[Below, Edwards provides an overview of twentieth century critical reaction to Pope's works.]

It was only ninety years ago that Arnold pronounced Dryden and Pope "classics of our prose." In 1880 Shaw was twenty-four, Yeats fifteen, Joyce two years unborn and Lawrence five; as Arnold suspected, a new literary age was dawning, one that would find his view of the Augustan poets no more congenial than many of his other views. But modern criticism was shaped by the need to answer Arnold, and our idea of Pope owes more than we like to admit to the Arnoldian terms it rejects.

The terms themselves are of course almost embarrassingly vulnerable: "Are Dryden and Pope poetical classics? Is the historic estimate, which represents them as such and which has been so long established that it cannot easily give way, the real estimate? Wordsworth and Coleridge, as is well known, denied it; but the authority of Wordsworth and Coleridge does not weigh much with the younger generation, and there are many signs to show that the eighteenth century and its judgments are coming into favor again. Are the favorite poets of the eighteenth century classics?"

Few others abide our question as meekly as Dryden and Pope, that is; but in fact these questions are rather feeble. The favorite poets of the eighteenth century were not Dryden and Pope at all, but Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton, Arnold's and everyone's favorites; and it is a slippery logic that would make the high estimate of the Augustans both a "long established" piety and an irritating fad of an impertinent new age. Yet if both "the historic estimate" and "the younger generation" have the suspicious rustle of the straw-man, still, our answers to Arnold on this matter have led to confusions of our own, not least the assumption that he spoke for an "official" Victorian culture unanimously insensitive or hostile to the Augustans. He himself assumed no such thing—his tone is defensive, if belligerently so.

Victorian taste resists casual definition—there was so much of it—but Arnold's age was of several minds about Pope. Arnold himself was restating a standard eighteenth-century view: that of, for example, Joseph Warton's insistence that "ethical poetry" like Pope's, however excellent of its kind, was of a lower order than the poetry of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton [Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756, 1782)]. (Johnson's defense of Pope tacitly conceded the point.) What Warton was saying in the 1750's Wordsworth was still saying in the 183O's: "if the beautiful, the pathetic, and the sublime be what a poet should chiefly aim at, how absurd it is to place these men [Dryden and Pope] amongst the first poets of their country! Admirable are they in treading their way, but that way lies almost at the foot of Parnassus" [Letters of the Wordsworth Family,]. (In the same remark, however, he admitted that "to this day I believe I could repeat, with a little previous rummaging of my memory, several thousand lines of Pope.") This historic estimate was memorably summed up, a decade before Arnold's remarks, by a Victorian belles-lettrist improbably named John Dennis, in whom Pope's Appius indeed lived on in softer forms of passion: "He has written none of the verses which children love, nor any lines which grown-up people care to croon over in moments of weakness or sorrow. [No Touchstones, in fact?] In his works the wit o'ertops the poetry, the intellect gets the better of the heart, and thus he wins admiration from his readers rather than affection" ["Alexander Pope," in Frazier's Magazine (May 1870)].

But of course there was another line on Pope kept alive in appreciative remarks by Byron, De Quincey and others, the line taken by Thackeray in The English Humourists (1853):

In considering Pope's admirable career, I am forced into similitudes drawn from other courage and greatness, and into comparing him with those who achieved triumphs in actual war. I think of the works of the young Pope as I do the actions of young Bonaparte or young Nelson. In their common life you will find frailties and meannesses, as great as the vices of the meanest men. But in the presence of the great occasion, the great soul flashes out, and conquers transcendent. In thinking of the splendour of Pope's young victories, of his merit, unequalled as his renown, I hail and salute the achieving genius, and do homage to the pen of a hero.

This sees Pope less as poet than as Representative Man, but Thackeray's "admirable career" at least has more generous intentions than Wordsworth's "admirable are they in treading their way," Dennis' "admiration … rather than affection," Arnold's own "admirable for the purposes of the high priest of an age of prose and reason." And an even higher heroic tone was being taken by Swinburne in the same year "The Study of Poetry" appeared:

And what a spirit it was! how fiery bright and dauntless! … It rouses the blood, it kindles the heart, to remember what an indomitable force of heroic spirit, and sleepless always as fire, was inclosed in the pitiful body of the misshapen weakling whose whole life was spent in fighting the good fight of sense against folly, of light against darkness, of human speech against brute silence, of truth and reason and manhood against all the banded bestialities of all dunces and all dastards, all blackguardly blockheads and all blockheaded blackguards, who then as now were misbegotten by malignity on dulness. ["A Century of English Poetry," Fortnightly Review (October 1880),]

One sees what Arnold had to contend with. Yet it was convenient for the twentieth-century estimate of Pope, in its beginnings in Bloomsbury, to take Arnold's estimate as representing the nineteenth century in toto. Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf admired the feeling rationality of Pope and his contemporaries—what Strachey, who aspired to it himself, appreciatively called "civilization illuminated by animosity"—largely because it so neatly rebuked the muddle of high principles, pomposity, and aggressive coarseness of taste in the Victorian ancestors they were so anxious to live down. In the charming prank she called a biography of Pope, Edith Sitwell put the new mood with characteristic verve:

A large section of the public has not yet recovered from the cold, damp mossiness that has blighted the public taste for the last fifty or even sixty years; and to these people, Pope is not one of the greatest of our poets, one of the most loveable of men, but a man who was deformed in spirit as in body … This general blighting and withering of the poetic taste is the result of the public mind having been overshadowed by such Aberdeen-granite tombs and monuments as Matthew Arnold—is the result, also, of the substitution of scholar for poet, of school-inspector for artist. [Alexander Pope (1930)]

One loves Pope in order to punish those one does not love, and the famous deformities make the preference all the more cruel—"What can such a nice girl see in him?" poor Arnold is imagined jealously asking. Bloomsbury does to public taste, in Arnold's name, what Arnold in his day did to public taste in Pope's name.

Now if compelled to choose, which of us would not prefer Arnold's "culture" to Lytton Strachey's "civilization," even if it meant losing Pope? High seriousness is at least serious, if rather high. But the idea of such a choice is a nice historical irony—Arnold wins the argument, in effect, by establishing the terms in which even Pope's better champions, outside Bloomsbury, show that he loses it. For Eliot and Pound, though their main stakes were elsewhere, Pope could be invoked to show a "hard" sensibility that measured the softness of a received and debased tradition. (If Pope, of all people, was good, then Milton, Shelley, and Tennyson were really out of luck.) For Empson, whose Seven Types in 1930 gave him more attention than anyone except Shakespeare and put him to some of the best "close reading" he's received, Pope was excellent proof of the complexity of motive good poetry reveals. For Leavis, Pope carried the healthy seventeenth-century "line of wit" farther than Eliot's scheme allowed, while embodying a positive integrity of culture and imagination that later ages would try to vulgarize or destroy. For American "New Critics" like Brooks and Tate, Pope demonstrated the "anti-Platonic" energy of wit and paradox. For Geoffrey Tillotson Pope showed the validity of "period" conventions of style we had forgot how to understand; for Maynard Mack he showed the rhetorical operations of the neoclassical genres, especially satire; for Reuben Brower he showed how poetry is made of other poetry, particularly the classical poets Pope's age felt in their brains as we feel Joyce and Eliot in ours; for a current generation of scholar-critics he shows how poetry contains the stuff of intellectual history, the philosophical, religious, political, and economic assumptions of an age. For Marshall McLuhan (to end a tiring list with a bang) the Dunciad gives a true account of how Gutenbergian typography detaches words from their meanings and ushers "the polite world back into primitivism, the Africa within, and above all, the unconscious."

This summary is of course cavalier and superficial; the study of Pope has been one of the finest achievements of our age of critical redefinition. Yet that achievement is significantly colored, and inhibited, by Arnold's terms. We deny that Pope was, in Arnold's sense, the high priest of an age of prose and reason by substituting for "prose and reason" qualities more to our taste—and to Arnold's, some of them. We find "imagination" in the wit of his imagery, organizational control rather than pedantry in his allusions, moral and metaphysical seriousness in his "social" attitudes and ironies; in general he serves as a useful corrective to a too narrow idea of poetry. Quite so, these findings are right—yet in effect we may only have redefined "prose and reason" as something better for Pope to be the high priest of, some other state of mind and culture he positively and masterfully can represent.

Our age understands more than Arnold about the nature of Pope's materials, the expressiveness of his poetic "prose" and the issues at play beneath the surface of his "reason"; but I doubt that we have sufficiently asked whether his relation to those materials is priestlike. Does our approval of Pope mean as much as it seems to? Do we read him for pleasure as we do other great poets? Do students find him as exciting as we tell them they should? Do teachers fight and scheme to teach him as they do to teach Shakespeare, Blake, Yeats, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth? In short, does Pope occupy minds today as something more than a little treasury of marvelous passages, and of brilliant exegetical moments in the masters of modern criticism? We can "analyze" his verse beautifully, appreciate his relation to his culture ancient and modern, see how the genres contributed to his art; but have we really grasped the pleasures, and the difficulties, of his poems as whole literary experiences?

I want to suggest that Pope's perspective on his own "civilization," what Arnold meant by prose and reason, was in its own way no less questioning and skeptical than Arnold's perspective on his, or ours on our own. And Pope's perspective is implicit in his way of organizing his materials, in the demands his "extensive" kind of poetry makes on the mind as one reads. My example will be Epistle II of the Essay on Man, a poem which, more than Pope's others, presents itself as reasoned, sequential discourse and seems to deny itself the digressive excitements of satire. Here Pope is as close as he ever gets to talking like a high priest, an official spokesman who knows the answers and aims to tell the truth for his reader's own good. Though sequential interpretation can be tedious, it may be useful to look through the Epistle part by part, to see what its way of progressing suggests about Pope's relation to his own poetic art.

Epistle II begins memorably with the great "glory, jest, and riddle" passage, which from its location both summarizes the attack in Epistle I on "Presumptuous Man" for failing to apprehend the implicit order in creation and establishes the ground for what follows, the account of passion's role in human experience:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl'd:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Maynard Mack's notes for these eighteen lines in the "Twickenham" edition run to more than a hundred lines of small type, with dozens of references to Pascal, Montaigne, Hooker, Milton, Robert Gould, Bezaleel Morrice, and other thoughtful worthies. Pope was well aware of the ethical traditions behind him, and Mack admirably explains the relation of Epistle II to the philosophical design of the whole poem. Yet that design seems more coherent in Mack's exegesis than it does in reading the poem; in this passage one feels a complexity of attitude that derives from the "background" but that also expresses a particular, dramatically "located" state of mind which the ideas themselves don't wholly account for.

That confident, magisterial first couplet seems to settle things—now that we know our proper study, all should be well. Yet what follows is unsettling. We are the pitifully confused thing we should study; and how can it hope to study itself? The antithetical, oxymoron-ridden verse patterns emphasize man's isthmian place in the creation, the terrible paradoxes of his nature—our nature. But once "Man" becomes "he," a third person both poet and reader can stand aside from, the paradoxes seem not to be personally menacing problems but the substance of a familiar and intelligible human situation. The contradictions in man's nature, that is, become material for speculative conversation—this is the voice of someone who "talks that way" and with whom we can thus be fairly comfortable, though (like Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern listening to "what a piece of work is a man") we risk something by assuming we know how to take such a message from such a voice.

But the rather abrupt rise of sarcasm in the following attack on speculative intellect—"Go, wondrous creature! mount where Science guides"—disturbs the reader's new-found composure. We can accept the general proposition that man is an absurd mixture of jarring natures, we've heard that before, but it hurts when intellectual heroes like Newton and Boyle (to say nothing of Plato!)—men we admire and are proud to claim as fellow creatures—are put to ridicule. And indeed the indulgence in an exhilarating Juvenalian, or Swiftian, animus ("Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule—/ Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!") does yield to a kind of control:

Superior beings, when of late they saw
A mortal Man unfold all Nature's law,
Admir'd such wisdom in an earthly shape,
And shew'd a NEWTON as we shew an Ape.

This puts Newton in his place, but it's not simply a ludicrous place. It makes some sense to value apes for their surprising and charming resemblances to us, and there's some comfort in hearing that "superior beings" aren't wholly unlike us in their pleasures. If Newton thinks the universe centers upon him, then the lines are a terrible affront; but if he understands (as Pope wants us to do) that the creation is a design of overlapping hierarchies in which apes, men, and superior beings have a mutual relation that shames none of them, he will find the remark as complimentary as it is satirical and limiting.

The point is that this opening section is made up of movements and countermovements of feeling, false starts, interruptions, and collisions. The poetic mind that examines man's isthmian nature also demonstrates it in its own noticeable shifts of emphasis and outlook. Elsewhere in this volume Paul J. Alpers speaks of the "seamless" effect of Milton's blank verse, one's sense that new material grows out of what has gone before without evident transitions or connections, like a tapestry endlessly unrolling before the eye. Pope's couplet verse, here and elsewhere, works quite differently—passages are being arranged as we watch, visibly put together for maximum effect like pieces of furniture in a large room, or like ideas in the Lockeian mind. (Even the self-containment of Pope's couplets suggests that "parts" are being arranged, that the verse moves not through "organic" growth but through a conscious and even ostentatious "art.") This is not, of course, mere "interior decoration," but the process of a poetry that confesses and makes a virtue of the uncertain, provisional nature of its own effects. The making of a rational doctrine—what Pope's prose "Arguments" for the four Epistles try to convey—is as much upset as advanced by a moment like the Newton-ape passage, which is less a contribution to the "thought" of the poem than a cue to a properly complex response to it, a response that in a way is also a resistance to the thought.

I am suggesting that Pope's is an art that makes visible its own difficulties in achieving structural coherence and doctrinal clarity. Epistle II shows him trying to accommodate doctrine to moral imagination, by finding and releasing elements in the traditional psychology of reason-and-passion that could support his own interest in irrational energy without sanctioning utter mindlessness. From Newton he moves rather abruptly to "Self-love" and "Reason" as the defining terms of isthmian self-awareness. It is not an exciting stretch of poetry, but in his analogies for self-love—the spring of motion in the mind's clockwork without which human life would be only a vegetable cycle, a kind of mental eyesight that takes short but intense views—one can at least see him searching for the best that can be said for unregulated passion, and the verse finally does wake up a bit:

In lazy Apathy let Stoics boast
Their Virtue fix'd; 'tis fix'd as in a frost,
Contracted all, retiring to the breast;
But strength of mind is Exercise, not Rest:
The rising tempest puts in act the soul,
Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole.
On life's vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but Passion is the gale;
Nor God alone in the still calm we find,
He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind.

As usual when the issue crystalizes into an object, a human embodiment of error like the lazy Stoic, Pope gets down to poetic business, here that of finding and sustaining a tone feelingly vigorous enough to support the claims being made for the value of passionate activity.

The culminating analogy for the relation of Reason and Passion comes here, and it stresses the difficult complexity of their interaction:

Passions, like Elements, tho' born to fight,
Yet, mix'd and soften'd, in his [God's] work unite:
These 'tis enough to temper and employ;
But what composes Man, can Man destroy?
Suffice that Reason keep to Nature's road,
Subject, compound them, follow her and God.
Love, Hope, and Joy, fair pleasure's smiling train,
Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of pain;
These mix'd with art, and to due bounds confin'd,
Make and maintain the balance of the mind:
The light and shades, whose well accorded strife
Gives all the strength and colour of our life.

Reason, God's "work," operates on the passions like a painter mixing and modifying his colors, creating balance out of elements that would glaringly clash if no such composing art held them in accord. The analogy was commonplace in ethical theory, and one sees why. Where the writer or musician in effect makes something of nothing—the words or sounds he "creates" are not the paper and ink he uses—the painter organizes what already exists. The finished painting is only the paint he began with, though wonderfully modified by what he has done with it. The passage says quite directly that such an ethical "art" is possible and desirable. Our life can be beautiful if we let reason exercise its composing powers. The conventionality of the terms—"fair pleasure's smiling train," "the family of pain"—does seem tacitly to confess that such an art ends in virtual cliché, like allegorical painting: the balanced mind isn't very novel or glamorous. But "the strength and colour of our life" ends the passage with a hopeful touch of vividness and affirmation.

But the Epistle is less than half finished, and this resolved mood is shadowed by the pages yet unturned, the lines we know remain to be read. Incompleteness was hinted at by "confin'd" and "strife," the rhyme words that may not be entirely appeased by their echo in "mind" and "life." (The rhymes indeed make us remember, not forget, the tension implicit in "balance.") And the next passage, though it begins with assured delight in a work compatible with the art of reason ("Pleasures are ever in our hands and eyes"), soon runs into a challenging qualification: "All spread their charms, but charm not all alike." Minds are not regular and uniform; receptivity to the objects of rational pleasure differs from man to man, and in each man one "master Passion" lurks, "like Aaron's serpent," to crowd out the other passions that should be part of the balanced whole. "The ruling passion is the manifestation of God's power," says the "Twickenham" note on Aaron's serpent, but as "Man" we consider the allusion as much from the viewpoint of Pharaoh and his magicians—it's an unnatural mystery that shakes our belief in the dignity of our own powers—as from Moses' and God's viewpoint. And this return to uncertainty is confirmed by lines 133-144, where the "lurking principle of death" in the youngest and healthiest constitution is the figure for the ruling passion, "the Mind's disease" which, fed by imagination, concentrates in one spot the "vital humour" that should nourish the whole psychic economy. The "dang'rous art" of imagination subverts the art of reason and we are back on the dark isthmus, in the chaos of thought and passion we supposed the analogy with art had transformed into "the balance of the mind."

This seems to be the crux of the ethical problem. Reason, which should control and guide natural impulse into integration of the self, seems in practice only a grim judge condemning our folly without helping us overcome it: "What can she more than tell us we are fools?" Epistle II manfully seeks a positive answer, but Pope's art in effect shows that it really has no answer—that the reason of the ethical poet, the authority by which he condemns bad men and praises good ones, is always provisional and ad hoc, an unprovable instinct that acts powerfully in negative modes but is virtually helpless to accomplish its purpose of satiric correction. To tell the rational truth about Sporus, Cibber, Atticus, Atossa, or Timon is to punish them so severely as to fix them in their defiant antipathy to truth and nature; and all the Men of Ross in the world won't lead them back to virtue's paths once Pope's reason has pronounced sentence upon them. In practice we either rationalize our vices into self-justification or conceive a horror of self from which there's no exit into positive, active virtue.

In short, the isthmian mood returns in the middle of Epistle II in a form that strikes closer to home than the large ethical commonplaces we admired but were so well able to bear in the opening lines. The verse of the middle sections is quieter, more abstract and discursive, than the high rhetoric earlier; but if anything this makes the mood harder to resist, less "placeable" as poetic or philosophical mannerism. Even so, Pope works hard at mitigating this dark idea of reason's practical impotence. "Nature" is invoked as authorizing a view of reason as "no guide, but still a guard"; all men are at least consistent in their individual passionate fixations, though the consistency may be trivial or pathetic and ultimately self-defeating:

Thro' life 'tis follow'd, ev'n at life's expence;
The merchant's toil, the sage's indolence,
The monk's humility, the hero's pride,
All, all alike, find Reason on their side.

Reason is simply that which transmits natural energy into usable social forms; like delicate fruits grafted on "savage stocks …the surest Virtues thus from Passions shoot, / Wild Nature's vigor working at the root" as anger is transformed to "zeal and fortitude," avarice to "prudence," pride and shame to "Virtue" (chastity), and so on. Reason is less a faculty than a disposition of mind, a channel through which passion flows and, in its passage, is purified into "civilized" behavior—virtue comes, as it were, not from repression but from sublimation.

Pope tries hopefully to see the passivity of reason both as transformational medium and as the instrument that measures the resulting differentiation between "negative" impulse and "positive" virtue: "This light and darkness in our chaos join'd / What shall divide? The God within the mind." Yet this couplet sums up a passage on the virtuous potential of villainy that seems very precarious (Nero and Cataline are so established in their evil roles by history as to make the thought that they could have been good seem empty theorizing—"Nero reigns a Titus, if he will," but he won't, he didn't) and from the metaphor of sorting out emerges a new and less hopeful appeal to the mixing of effects in painting:

Extremes in Nature equal ends produce,
In Man they join to some mysterious use;
Tho' each by turns the other's bounds invade,
As, in some well-wrought picture, light and shade,
And oft so mix, the diff'rence is too nice
Where ends the Virtue, and begins the Vice.

These lines are a kind of miniature of the larger movement of the poem. The positive claim for the "mysterious use" of extremes is made; but what follows dwells not upon the use, the achievement of "balance," as above, but the mystery, in four lines of concession that pull against the hopeful commonplace. Here painting signifies not integration of opposites but the impossibility of telling light from shade, virtue from vice, in a well-made picture of human character. As usual, Pope's dialectic moves away from synthesis when it seems to have been achieved—it unresolves what had seemed settled. Though we (addressed as "Fools!") are immediately warned that we know very well the difference between vice and virtue, this stubborn common sense appeals not to reason but, as the "Twickenham" note says, to an "intuitive" apprehension that vice and virtue exist and are different. We get so used to our own vices as to think them less dreadful than our neighbors, but this is only because custom and self-interest film over the ugliness we naturally recognize at first sight.

This section of the epistle seems a jumble of claims, concessions, and qualifications that is almost impossible to follow as "argument." But we miss the point, I think, if we simply judge Pope a bad philosopher and the poem therefore faulty. Rather, in Pope's very visible difficulty in reconciling the ethical doctrines philosophers offer us, something significant is expressed. A poet's mind lets us see what it is doing—making poetry out of lumps of philosophy that resist becoming poetry. The mind that can't quite resolve these ideas into coherent unity is a recognizably human one, by no means immune to the weakness and error it finds in the mind of "Man." Whatever we make of the argument, we can follow the ethical poet's refusal to ignore or sentimentalize human folly as it struggles against his determination to salvage from the chaos some basis (almost any will do) for continuation of life within that chaos. The qualification and redirection of points, the shifts of tone and mood, express not mere confusion but a visible and meaningful dissatisfaction with what one can say, what one has said, about the nature of moral consciousness. Pope shares some of Eliot's understanding of the hopelessness, and the absolute necessity, of philosophical poetry, where each attempt at truth is

Pope's view of "emotion" is less austere than this, but despite its assertive moments the general tone of the Essay on Man is anything but confident and cheerful. Not the substance of a doctrine, but the activity of trying to formulate it satisfactorily—and only partly succeeding, and knowing that the success is only partial—is what Pope most powerfully expresses.

The making of poetry out of resistances to one's own doctrinal impulses is especially clear and impressive in the last section (VI) of Epistle II. In a long passage Pope first seems to arrive at the goal, a mood (if not a coherent argument) that sums up and turns to positive account the hesitations and contradictions that have accumulated. All men are virtuous and vicious in idiosyncratic ways, but "HEAVEN'S great view is One, and that the Whole"—God counteracts our weakness by assigning to each man the "happy frailty" that suits his station. The "glory, jest, and riddle" formula is converted into terms that seem to answer and resolve it—"[Heaven] builds on wants, and on defects on mind, / The joy, the peace, the glory of Mankind"—and Pope goes on to praise Society as the gift of heaven that puts passion and weakness into a reciprocal play that serves all needs:

Wants, frailties, passions, closer still ally
The common int'rest, or endear the tie:
To these we owe true friendship, love sincere,
Each home-felt joy that life inherits here:
Yet from the same we learn, in its decline,
Those joys, those loves, those int'rests to resign:
Taught half by Reason, half by mere decay,
To welcome death, and calmly pass away.

There is still a half-turn ("Yet from the same…) from positive to qualifying negative, but the dying fall delicately makes death seem a necessary and acceptable completion of "life." The Epistle could end here.

But of course it doesn't, and the thirty-four concluding lines are astonishing in this context—as well as being, independent of context, one of Pope's finest pieces of poetry. "Half by Reason, half by mere decay" recalls something the analysis of reason and passion has largely obscured, the biological imperative, so to speak, that shadowed the opening lines but had little part in the ethical speculations that followed. Life reconciles you to the self you are—such has been the Epistle's hopeful burden—but the result looks different from another perspective:

The learn'd is happy nature to explore,
The fool is happy that he knows no more;
The rich is happy in the plenty giv'n,
The poor contents him with the care of Heav'n.
See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,
The sot a hero, lunatic a king;
The starving chemist in his golden views
Supremely blest, the poet in his muse.

Happiness may indeed compensate for our deficiencies, but a world of dancing blindmen, singing cripples, drunks and madmen convinced of their own heroic grandeur, obsessed alchemists and "inspired" poets, is no happy prospect to the rational reader. This is the world of Swift's "Digression on Madness," the world of the misers in To Bathurst who starve themselves to fatten their bank accounts, the world of the poor compulsive scribbler in Arbuthnot who "lock'd from Ink and Paper, scrawls / With desp'rate Charcoal round his darken'd walls," the world of nonsense that oozes from the inner sanctuary of Dulness herself:

Hence the Fool's paradise, the Statesman's scheme,
The air-built Castle, and the golden Dream,
The Maid's romantic wish, the Chymist's flame,
And Poet's vision of eternal fame.
(Dunciad,)

Such happiness heartbreakingly feeds on delusion and suffering, and the visionary intensity of Pope's "See" mixes rapt fascination with an almost unbearable pitying wisdom—this is what heaven offers to make our isthmian lot endurable!

At this moment it is hard to value the doctrinal point, that passionate self-deception is God's way of allowing man to live at all. Once you know what Pope knows in these lines, their consoling power mostly disappears. He does try to regain the "philosophical" perspective:

See some strange comfort ev'ry state attend,
And Pride bestow'd on all, a common friend;
See some fit Passion ev'ry age supply,
Hope travels thro', nor quits us when we die.

But the terms and implications clash with the doctrine. That persistent "Hope" is what sustains the Dunces, the obsessed women of To a Lady, the lost souls at the end of To Cobham whose hopeful deaths merely re-enact the compulsive follies that ruined their lives. "Some strange comfort" is not said by someone who takes much comfort in it himself, and while "a common friend" tries to mean a mutual, impartial one, it comes close to meaning an indiscriminate one, notoriously available to all like a common alehouse or a common whore. (A friend who's everyone's friend seems no friend at all; and of course the antecedent for all this is Pride.) And what follows offers strange comfort indeed:

Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law,
Pleas'd with a rattle, tickled with a straw:
Some livelier play-thing gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite:
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage;
And beads and pray'r-books are the toys of age:
Pleas'd with this bauble still, as that before;
'Till tir'd he sleeps, and Life's poor play is o'er!

Jaques' "strange eventful history" of the ages of man is seen here with more compassion but equal melancholy; for Pope "Life's poor play" defines man less as actor than child, indulged by "kindly" nature and unable to grow up to put away childish things. Again, the voice that speaks knows better, yet can't really insist on its superior wisdom—we have not been reconciled to the isthmian state but made to feel its inadequacy and folly even more poignantly.

And this discontent, what the poem vows to talk us out of, is not appeased but further exacerbated by the final reappearance of the analogy with painting, which now stresses the illusory quality of the attitudes that sustain us:

Mean-while Opinion gilds with varying rays
Those painted clouds that beautify our days;
Each want of happiness by Hope supply'd,
And each vacuity of sense by Pride:
These build as fast as knowledge can destroy;
In Folly's cup still laughs the bubble, joy;
One prospect lost, another still we gain;
And not a vanity is giv'n in vain;
Ev'n mean Self-love becomes, by force divine,
The scale to measure others wants by thine.
See! and confess, one comfort still must rise,
'Tis this, Tho' Man's a fool, yet GOD IS WISE.

The doctrine is adequately preserved—man's folly proves God's wisdom in giving comforts even to foolish creatures. But the final couplet is imaginatively less "final" for coming after such a vision of human futility. To see and confess one's folly requires that one be wise enough to recognize it as folly and desire something better—yet according to the poem that desire is itself foolish. The difficult argument leads back to its beginning, the dark isthmus from which both mainlands are always poignantly visible but unattainable. Still, if the proper study is circular and frustrating, the proper student, the reader, has learned something. He now can see what is left unsaid by pronouncements about The Human Condition; he knows that "philosophy" as doctrinal product matters less than the activity of trying to produce it, the continual redefining and shifting of emphasis required to think seriously about the case.

When one asks what post-Arnoldian criticism of Pope has not sufficiently taken account of, so simple a matter as the poems' length comes to mind. The Horatian imitations, for example, are all longer than their originals, on average more than fifty percent longer; and if some of the excess is due to the relative prolixity of an uninflected language, still, English isn't that much wordier than Latin, and the concision of Pope's couplet English is proverbial. It is rather startling to realize that the Dunciad is longer than "Prufrock," The Waste Land, Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets combined, and even the shorter major poems run to several hundred lines. And the scale is not supported by the devices one expects in long poems. No full-length story is told, at least not in any direct and efficient way; the perspectives of history or allegory are incompletely developed when they figure at all; there is, apart from Eloisa to Abelard, no intensive representation of a particular consciousness "personally" involved in its own experience. (The voice in Arbuthnot and the other "personal" satires is at least as much "the satirist" as he is "Pope.") It is usually hard to grasp the connection between a passage in Pope while reading it and a significant whole order of progression in the poem. There seems something provisional, potentially alterable, about the arrangement of parts; and of course Pope often did write "parts," passages that would later be fitted into poems, and many of his best works were rewritten, rearranged, added to or cut down, as second thoughts suggested new possibilities.

The lengthiness of the poems makes him a nuisance to anthologists, who must either print inferior shorter poems, truncate several of the masterpieces, or print one or two major poems in entirety and so exclude other aspects of a richly various body of work. And the anthologists' problem is in a way our critical problem too, since even learned readers mostly possess the poetic tradition as a kind of big personal anthology of favorites into which short poems fit better than long ones unless the latter are broken up into storable and retrievable "beauties." Pope belongs in that anthology, and prominently, but the great moments fit better than the poems. Or, if one abandons the anthology and gets down to work on Pope himself, it is easier and tidier to transform long and relatively "unstructured" works into a synthetic order made of selected passages, which when released from the whole context are more available for one's purposes—image tracing, genre definition, allusion hunting, intellectual historiography, whatever it is we "do." These things are worth doing, they help us to understand Pope as Arnold or even Johnson couldn't; but our sense of parts may interfere with an understanding of whole poems.

My account of Epistle II of the Essay on Man may roughly suggest a way of thinking about what Pope's long poems are like. By this account, the poem is a collection of moments assembled to cast light on or even interfere with each other. Some of the moments are memorable in themselves, others tend to fade when the eye leaves the page. And their order may seem tentative and logically loose—we remember what we remember not as a progressive, unfolding design but as a complex overlaying of conflicting attitudes and feelings that are not perfectly governed by the poem as formal object or generic instance. The Rape of the Lock is a well-made poem, perhaps Pope's most brilliant "design"; yet one remembers better the moments of excessive intensity—the sad and curiously useless wisdom of Clarissa's speech, for example, as it picks up earlier, glancing suggestions of the futility and pathos of merely "social" existence—than the splendid moments that grasp and place social details in the teasingly ironic main picture. The Essay on Criticism rehearses the standard neoclassical literary dicta, but only (as Empson shows) through jokes about Wit confessing that the kind of writer Pope is, while superior to the mere witlings who mostly make up the world of poetry and criticism, is yet from the perspective of truly great writers, the Ancients, rather small potatoes; what the Rules don't teach is finally more important than what they do. The Essay on Man and the Moral Essays represent a struggle between an ethical theory and a particular awareness of vice and folly that the theory can't quite take care of; the Epistle to Arbuthnot and the Epilogue to the Satires dramatize the virtual impossibility of reforming uncivilized behavior with the resources of civilized irony; the Dunciad is so confusing in plot and action because it is so insistent and thorough in detail, because the "myth" of Dulness can't wholly accommodate the passion of Pope's response to actual dunces or his fascination with the processes of degeneration that his "civilization" compels him to abhor.

Pope's poetry, that is, has less (though less is not nothing) to do with the neoclassical qualities of formal order, reasoned argument, logical coherence of parts, urbanity of manner, than we have tended to suppose. His verse is more than a way of presenting the data and skills of "Augustan" literary culture. I am convinced that the poems are not harmonious, resolved wholes, and that they are none the worse as poems therefore. They don't make sense taken as narrative or discursive orders like Paradise Lost or The Prelude; they do make "dramatic" sense only if one conceives of wit and poetry and Pope in terms that do more than turn the tables on Arnold. The past changes as we change, obviously, and the twentieth century might want to think Pope more like Eliot and Pound and the Stevens of the longer poems than like Milton or Wordsworth. If we think of his as a "visible" art—one that depends on recognizing and participating in logical and emotional discontinuity, juxtaposition of contradictory tones and moods, imperfect adjustment of feeling to convention—we might understand and enjoy him better.

So large and vague a suggestion of course solves nothing; I mean only to suggest that our view of Pope may be too comfortable, that his poems pose more difficulty than they seem to. One doesn't want to have to put on an imaginary periwig to read him, coming to him only by forgetting who and where we really are. On the other hand, too much "relevance" is worse than none at all—Pope is not simply a "modern" poet, and we must see and respect his differences from us because they are what he has to teach us. His poetry is not just a collection of fine passages, yet it really won't do to claim for it the "thematic" or "structural" or "imagistic" integrity we have invented to describe Shakespeare or the novelists or the lyric poets. He is more than the drawing-room wit his enemies think him, yet views of him as Swinburnian hero or McLuhanesque pivotal mind run into his own skeptical amusement about such pretensions even in himself. If he was in some sense a Christian poet, his religious moments usually sound like rhetorical devices; and his beliefs, such as they may have been, don't strongly bear on the subjects and moods his poetry takes as its imaginative province.

It may be better to accept these contradictions than to try to resolve them, seeing him as an artist imperfectly convinced that his own art worked, or that any human art could achieve its highest intentions. In the poems assertion and denial, positive hope and worldly skepticism, visibly confront and criticize each other. Progressive design turns back on itself questioningly, so that "endings" are usually inconclusive or despairing, as in To Bathurst, the Epilogue, or the Dunciad. Or, when the positive note is struck, as at the end of The Rape of the Lock, the Essay on Man, To Burlington, or Arbuthnot, one at least recognizes that it has been hard earned, that something has had to be left out to make the final major chord feasible. This is not to claim for him some tragic sense of life, only a wonderful power of perceiving the limits of secularized imagination and of letting us see that he sees them.

Modern criticism has excellently told the main truth about Pope, that he is a poet, that the great moments are fully imagined, complex, rich in evoked feeling, mature in moral intelligence. But the criticism is most useful and interesting when it asks how the poems render a mind at work—Empson and Brower are especially helpful here—and as yet it hasn't taken this direction often and fully enough. We know a great deal about Pope's "civilization," the cultural materials, ideas of personal style, and assumptions about literary manner and intention out of which he made poems. But it is not the mere possession of ideas and techniques, but possessing them in particular, potentially unstable ways that defines his civilization, which remains open to its discontents, the difficult possibilities its official tenets and assumptions tend to exclude. If he believed in prose and reason, it was because they were impossible; if he was a high priest, his sermons show his awareness that the church might fall on him at any moment. In a way, as Arnold saw, he was the wrong man to have taken on the task of realizing in English the shape and substance of what his age took to be the "classical" state of mind; in another way, that very wrongness is what makes his poems so compelling and potentially so congenial to the twentieth century, if—as of course I have failed to do, too—it can ever get Arnold out of its head.