SOURCE: “Introduction: Imitation and Commerce,” in Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense; Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 1-14.

[In the following essay, Morris discusses Pope's attitudes toward the literary past, particularly his “veneration” of Dryden's poetry, in terms of both the classical theory of mimesis and contemporary mercantile doctrines of trade.]

The best history of a writer is contained in his writings—these are his chief actions.

—George Eliot

Only a handful of writers are sufficiently central that we name whole ages after them. Thus we speak of an Age of Wordsworth but not an Age of Keats, a Pound Era but not a Williams Era or an Age of Frost. Alexander Pope is the major poet of his century, and the period of his lifetime (1688-1744) might be justly called, give or take a few years, the Age of Pope. Pope's importance, however, extends far beyond his own times. Few major poets remain so unfailingly controversial, for Pope has deeply divided readers in almost every subsequent generation. (His gift for attracting enemies seems inseparable from his poetic virtues and large talent for friendship.) Questions of morality no doubt generate much of the divisiveness; even after two hundred years his motives and conduct still inspire lively dispute. Yet, questions about Pope's morality do not fully explain his knack of transforming readers into passionate advocates or adversaries. He continues to engage us, I believe, especially because his work requires us to clarify and to articulate our differences about literature itself. It demands that we reconsider such primary issues as the uses of tradition, the value of rhyme, and the place of doctrine in poetry. We must redefine what we mean by imitation and originality, by open and closed form. We must test our beliefs about the moral stance of the poet, about the nature of style, about didactic verse, about wit and reason and imagination as poetic resources—about the relation between life and art. Pope is more than a gifted writer from a distant age whose writing still commands attention. He has become fundamental to our ways of thinking about literature.

The purpose of this book is to offer a perspective on Pope which will allow a better understanding of his achievement and importance. Perspective is a crucial matter, because Pope remains identified by many of his readers (and many who have not read his work) with the smallest fragment of his genius: the heroic couplet. Most academic studies have unintentionally helped to distance or to diminish Pope by offering us only two main ways of encountering his work, as in a film that consists entirely of close-ups or panoramas. We view him neither through the detailed analysis of individual poems and of special topics or through bird's-eye surveys which glance swiftly and superficially over his entire career. In the years since Reuben A. Brower's Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (1959) only a few critical books—introductions aside—have attempted to discuss at length the whole range of Pope's work, and even Brower circumscribed his study by emphasizing Pope's debt to the classical tradition, especially to “Homer and the Roman poets.”¹ As in Brower's distinguished study, for example, the emphasis upon a special topic or controlling theme necessarily introduces additional problems of perspective by excluding or by blurring whatever falls outside a unifying focus. (Thus Pope's classicism needs to be understood in relation to his concern—not always disapproving—for contemporary culture and for popular writing: he enjoyed such unclassical works as Gulliver's Travels, The Beggar's Opera, and Robinson Crusoe.) A writer as diverse as Pope demands in his readers a perspective both comprehensive and flexible, one which offers more than a choice between rapid sketches in bold outline and the scrutiny of magnified pieces. We need a perspective which encourages us to see Pope as a life-size, three-dimensional, changing figure. We need studies which are detailed but not fragmentary, extensive but not merely general, which permit us a spectator's freedom to shift our points of view. If no single study can accomplish such an impossible combination of virtues, it is essential to respect the diversity of such an elusive and many-sided writer.

The problems of perspective are further complicated by Pope's troublesome multiplicity, for his character and art confront us with strangely incongruent figures. There is the bawdy Pope, the polite Pope, Pope the scholar, Pope the gardener. There is the London wit, the country gentleman, the plain-dealer, the genteel equivocator. There is the gallant, the outsider, the man of moderation, the heroic extremist, the faithful son, the devoted enemy, the trickster, the philosopher, and the rake. Like Proteus, his nature seems centered, if a stable center exists, in the power to assume different shapes. It is easier to make sense of Pope if we narrow our gaze to a single fragment of his character, such as the familiar poet of retirement and limitation who gives voice to all the verities of neoclassicism. A more comprehensive study, however, must offer us a less manageable portrait—diverse, copious, changing, contradictory—like mankind as depicted in Pope's two puzzling epistles on human character.

An exhaustive study of Pope might begin with the moment when Pope began his own literary studies, but in a poet so precocious and so devious (who, quoting Ovid, reports that he lisped in verse) such unrecoverable origins recede indefinitely. Even as a child, Pope seems never wholly outside the world of literature. Perhaps the best substitute for a moment of poetic origin—the occasion when the poet first dedicates himself to poetry—is Pope's encounter as a child with the seventy-year-old poet and playwright John Dryden. “I saw Mr. Dryden when I was about twelve years old,” Pope recalled to Joseph Spence. “I remember his face, for I looked upon him with the greatest veneration even then, and observed him very particularly.”² This encounter at Will's Coffee House had not been left to chance. Pope had persuaded a friend to bring him to Will's—where Dryden regularly held court—hoping to see the greatest writer of the age. To the young Pope, Dryden was not simply a celebrated literary man but the epitome of a poet. Pope at twelve was carefully observing not just an individual but a role, a vocation, an archetype.

The “veneration” (implying almost religious awe) with which Pope gazed at Dryden tells us a great deal about Pope. As he once implied in referring to the encounter at Will's, he saw in Dryden something like the legendary dimensions of Virgil. Nor did this patriarchal stature diminish as Pope gained experience in recognizing Dryden's faults. At sixteen he had undertaken with the aging William Wycherley a strained and posturing literary correspondence, and the unpublished young poet needed no prompting to share his thoughts about Dryden. “I think with you,” he replied agreeably to Wycherley, “that whatever lesser Wits have risen since his Death, are but like Stars appearing when the Sun is set.”³ So imposing was Dryden to Pope that even his absence seemed, like night, a form of lingering presence. Although Pope spent ten years translating Homer and editing Shakespeare, although he was one of the earliest admirers of Milton, and although he borrowed ideas or appropriated phrases from writers in at least four languages in a literary heritage extending from the Bible to Matthew Prior, yet, as he worked to secure his character and reputation as a poet, his closest kinship was with the man (like Pope, a Roman Catholic) who was the most important writer of the previous age. Dryden's words and rhythms and thoughts make a continual reappearance throughout the works of his extraordinarily allusive successor. It is hardly surprising that Pope kept a picture of Dryden in his chamber, along with portraits of Shakespeare and of Milton.

The influence of a great writer often causes later writers to experience a form of anxiety. Pope's relation to Dryden, however, does not reveal the strains of psychic and literary conflict that Harold Bloom discovers in Romantic and in post-Romantic writers. Pope's emotions are instead disarmingly direct: “Many people would like my ode on music better,” he states matter-of-factly, “if Dryden had never written on that subject.”⁴ The judgment is probably correct. It certainly exposes no dark and intricate turns of anxiety, no oedipal designs on Dryden's muse, no latent fears of castration, no patricidal desire—only respect mingled with diffident self-regard. When Pope came to translate the Iliad and the Odyssey, he again encountered the looming presence of Dryden, who had published translations of scattered passages from Homer. “Had he translated the whole Work,” Pope confessed sensibly, “I would no more have attempted Homer after him than Virgil, his Version of whom (notwithstanding some human Errors) is the most noble and spirited Translation I know in any Language.”⁵ Pope's parenthesis is not an instance of mean-spirited detraction—damaged praise—but the expression of discriminating independence—the judicious criticism of one who knows, as opposed to servile or dutiful flattery. (Dryden himself publicly deplored his own haste in composition.) It might be possible to uncover traces of anxiety or envy in Pope's silences, to discover occasions when he ought to have praised Dryden but did not—as in the roll call of exemplary critics which concludes An Essay on Criticism. Yet, silent omissions, where they can be reasonably discovered, prove little. Pope borrowed more without acknowledgment than any major poet except Shakespeare. Psychoanalytical speculation about his latent anxieties, even if fascinating, overlooks the central feature of Pope's literary relation with Dryden. His relation to the past was not governed by oedipal themes or buried laws of the psyche, but by two formerly powerful and closely related forces: the classical theory of mimesis and the mercantile doctrines of trade.

For Pope, the classical theory of imitation specified the poet's main task not as the pursuit of radical uniqueness—what a later generation meant by “originality”—but as the imitation of nature. The imitation of nature, of course, included the imitation of literary works that embodied laws, forms, and sentiments stipulated as “natural.” This, for Pope, was the great lesson of Virgil, whose youthful, spirited contempt for literary models did not survive his later scrutiny of Homer. As Pope wrote of Virgil's crucial discovery: “Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.”⁶ The imitation of specific writers and of established genres did not imply slavish copying, which Dryden dismissed with scorn: “This is like Merry Andrew on the low rope, copying lubberly the same tricks which his master is so dexterously performing on the high.”⁷ Neoclassical imitation, as Pope and Dryden understood it, implied a process of transformation in which continuities with the past are a means of making change visible. “I might imitate Virgil, if I were capable of writing an heroic poem,” Dryden modestly remarked, “and yet the invention be my own.”⁸ For Pope, as for Dryden, invention—the creative faculty which discovers and disposes new materials for art—was the indispensable collaborator in all worthy acts of imitation. (“Without invention,” Dryden insisted, “a painter is but a copier, and a poet but a plagiary of others.”⁹) Thus the past, like nature, is an inexhaustible treasury of matter which the inventive poet will put to use, mixing genres, adapting characters, reviving imagery, echoing thoughts to create a work simultaneously familiar and new, imitative and original. Although an adversarial relation with the past often bedeviled (or inspired) writers in the generations after Pope, Pope was not, as they were, charged with the burden of an innovation so radical that it reduced the past to a catalogue of exhausted possibilities. Pope, while drawing nourishment from the past, found his main adversaries in the present—in the corrupt politicians and hack writers whose open rejection of established values he transformed into a sign of their duncelike irrationality.

It was in genealogy that the theory of imitation found its most fruitful metaphor for expressing the relation between past and present. Genealogy, of course, was not the only metaphor available, for neoclassical writers imagined the past in various ways, complementary and sometimes contradictory. The past might seem, for example, like a pastoral scene, a region wholly set apart from the present, inaccessible, fixed in a serene and perfect stillness, as in a classical landscape by Poussin. This is the view Pope reflects in An Essay on Criticism when he imagines the great writers of the past as a separate community—“born in happier Days” (l. 189)—isolated from the corrupt present by an almost visible gulf. Genealogy as a metaphor for imitation held the power to span the vast distance between past and present without denying the remoteness of antiquity. In fact, the bond linking fathers with sons—sometimes over many generations—becomes the most common way for eighteenth-century writers to express their connection to the past, and Pope invokes this metaphoric bond in An Essay on Criticism when he directly allies himself with the great ancient writers as “the last, the meanest of your Sons” (l. 196). For Pope the relation between fathers and sons did not conjure up themes or metaphors of Freudian family romance, but rather it referred mainly to social, legal, and religious duties. Pope imagines the son primarily in the role of heir: the ultimate successor to his father's estate. Imitation becomes the act by which a modern poet appropriates tradition, establishing himself as rightful successor, son and heir, to the great ancient writers. Yet, the social and legal suggestions of inheritance do not exhaust the metaphor of genealogy. Equally important, the father is both guardian and teacher; he protects the son, instructs him, and guides him toward eventual independence and maturity. This filial embrace with the past—far from creating rebellious tensions—serves as a source of support, for the father in his role as tutor and protector performs the office usually attributed, in the traditional development of the artist, to the “master.” Imitation is a mode of learning—a source of knowledge—and the tradition of artistic discipleship expects worthy sons eventually to become the fathers and teachers of a new generation. The crucial question for Pope is whether they will have appropriated—made their own—what the past has to teach them. We look in vain for hints of anxiety in Pope's forthright statement that he “learned” the art of versification “wholly from Dryden's works.”¹⁰ Dryden, quite simply, was the master.

While the theory of mimesis provided in genealogy one way for modern writers to imagine their relation to the past, a complementary version of the same relationship (with its own cluster of metaphoric terms) was available in contemporary mercantile doctrine. Commerce, as an economic force and a literary subject, holds an importance in the eighteenth century now difficult to reconstruct.¹¹ Free from its later associations with bourgeois philistinism and distinct from mere shopkeeping or plying a trade, commerce then seemed an unprecedented national adventure—opening new overseas markets, supplying raw materials, generating endless publications, and promising not only personal wealth but also imperial power. Far from denigrating commerce as an activity reserved for the enemies of culture, Augustan writers viewed it as a potentially glorious and civilizing enterprise. Thus Pope's Windsor-Forest (1713)—like Dryden's Annus Mirabilis (1666), from which it frequently borrows thoughts and images—concludes its vision of British renewal by celebrating commerce as an emblem of harmonious order. Pope would later question the commercial spirit Windsor-Forest so readily endorses, but his early celebration of trade was far from unusual. Polite letters had discovered in commerce something like a new species of romance. The merchant as financial daredevil and exotic traveler grew indistinguishable, in some eighteenth-century accounts, from the enterprising heroes who dominated the recently translated Arabian Nights (one of Pope's favorite books). Commerce promised the abrupt magical change of fortune that also fed the national passion for lottery tickets and South Sea stock (in which Pope, too, invested). This general celebration of commerce had at least one further effect on the world of writing. It supplied a set of economic metaphors for literary production at a time when literature was just beginning to redefine itself as a commodity. It is not coincidental that Pope was the first English poet to earn a living from the sale of his works or that borrowing (perhaps his most characteristic literary trait) refers, like commerce, to an economic process.

It was probably from Dryden that Pope borrowed the commercial metaphors which help him express his relation to the past. Dryden at times viewed the poet's task as inseparable from the new enterprises of commerce. As he announced openly: “I trade both with the living and the dead, for the enrichment of our native language.” These words, meant to explain his linguistic practice in translating the Aeneid, offer more than a description of poetic technique. The metaphor of commerce central to Dryden's meaning might be said to encompass a whole theory of literature. His subsequent discussion of poetic language seems to have been developed primarily to explore the richness of this controlling metaphor. “If [re]sounding words are not of our growth and manufacture,” he continues, “who shall hinder me to import them from a foreign country? I carry not out the treasure of the nation, which is never to return; but what I bring from Italy, I spend in England: here it remains, and here it circulates; for, if the coin be good, it will pass from one hand to another.” Then he concludes his strange discourse on poetic diction with a restatement of mercantile theory that sounds as if it were written by an economist rather than by a poet or literary critic: “We have enough in England to supply our necessity; but, if we will have things of magnificence and splendour, we must get them by commerce.”¹² Such literary uses of commerce did not depend upon a realistic understanding of how an economy functions. We are witnessing rather the spell of a metaphor as it shapes and expresses Dryden's attitude toward the relations between present and past. Writing—whether it involves translation or imitation or allusion—seems now absorbed into the general activity of commerce, and the restoration of English literary greatness is seen to depend upon expanded trade with the past. The past, like Virginia or the East Indies, becomes a resource for what Dryden calls national “enrichment.” Poets in this alliance find themselves the merchants of a mutual exchange between distant worlds of time.

The idea of the poet as merchant, though hardly a sublime concept and insufficient to represent Pope's larger view of poetry, expresses an outlook wholly appropriate to the materialistic and patriotic spirit of Augustan writing, concerned with rebuilding England's literary reputation after the ruinous violence of seventeenth-century conflict. Such rebuilding is Dryden's theme in his noted essay Of Dramatick Poesie (1668). “Be it spoken to the honour of the English,” boasts Dryden's usual spokesman, Neander, “our nation can never want in any age such who are able to dispute the empire of wit with any people in the universe.” The metaphor representing literature as an empire-in-dispute may seem casual or commonplace until we reflect upon the strange setting in which Dryden places his four speakers. They are drifting down the Thames on a barge, attracted by a distant thunder of cannon. A great naval battle is in progress, we learn, between Dutch and English warships—which “disputed the command of the greater half of the globe, the commerce of nations, and the riches of the universe.” By setting his gentlemanly argument against the background of a violent episode in the recurring Anglo-Dutch commercial wars, Dryden emphasizes that two empires are in dispute—that English dominance in commerce establishes a paradigm for literary dominion. At times Dryden's metaphors reveal an exploitative attitude toward the past that verges on crude imperialism. For example, Neander says in praise of Ben Jonson's imitation of the ancients: “He has done his robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets, is only victory in him.”¹³ Here is the opposite of anxiety: a sovereign confidence that the past exists to advance the power and grandeur of the present. This belief, purged of its bellicose tone, is among Dryden's most important legacies to Pope and is the basis of all Pope wrote. “A mutual commerce makes Poetry flourish,” the young Pope explained to his mentor, William Walsh. “But then,” he added, in enlightened mercantile phrases, “Poets like Merchants, shou'd repay with something of their own what they take from others; not like Pyrates, make prize of all they meet.”¹⁴

What can it mean to “repay” the past? Pope's statement to Walsh helps to answer this paradoxical question when we recognize that Pope's image of mercantile repayment corrects or revises Neander's rough metaphor describing imitation as a form of imperious theft or seizure. For Pope, the present “repays” the past by judiciously correcting or improving its legacy. This process, so crucial for understanding Augustan poetics, is what Pope describes in the ambiguous term refinement. Refinement does not imply an indiscriminate or artificial smoothness—as Romantic critics of Pope suggest in their attacks—mere high polish, fancy manners, or elitist taste. In refinement, the purpose of labor is to enhance value already existing in an original material. (It is necessary in refining gold to begin with gold-bearing ore.) The most obvious eighteenth-century models for refinement were the massive building projects which occupied the great landowners of Pope's day, who not only constructed vast country houses in imitation of classical prototypes but also redesigned the landscape, adding artificial lakes or woods or vistas wherever nature proved deficient. This was far from mere polish, even when stretched to absurdity. (The well-placed ruin soon joined Roman temples on the list of desirable aristocratic improvements.) Refinement was a special kind of creation which artfully linked past and present in an improving harmony. Like Pope's famous improvements to the small estate he rented at Twickenham, the changes in landscape and in architecture signified internal refinements of spirit, taste, and knowledge. Ethics and aesthetics thus shared the same general goal, as reflected in The Spectator, where the refinements of polite behavior were recommended in a prose so pure that Addison sometimes stopped the presses (legend has it) to correct a comma. An ideal so widely shared has, of course, numerous precedents—in theology, in philosophy, in political theory—but for Pope no precedent was more more conspicuous than the literary career of Dryden. It was Dryden who most influentially defined the modern writer's relation to the past as one of revision, correction, and improvement. Pope would have perfectly understood the reference to Augustus' transformation of Rome when Samuel Johnson wrote of Dryden that he found the language brick and left it marble.¹⁵

Refinement, as a concept describing the Augustan poet's relation to the past, provides both the subject and structure for Dryden's brief but important poem “To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve” (1694). The poem is in effect a sustained meditation on the relations between past and present, proposing a clear three-stage vision of English literary history since the time of Elizabeth. First come the great Elizabethan “Syres” (l. 3): unnamed writers of strength and genius, who were also rough, rude, and uncultivated. The second stage commences with the Restoration, which Dryden characterizes as a period of art, skill, and cultivation accompanied by the unwelcome loss of genius and strength. (Dryden modestly includes himself among the writers of this second stage.) Congreve, for Dryden, signals the inception of a third and culminating era, when strength and art, genius and regularity are at last triumphantly united. This is the prophetic moment of transition with which Dryden's poem begins:

Well then; the promis'd hour is come at last;
The present Age of Wit obscures the past.(16)

This is a counter Dunciad: its plot reveals the long-deferred arrival of light. The light which obscures the past, however, does not bury it in darkness. In Dryden's vision of refining change, the present rejects only the weakness and errors of the past, while maintaining and augmenting its strengths. This mythic history of refinement—with Congreve cast metaphorically as Dryden's “Son” (l. 43) and “lineal” (l. 44) heir—suggests how Pope might have understood his visit to Will's Coffee House. As he gazed at Dryden “with the greatest veneration,” he was gazing at the poetic father whose estate he—not Congreve—would soon inherit and improve.

There is no more profound kinship between Pope and Dryden than the belief that poetry advances by refining the achievement of the past. Refinement is so far from mere technique that it enters into the most basic composition of Pope's thought, which his technical improvements might be said to reflect. For Pope the ultimate purpose of poetry is, quite simply, to make men better. The refinements of poetry are a means toward achieving ethical improvements that Pope would consider more valuable than any poem. Toward this goal, he needed to turn his attention to improving the legacy of English verse as inherited from Dryden. Pope, of course, never gave better proof of his debt to Dryden than when improving, and reproving, him. Thus, although he praised the unprecedented variety, energy, and majesty of Dryden's couplets, he also usually rejected the alexandrines and triplet rhymes so characteristic of Dryden. Such silent reproofs, to be sure, do not add up to damaging criticism. They also seem focused upon small points of style. Pope, however, found in Dryden much more serious errors—errors which he could not correct in silence.

Dryden's serious failures shared, in Pope's view, the defects characteristic of most Restoration writing. The charge that Dryden often lapsed into tasteless indecency (“To please a lewd, or un-believing Court”) seems slightly hypocritical when issued by the author of Sober Advice from Horace (1734)—Pope's seamy analysis of lust. Less pietistic is the explicit claim that Dryden's indecency can be understood as an attempt to win favor at court. In refining the example of Dryden, Pope was less concerned with indecent language than with establishing his independence from all sources of patronage, both in and out of court. This determination not to repeat Dryden's errors is clear, too, in Pope's complaint that Dryden published in haste, failing to revise or correct his own performances. As Pope wrote in mixed praise and blame: “Ev'n copious Dryden, wanted, or forgot, / The last and greatest Art, the Art to blot.”¹⁷ Pope, in correcting Dryden, performed what Dryden did not do for himself. Yet, although Pope's pursuit of correctness is notorious, there is one final improvement which clearly distinguishes his work from Dryden's. Dryden, in Johnson's words, “delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning, where light and darkness begin to mingle; to approach the precipice of absurdity, and hover over the abyss of unideal vacancy. This inclination sometimes produced nonsense.”¹⁸ Such a description could not apply to Pope. For Pope and his age, the improvement which most clearly measured their distance from the recent past was conveyed in a single, momentous change: the correction of nonsense by sense. Sense, as embodied in the poetry of Pope, became the watchword of a new age.

As I have said, this study of Pope aims to encompass his entire career, treating specific poems at considerable length. In most cases I have chosen to discuss well-known poems rather than works which are seldom read or taught, although this procedure slights some poems which seem to me unjustly neglected. There is no single, central argument or thesis which underlies my discussion of specific poems, such as the claim (by Thomas R. Edwards, Jr.) that Pope's career can be divided into an “Augustan” and a “grotesque” mode. Such overly schematic generalizations tend to dissolve when pressed upon individual works. What gives this book coherence is a series of recurring topics, issues, and themes. The sequence of chapters, while following the basic chronology of Pope's works, is intended to allow the eddying and recursive movement of Pope's thought full play, as later poems extend or modify or affirm earlier positions. A chronological study in thematics seems especially appropriate to Pope's work. Pope, in his concern with ethics, was particularly attracted to the interpenetration of imagery and idea that imparts a concreteness and vitality to abstract propositions. In addition, as a writer whose major work spans three decades, he was constantly revisiting and revising his own compositions. Revision, in its richest sense, is the characteristic activity of Pope's writing. Homer, Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden—all are in various ways “revised” by Pope as he appropriates their virtues for his work or infuses their writing with his own vision. Even his own previous works become a resource which he draws upon later. For Pope, new poems do not simply follow, but modify and sometimes replace—even retract—what went before. A study in thematics, with its recursive ebb and flow, offers a way of understanding how thoroughly Pope devoted his career to the refinement which comes through repeated acts of perception, with their reopening and shifting of perspectives. Revision for Pope is a great deal more than a technique of composition. It is a mode of thought, a natural rhythm, a way of life.

As a poet dedicated to the principle of refinement, Pope at times necessarily contradicted his earlier positions and statements, since revision can introduce change which is abrupt and radical as well as gradual and continuous. Sometimes, because he is a writer so committed to paradox, his thought is irreconcilably divided, as with his attitude toward women, whose “oppression”—the term is his—he observes, condemns, and, in a milder form, perpetuates. Yet, it is not sufficient to observe contradictions within Pope's thought, whether they emerge over time (as his themes develop and ideas alter) or remain fixed and unalterable. We must also try to understand how and why these conflicts appear at different times in different poems. An understanding of such differences exerts two kinds of pressure: outward, toward history, so that we may see how Pope revises both his own thought and the thinking of his age; and inward, toward detailed literary analysis, so that we may see how Pope develops the resources of his style and vision. Refinement implies both change and consistency, and what remains consistent is no less important than what changes. The unchanged verse or phrase or thought, as it passes through successive stages of approval, contributes an invaluable stability to the text, without which change would be invisible. The scope of such changes may be large or small; size is not crucial. Refinement refers to a process, not to magnitude, and it is in the unremitting refinement of his own thought and language that Pope locates the poet's essential work. My purpose in examining Pope's work is not to argue with him, to condemn or to exaggerate his failures of logic, his ideological blindnesses, his lapses of taste. Rather, I wish to recover the vision and revisions which make his work—including its blindnesses, lapses, failures, and contradictions—ultimately compelling and coherent. Pope's outlook clearly differs from our own. The literary conventions he accepted we no longer accept, much as swords and wigs and sedan chairs, like rhymed couplets, now seem antique. I do not intend to claim for Pope an unusual timeliness or special relevance to the present, if only (as Pope insisted) because the present continually changes. I try instead to present Pope through the past, believing that his power to speak to us depends primarily on our power to recover his language and the vision which gives it shape. Neoclassical theorists often emphasized the importance of timeless values and general truths, as in Imlac's famous advice against numbering the streaks of the tulip. Pope, in many ways the most neoclassical of writers, shared the view that art must not lose itself in what is purely idiosyncratic, contemporary, individual, irregular, or untrue. It was also Pope, however, who believed that poets unable to speak to their own times speak, finally, to no one. Historical facts, local details, slang expressions, personal whimsies, unruly (even obscene) verses all find a place in Pope's work—to the distress of readers who seek only what is timeless and uplifting. We cannot understand Pope fully or adequately without immersing ourselves in the historical life which his works helped to create and which they so fully engaged. The challenge in reading Pope arises precisely from the complicated sense in which he agrees with Wallace Stevens that poetry—while not reduced or restricted to its origins—is always, inevitably, “the cry of its occasion.”

Notes

1. Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. viii. I do not mean to slight various introductory books which undertake the difficult task of reviewing, in a few brief chapters, the life and art of a prolific, complex writer whose major works span three decades; Pat Rogers' An Introduction to Pope (London: Methuen, 1975) is a reliable guide. I should also express my debt to four skillful studies which extend the analysis of a special topic or controlling theme throughout Pope's work: Thomas R. Edwards, Jr., This Dark Estate: A Reading of Pope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963); Patricia Meyer Spacks, An Argument of Images: The Poetry of Alexander Pope (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971); Frederick M. Keener, An Essay on Pope (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); and Dustin H. Griffin, Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

2. In Spence, I, 25. Pope's relation to Dryden is the subject of two essays by Reuben Brower: “An Allusion to Europe: Dryden and Poetic Tradition” (1952), reprinted in Essential Articles, pp. 132-145; “Dryden and the ‘Invention’ of Pope,” in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 211-233.

3. Correspondence, I, 2 (26 December 1704). On Pope's correspondence—especially its shifting voices and social strategies, which affect the meaning of nearly every statement—see James Anderson Winn, A Window in the Bosom: The Letters of Alexander Pope (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Press, 1977).

4. In Spence, I, 28. When Bloom describes Milton's Satan as a figure of the modern poet “because he shadows forth gigantically a trouble at the core of Milton and of Pope,” I assume that he considers Pope among the writers “troubled” by their relation to the past; see Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 20. With good reason, Bloom draws most of his examples from post-Augustan writers.

5. “Preface” to the Iliad (1715), in PW, p. 251.

6. An Essay on Criticism (1711), l. 135.

7. “Dedication of the Aeneis” (1697), in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker, 2 vols. (1900; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), II, 201.

8. Dryden, “A Parallel of Poetry and Painting” (1695), in Essays, II, 138. Pope maintains a similar view of invention: “It furnishes Art with all her Materials, and without it Judgment itself can at best but steal wisely: For Art is only like a prudent Steward that lives on managing the Riches of Nature. Whatever Praises may be given to Works of Judgment, there is not even a single Beauty in them but is owing to the Invention” (“Preface” to the Iliad, in PW, p. 223).

9. Dryden, “Dedication of the Aeneis,” in Essays, II, 201.

10. In Spence, I, 24. In a similar spirit, Dryden describes the diction of his translation of the Aeneid by saying, “I must acknowledge that Virgil in Latin, and Spenser in English, have been my masters” (Essays, II, 218). Pope's apprenticeship to the great “masters” of the past is clear from the anecdote he told concerning his early attempt at an epic poem, as recounted by Spence: “I endeavoured (says he, smiling) in this poem to collect all the beauties of the great epic writers into one piece. There was Milton's style in one part and Cowley's in another, here the style of Spenser imitated and there of Statius, here Homer and Virgil, and there Ovid and Claudian” (Spence, I, 18).

11. See Eli Heckscher, Mercantilism (1931), trans. Mendel Shapiro, rev. ed., 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1955), and J. H. Parry, Trade and Dominion: The European Overseas Empires in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Praeger, 1971). A useful introduction to the literary uses of mercantile doctrine is Louis A. Landa, “Pope's Belinda, The General Emporie of the World, and the Wondrous Worm” (1971), reprinted in Recent Essays, pp. 177-200. See also james H. Bunn, “The Aesthetics of British Mercantilism,” New Literary History 11 (1980), 303-321.

12. Dryden, “Dedication of the Aeneis,” in Essays, II, 234. Addison in The Spectator (no. 69) provided one of the most glowing contemporary accounts of the benefits which flow from commerce: “Our Ships are laden with the Harvest of every Climate: Our Tables are stored with Spices, and Oils, and Wines: Our Rooms are filled with Pyramids of China, and adorned with the Workmanship of Japan: Our Morning's-Draught comes to us from the remotest Corners of the Earth: We repair our Bodies by the Drugs of America, and repose our selves under Indian Canopies. My friend Sir andrew calls the Vineyards of France our Gardens; the Spice-Islands our Hot-Beds; the Persians our Silk-Weavers, and the Chinese our Potters. Nature indeed furnishes us with the bare Necessaries of Life, but Traffick [commerce] gives us a great Variety of what is Useful, and at the same time supplies us with every thing that is Convenient and Ornamental.” The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).

13. Dryden, Essays, I, 88, 28, and 82.

14. Correspondence, I, 20 (2 July 1706). On the possibility of “mutual gain” from trade, see Richard C. Wiles, “Mercantilism and the Idea of Progress,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 8 (1974-75), 56-74. Also useful is John McVeagh's Tradefull Merchants: The Portrayal of the Capitalist in Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)—especially the chapter entitled “The merchant as hero: 1700-1750.”

15. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (1779-1781), ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), I, 469. The best introduction to this subject is the brief essay by Susan Staves entitled “Refinement” (delivered at the forty-first session of The English Institute, 26 August 1982).

16. All quotations from Dryden's verse refer to the four-volume Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). For additional clarification of Dryden's views of the past, see Achsah Guibbory, “Dryden's Views of History,” Philological Quarterly, 52 (1973), 187-204.

17. For Pope's comments on Dryden, see The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated (1737), ll. 213-214, 267-269, 280-281.

18. Johnson, Lives of the Poets, I, 460.

Epigraph: The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 7 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), VII, 230.

Abbreviations

Correspondence: The Correspondence of Alexander Pope. Ed. George Sherburn. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.

Essential Articles: Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope. Ed. Maynard Mack. Revised edition. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1968.

PW: The Prose Works of Alexander Pope. Ed. Norman Ault. Oxford: Basil Blackwell (for Shakespeare Head Press), 1936.

Recent Essays: Pope: Recent Essays by Several Hands. Ed. Maynard Mack and James A. Winn. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980.

Spence: Joseph Spence. Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men (1820). Ed. James M. Osborn. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.

Twickenham edition: The Poems of Alexander Pope. Ed. John Butt et al. 11 vols. London: Methuen, 1939-1969.