace for many years. Walter Pater spoke of Pope”s “sophisticated lack of taste.” He expressed his opinion in complete opposition to Tory aficionados, who saw in him the epitome of exquisite wordiness. Lytton Strachey, on the other hand, formulates his rebuke thus: “with an epic distich he enchanted his shrieks into poetry”. All these charges have made it perplexing for literary history to count Pope as a poet. Many of them are otherwise well founded; nevertheless, “if to be a poet means to write the most dour poems we know, to endow words with a vivid and exciting energy, to forge distichs and poems that remain forever in the memory, to present even a limited view of people and human life – then only an extraordinary persistence in madness or perversion could have Pope denied that designation.”
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The paradox of Pope”s poetry reception
Literary critics have always accused Pope of a smoothness, a “politeness” both of form and content, a restraint which this poet has become synonymous with in English literature. It is said that the author of Kidnapped Lock betrayed the freshness of the open air, which belonged to the age-old and most splendid tradition of poetry of the British Isles, for the stuffiness of cafes and the city. There is a familiar opposition formed by Pope and William Cowper. The former is supposed to represent the so-called “poetry of the city”, the latter the “poetry of the countryside”. Another serious objection goes as follows: Pope mechanized the poem, adapted it to the demands of the prose age, abandoned the spontaneous gusts of lyricism for a strictly, precisely worked-out poetics.
The paradox of the reception of Pope”s poetry lies in the fact that in its essence it presents the exact opposite of the accusations made against it. While a pedantic attention to the finesse of rhymed form is a fact, “in reality (…) Pope represents a reaction against artificiality and a return to nature.” Tory rebelled against drawing-room and conceptual poetry, and did not hold the Baroque in high esteem precisely because of its excessive attention to formal perfection. Pope rejected John Donne. As a result, although the moral overtones of his poetry proclaimed a rejection of dark, pessimistic thoughts in favor of what is light and wholesome, Pope is the central figure of the Enlightenment who should be associated with a revolution of the Romantic type.
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Works published in Poland
Sources
