SOURCE: “‘So Easy to Be Lost’: Poet and Self in Pope's The Temple of Fame,” in Papers on Language & Literature, Vol. 29, No. 1, Winter 1993, pp. 3-27.

[In the following essay, Wheeler addresses the autobiographical aspects and personal tone of The Temple of Fame, speculating on the nature of Pope's attitude toward literary fame.]

When Pope sent Martha Blount a copy of The Temple of Fame, the accompanying letter contained these remarks about fame: “Whatever some may think, Fame is a thing I am much less covetous of, than your Friendship; for that I hope will last all my life, the other I cannot answer for. … Now that I talk of fame, I send you my Temple of Fame, which is just come out: but my sentiments about it you will see better by this Epigram:

What's Fame with Men, by custom of the nation,
Is call'd in women only Reputation:
About them both why keep we such a pother?
Part you with one, and I'll renounce the other.

(Correspondence, 1: 280)

Playful and serious, these comments reveal Pope's ambivalent attitude about fame: it is transient; it is dependent upon the views of others; it possesses a commercial value, which one can at least offer to exchange for happiness; and Pope is willing to renounce it. We can only guess at Martha's reaction when she read the poem and discovered the professed denunciation of fame in it, but of the significance the question of fame had for Pope at this stage of his career, there can be no doubt.

In a recent review essay Frederick Keener makes on observation with which most of us who study Pope would concur: “the main movement in Pope studies of the past decade and more has been the effort to see the works in relation to the life, and especially to see both works and life as affected by historical circumstances” (81). While some of the recent historical/ideological studies have properly included readings of Pope's earlier works, most of the psychological/biographical scholarship, however, has concerned itself primarily with the later, satiric phase of Pope's poetic production, where the poems, such as the Epistle to Arbuthnot and the Horatian Imitations, are more obviously autobiographical and where the complex issue of satiric persona presents itself so intriguingly.¹

We now have, therefore, a fairly good idea of Pope's voice, his “Horatian stance,” in these later poems; whether we feel that the stance is sincere and genuinely moral or politically posed and hypocritical, we know it is Popean and recognize it when we see it, or when we hear it. But who is the Pope who could compose such disparate works as An Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, and Eloisa to Abelard? In these poems, critics, like their New Critical forebears, seem far more comfortable discussing formal elements, from verse paragraphs to antithetical tensions to Pope's famous couplet art. Yet this second decade of the eighteenth century, witnessing the end of the Stuart monarchy, was crucial not only to Britain's history but also to Pope's life. During this time Pope experienced his first encounter with notoriety (with all the good and bad that the term implies), enjoyed the company of the politically mighty and then watched it scatter, and embarked on the literary project that would drain his energy yet make him famous and rich. For a young poet, especially for one living in such a politically and sociologically transitional period, these events produce both thrills and anxiety that cannot be repressed from the poetry, regardless of one's theoretical poetic. Pope's The Temple of Fame is one poem of this early period that is psychologically self-revelatory.

Unfortunately, this personal dimension of The Temple of Fame is largely ignored. Even Dustin Griffin, in his effort to trace a personal presence throughout Pope's career, glances quickly at The Temple of Fame and moves on. Of the little scholarship that exists on the poem, most can be classified as what we call “source studies,” examinations of poetic portraits of fame by writers preceding Pope, and, more frequently, comparisons between Pope's poem and Chaucer's unfinished Hous of Fame, Pope's most obvious and direct source, which he generously acknowledges.² Such studies are useful but exhaustible; as in navigating an uncharted river, the source is eventually found and explorations cease. Maynard Mack typifies critical response to the poem: “Chaucer's poem,” Mack asserts, “… is pruned and reshaped to make a rounded moral parable” (164). Comments by Griffin and Donald Fraser are equally brief and somewhat unsatisfying. Fraser perceives that “the style of the poem is an intriguing mixture of Pope's grand manner and contemporary satire, but [that] his conclusion has a surprisingly personal tone” (286). He then states that in the poem's concluding lines “the youthful poet himself appears to be offering this manifesto as his genuine personal opinion on this topic” (Fraser 287). Griffin echoes this recognition of the personal and genuine in the conclusion: “he adds an epilogue to Chaucer's unfinished poem in order to provide a natural conclusion and ‘a Moral to the Whole’ [from Pope's note to 1. 497]. … He concludes not by forswearing fame, but by cautiously specifying the terms on which he would seek and accept it” (89).

From such commentary, sparse though it is, there comes to be something of a standard reading of the poem, a reading based largely on the poem's structure and the prefatory and annotational apparatus Pope appends to it. Structurally, The Temple of Fame consists of four seemingly distinct parts: 1) a short, introductory, section, obligatory in such dream vision poems, that establishes the speaker and sets up the dream vision, a frame; 2) a description of the temple of fame; and 3) a description of the house of rumor—these two sections constituting the dream vision; and 4) a final, apparently reflective section where the speaker seems to be interpreting the dream and applying its lesson directly to himself, what Fraser calls a “manifesto” and Griffin calls an “epilogue.” Such terms imply a distinctness for the final section, removing it from the poetic vision and placing it in a more realistic realm of the “genuine” and the “natural.” This interpretation derives, I suppose, from Pope's prefatory “advertisement” defending his use of allegory: “Some modern Criticks, from a pretended Refinement of Taste,” Pope writes, “have declar’d themselves unable to relish allegorical Poems. ‘Tis not easy to penetrate into the meaning of this Criticism; for if Fable be allow'd one of the chief Beauties, or as Aristotle calls it, the very Soul of Poetry, ‘tis hard to comprehend how that Fable should be the less valuable for having a Moral.” Combined with Pope's note to line 497 (quoted by Griffin above), which identifies precisely the “moral,” this definition of allegory allows us to separate fable from moral, or, in this case, dream from reality, fiction from truth, poem from epilogue.

So the “standard” reading goes something like this: a young poet (the poem's speaker) falls asleep and has a dream about fame. He discovers that fame is both good and bad, and that it comes only at a price. He learns a valuable lesson and, in the final four lines, offers the following prayer:

Then teach me, Heaven! to scorn the guilty Bays;
Drive from my Breast that wretched Lust of Praise;
Unblemish'd let me live, or die unknown,
Oh grant an honest Fame, or grant me none!

(521-25)

³Such a summary, of course, reduces the standard reading and the poem, but that such a summary comes so easily suggests, perhaps, why The Temple of Fame is often overlooked: it is so “lucid, coherent, and objective,” G. Wilson Knight claims, “a child could understand it” (94).

But I think that Pope's poem is much more interesting than this summary or Knight's confidence would suggest and that we should beware, here as in The Dunciad or even in the famous note to the Clarissa speech in The Rape of the Lock, of simply accepting at face value Pope's self-commentary. If we accept, however, Pope's claim that The Temple of Fame was written in 1711,⁴ then we find Pope writing, in the same year he found fame thrust upon him with the publication of An Essay on Criticism, a poem about a young poet's contemplation of fame. And its publication date of 1715 finds Pope actively engaged in the enormously ambitious task of translating Homer, the completion of which would establish not only his reputation but his fortune. To read the poem anyway but personally seems, to my mind, almost irresponsible.

Pope's poetry and correspondence abound with observations on the moral ambiguity of fame and its effect on the self. Since, as Douglas Patey makes clear, the “Popean self … is defined from without (by providence), it is essentially constituted by its roles, and so by the moral ends (in the broadest sense of ‘moral’) that those roles embody” (367-68). In his later career the role of famous poet permits Pope to pursue vigorously his moral goals, as he and his ideology define them. We see this attitude proudly exhibited in statements such as these from the Epilogue to the Satires (1738): “Yet may this Verse (if such a Verse remain) / Show there was one who held it [‘Villany’] in disdain” (Dia. I, 171-72) or “Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see / Men not afraid of God, afraid of me” (Dia. II, 208-9). Here is the Popean “voice” we are accustomed to, and it is made possible by Pope's fame—his substantial wealth and the poetic reputation that allow him to associate with the politically and financially powerful and to speak himself with the authority of power.

Earlier in his career Pope's voice is different. Upon his first publication, that of his Pastorals in May 1709, Pope, in a letter dated 17 May 1709 to William Wycherley, expresses an attitude toward fame that he would repeat in The Temple of Fame: “I shall be satisfy'd if I lose my Time agreeably in this way, without losing my reputation: As for gaining any, I am as indifferent in the Matter as Falstaffe was, and may say of Fame as he did of Honour, If it comes, it comes unlook'd for; and there's an ‘End on't’” (Correspondence 1:59). Also present in this statement, in addition to the announced indifference toward fame, is an instance of Pope's often-articulated view of writing as a leisure activity. This aristocratic view of writing may be found throughout Pope's writings. In what is perhaps his most directly autobiographical poem, the Epistle to Arbuthnot, we find the poet referring to his craft as an “idle trade” (l. 129) and playfully (and ironically) asking, “was I born for nothing but to write?” (l. 272).

If this notion that writing was properly a part-time aristocratic activity seems ironic coming from a poet who made so much money from his craft, we must remember that it was an attitude forged early in Pope, while living at Binfield in the first decade of the century. Mack notes that, as a merchant, Pope's father “had prospered.” At his retirement in the year of his son's birth, “he was worth some £10,000—a fortune in those days” (24). In today's inflated currency that fortune would be worth several hundred thousand pounds; it enabled the family to live a life of ease in the country near Windsor Forest. Pope's early influential friends—William Walsh, John Caryll, Samuel Garth, and William Trumbull—were wealthy and politically astute men who had withdrawn from London for what was then called a “private life.” Conversing with Pope on morality and poetry and always encouraging the young poet with his verse-making, they were men of an older generation and instilled in Pope the view that one did not write to make money or to seek fame. Pope was later to tell Spence of this period, “I still look upon these five or six years as the happiest part of my life.”⁵

But Pope, at about this time, was also introduced by friends such as Wycherley and Henry Cromwell to the bright life of literary London. Of the contrast offered between the private life of the country and the worldly life of London, Mack colorfully notes that as Pope made “these forays into the London world of taste and fashion on which literary success depended, the realization must often have come home to him that between the House of Holiness and Vanity Fair there is a great gulf fixed” (27). Additionally, Pope began somewhat contradictorily to view writing poetry as a profession. In a letter dated 17 December 1710 to Cromwell, during this period the correspondent with whom Pope most frequently discussed the technical matters of poetry, we find this comment on poet Richard Crashaw: “I take this Poet to have writ like a Gentleman, that is, at leisure hours, and more to keep out of idleness, than to establish a reputation: so that nothing regular or just can be expected of him … no man can be a true Poet, who writes for diversion only” (Correspondence 1: 109-10). Establishing a reputation, posed here as a desirable (perhaps even necessary) function of writing, contrasts sharply with Pope's previously expressed indifference, an indifference that was impossible to maintain when reputation followed quickly the publication in May 1711 of An Essay on Criticism, a poem that Addison called in Spectator 253 “a Masterpiece in its kind.” Mack remarks that “one of the special delights of Pope's Essay, in fact, is the sharply drawn picture it gives of the bustling, contentious, opinionated London scene, conveyed in an idiom that retains something of the informal sparkle as well as the high spit and polish of the best comic speech of the stage” (168). Pope learned this idiom, as well as the numerous critical commonplaces present in the Essay, not only from his reading but from coffee-house chat with critics, poets, and pretenders to those names.

Clearly London was attractive, and it was where fame was housed. A generation earlier, in his optimistic and patriotic justification of locating the Royal Society in London, Thomas Sprat supplied the metaphor: “It [London] is the head of a mighty Empire, the greatest that ever commanded the Ocean: It is compos'd of Gentlemen, as well as Traders: It has a large intercourse with all the Earth: It is, as the Poets describe their House of Fame, a City, where all the noises and business of the World do meet” (87). If this “House of Fame,” this “Vanity Fair,” formulated itself for Pope as an object of desire in that heady year of 1711, the year that Pope claims to have composed The Temple of Fame, by 1715, the year of the poem's publication, the city had displayed as well its dangers.

Spending much of his time in London, Pope, in late 1712, wrote his friend Caryll, proclaiming that “to be uncensured and to be obscure, is the same thing” (Correspondence 1: 154). And he wrote from experience. The Essay on Criticism had brought with fame the onset of the nearly constant barrage of attacks that plagued Pope throughout his career. John Dennis, whom Pope portrayed disparagingly in the Essay, published his well-known Reflections on that poem in June of 1711. By 1715, when Pope was at work on his Homer, he had fallen out with Addison and the Buttonians, their attacks in that year constituting, according to George Sherburn, “something like an organized effort to discredit Pope upon the appearance of the first volume of his Iliad” (139). Pope had also witnessed the break-up of the Scriblerus Club, as Swift relocated in Ireland and Harley was imprisoned. The ascendancy of George I, the return to power of the Whigs, and the failed Jacobite uprising of 1715 fueled, as his letters indicate, considerable anxiety in the young Catholic poet. Writing to Martha Blount, in a letter Sherburn tentatively dates 1715, Pope contrasts the country and city life: “a true relish of the beauties of nature is the most easy preparation and gentlest transition to an enjoyment of those of heaven; as on the contrary a true town life of hurry, confusion, noise, slander, and dissension, is sort of an apprenticeship to hell and its furies” (Correspondence 1: 154).

“The early eighteenth century was,” as Brean Hammond reminds us, “a transitional period in the economics of writing, because it witnessed the gradual change from art commissioned to art marketed (a process to which Pope himself was a catalyst)” (86). If the publication of Pope's Pastorals had been largely commissioned, or at least urged and assisted by his aristocratic friends, the publication of his Iliad, when Pope became (to borrow one of Mack's section headings) “essentially his own publisher” and his correspondence to his friends hawking subscriptions sounds like that of a sales manager to his field reps, was full-scale marketing. It seems that between these events Pope found himself at a crossroads, seeking at once acceptable definitions of poet and self. What we know of Pope's life makes clear that his desires include the ever-conflicting ideals of becoming a rich and famous poet and remaining a virtuous gentleman detached from professional, political, and commercial strife. In The Temple of Fame Pope constructs a mythology that offers ideally the best of both worlds—an “honest fame.” The impossibility of realizing that ideal is Pope's constant fear, a fear articulated in his poem.

Pope opens the poem by establishing the time of year in which the dream occurs:

In that soft Season when descending Showers
Call forth the Greens, and wake the rising Flowers;
When opening Buds salute the welcome Day,
And Earth relenting feels the Genial Ray.

(1-4)

We might well wonder why, since the speaker is ostensibly asleep, establishing a season, extrinsic to the action of the poem, is necessary, but I think this opening is suggestive in several ways. It alludes, no doubt, to the most famous lines in Chaucer, the opening of the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, but also, and more importantly, to Pope's first published poem, the pastoral “Spring,” which opens using the same combination of spring and morning imagery and using many of the same words. In “Spring” Daphnis' first lines are

Hear how the Birds, on ev'ry bloomy Spray,
With joyous Musick wake the dawning Day!
Why sit we mute, when early Linnets sing,
When warbling Philomel salutes the
Spring?
Why sit we sad, when Phosphor shines
so clear,
And lavish Nature paints the Purple Year?

(23-28)

Here spring/morning transforms the mood of the young swains and inspires the song/poetry that takes the form of competition between them.

Yet in The Temple of Fame it seems curious that images of awakening are employed as prologue to a dream. It is true that the dream is a morning dream, and I will address that issue shortly, but metaphorically both spring and morning connote youth, the youthful poet; moreover, “genial” not only suggests congenial—the sun's rays being agreeable to greens, flowers, and buds—but also signifies the adjectival form of genius. Additionally, the term “relenting,” applied here to earth, probably means not just the customary “softening” but an actual transformation from solid to liquid, a melting under the influence of heat. The OED, though labeling it obsolete, gives this definition as the primary one for “relent” and cites Pope's “Spring” as an example. Thus, with the double meaning of genial, we have a double meaning for the line: just as the warm spring sun transforms the earth, thawing the frozen ground of winter, so too does the poetic genius have a capacity for transformation, for re-creation. Just as with the awakening by the season and morning of the poetic capabilities of Pope's earlier created shepherds, we have here an announced awakening of a young poet's genius, a genius with transformative capabilities.

If the poet's self is lost in sleep, a poetic Other is awakened or born, an event that, as we shall see, is at once positive and negative, exciting and dangerous. (Pope, in his Preface to the 1717 Works, combines the metaphors of season and infancy with reputation: “the reputation of a man generally depends upon the first steps he makes in the world, and people will establish their opinion of us from what we do at that season when we have least judgment to direct us” [TE 1:5].) Citing the OED, Dustin Griffin points out that “about 1700, new meanings of ‘self’ as a noun began to be needed, as designating not only the authentic person, but also an identity that might vary from time to time or be divided against itself” (28). A dream vision, especially one related at a later time, necessarily creates just such a division.⁶

To return now to the notion of a morning dream—the speaker introduces the dream with the following lines:

As balmy Sleep had charm'd my Cares to Rest,
And Love it self was banish'd from my Breast,
(What Time the Morn mysterious Visions brings,
While purer Slumbers spread their golden Wings)
A Train of Phantoms in wild Order rose,
And, join'd, this Intellectual Scene compose.

(5-10)

Evident in these lines is a distinction between deep sleep, balmy and soothing, which puts cares to rest and banishes love, and morning sleep, which brings with it mysterious visions and a train of phantoms, arguably a more troubling sleep. Syntactically, the “joined” of the final line here refers ambiguously both to the joining of the train of phantoms and, more provocatively, to the joining of the purer slumbers (deep sleep) with the phantoms or visions. In the latter case, we have an interesting situation of “in-betweenness” with the purer slumbers spreading wings to leave (or stretching themselves awake?) and the phantoms on the rise, a state between deep sleep and wakefulness, where cares and love, no longer safely removed, can return to the subconscious, a state where the self and the other mingle. Such a state produces a confusion suggested above in the oxymoronic image of “wild order” and the lines that immediately follow:

          I stood, methought, betwixt Earth, Seas, and
Skies;
The whole Creation open to my Eyes:
In air self-ballanc'd hung the Globe below,
Where Mountains rise, and circling Oceans flow;
Here naked Rocks, and empty Wastes were seen,
There Tow'ry Cities, and the Forests green:
Here sailing Ships delight the wand'ring Eyes;
There Trees, and intermingl'd Temples rise:
Now a clear Sun the shining Scene displays,
The transient Landscape now in Clouds decays.

(11-20)

If we are standing “betwixt earth, seas, and skies,” where are we? Moreover, this nebulous geographic location is qualified by the “methought,” or does the “methought” modify “stood,” the speaker unsure of both his location and his posture? And note the wild order. The speaker perceives “the whole Creation,” but his description is of a creation other than his own—God's creation, if you will. Stylistically, these lines remind us of the more familiar description of concordia discors in Windsor Forest, where the world is “harmoniously confus'd: / Where Order in Variety we see” (14-15). But if there is harmony in this creation, it is a harmony more like the one in the famous lines in Book I of the Essay on Man, “not understood”; with this apparent loss of control, the descriptive emphasis is clearly on the wild. Wildness is present in the rapid movement of the view and in its transience, present in the juxtaposition within single lines of antithetical elements—mountains and oceans, rocks and wastes, cities and forests, trees and temples.

By describing the scene poetically, the speaker, however, is afforded the exciting opportunity for re-creation. Indeed, the order seems present only in the poetry itself: in the repeated initial where, here, there; in Pope's familiar use of antithesis and caesura; in the highly ordered texture of Pope's couplet art. As with the use of “genial” above, here we find combined the natural world of extrinsic reality with the fictive world of poetic genius. Read in this self-referential context, these lines cast a curious light on the “joined” and “compose” above. Ordering, joining, and composing are all performed by the poet as he practices his craft. The “intellectual scene” or “allegory” that is to follow is composed not just in a confused state between sleep and wakefulness but also as a product of the psychological construct of the poet—his cares, the worries to which a young poet (or anyone) is subject; love (most likely self-love, or ambition); and his creative vision. Seen in this light, the vision of The Temple of Fame is not merely an abstract moral allegory describing fame and rumor; rather, like a real dream, it combines elements of extrinsic reality with those of the imagination, revealing in a very profound way the psyche of the young poet.

Later in his career, Pope would characterize the descriptive and allegorical poems of this period as works of imagination, the creation of them as “wandering in Fancy's Maze”; he contrasts this youthful phase with a maturity when he “stoop'd to Truth, and moraliz'd his Song.” But the poet is present in the creations of both periods. Consider the descriptions of the temple of fame and the house of rumor. Most noticeable, perhaps, is the highly ordered nature of fame's temple. Gone is the wild disarray of the initial lines of the dream, and the order now in this poetic creation resides in the described object, in the vision itself as well as in the descriptive verse. The visual, geographic movement of the description is upward and inward (away from the earlier description of creation); the architecture is regular and largely classical, though always appropriate to its residents; and the persons described reflect an ordered hierarchy of heroes, as we witness a progression from soldiers to political leaders to philosophers to martyrs to the six great writers in the center, with Homer occupying the central place. The writers are supported by columns depicting scenes from their works, their fame clearly dependent upon their writing. Donald Fraser notes that “in Chaucer's Hous of Fame, the pagan writers ‘bear up’ their subjects on their shoulders, whereas in The Temple of Fame Pope elevates his writers above their subjects. … Their literary works serve as the foundation of their individualized fame as authors, … as if authorial fame were ultimately supreme” (291). We might also note that all of the pre-publication publicity would have forced, for Pope's contemporary audience, an obvious identification of Pope with the centrally deified Homer and that the lavish description of material wealth present in the temple might be construed (at least for us with the benefit of hindsight) as prophetic. Contrasting with the slippery slope of the mountain upon which the temple sits, the temple is permanent, not subject to the influence of time; here “Grav'd o'er their Seats the Form of Time was found, / His Scythe revers'd, and both his Pinions bound” (147-48).

The scene shifts with the blast of a trumpet to one more frighteningly real than that of the ideal temple, and the speaker now views “millions of Crowds” of petitioners, judged by fame's “blind Sister, fickle Fortune.” The order of the previous scene vanishes: there is no apparent hierarchy to the petitioners; fortune's judgments are arbitrary; the previously predominant sensory perception of sight becomes one of sound—dialogue, shouts, blaring trumpets; permanent fame dissolves into mere reputation and rumor. The prevailing effect is again one of confusion:

          This having heard and seen, some Pow'r
unknown
Strait chang'd the Scene, and snatch'd me from the
          Throne.
Before my View appear'd a Structure fair,
Its Site uncertain, if in Earth or Air;
With rapid Motion turn'd the Mansion round;
With ceaseless Noise the ringing Walls resound.

(418-22)

As we enter the house of rumor, its description recalls the initial confusion of the dream, and the disorder increases until at last truth and lie are inexorably linked:

At last agreed, together out they fly,
Inseparable now, the Truth and Lye;
The strict Companions are for ever join'd,
And this or that unmix'd, No Mortal e'er shall find.

(493-96)

Important here is that just as truth and lie are always mixed, so too are the Temple of Fame and the House of Rumor flipsides of the same construction; fame and rumor are never independent, and the temple itself is rendered a fanciful artifice.

The descriptive vision ends at this point, and the speaker becomes an active participant:

                    While thus I stood, intent to see and hear,
One came, methought, and whisper'd in my Ear;
What cou'd thus high thy rash Ambition raise?
Art thou, fond Youth, a Candidate for Praise?

(497-500)

The remaining twenty-four lines of the poem relate the speaker's reply to the questions, and though it is tempting to read these lines as a conventional dream vision framework, or “epilogue,” there is no evidence to indicate that the dream has ended, no return to the bedroom where the dream originated. Rather, the observer has now merged with the vision, and the vagueness of the “one” who whispers and of the “methought” recalls that same state of “betwixt” that we witnessed in the poem's first section.

Significantly, the speaker's reply addresses not only fame but also a sense of self. Admitting that he, too, came “not void of Hopes,” that he, too, is a petitioner to fame, the speaker acknowledged the difficulty of attaining his goal:

But few, alas! the casual Blessing boast,
So hard to gain, so easy to be lost:
How vain that second Life in orders' Breath,
Th' estate which Wits inherit after Death!

(503-6)

Ostensibly, the young poet laments the unreliability of seeking immortality through poetic reputation, but there is more going on here. The second line above—“So hard to gain, so easy to be lost”—is quite different from a line that would read “so hard to gain, so easy to lose.” Granted, Pope needs the additional syllable, but, given his care in revising his work and his stated objections to employing “expletives” to fill out a line, we must acknowledge that the line refers, in addition to fame, potentially to the self—so easy to be lost.

“To be lost” could be construed in the moral sense—that is, to be morally lost, or corrupted, the seeking of fame long associated with corruption. But as Douglas Patey points out, “corruption [is] a word never far, at this period, from its Latin sense of division into parts” (366). It is this latter sense—that of self-fragmentation or loss of self—that is most intriguing in this Popean (con)text. In the twentieth century, loss of self is a commonly-expressed idea: Eliot claimed that “the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (7). But in the early eighteenth century, when thinkers were just beginning to digest the implications of Locke's remarks on individuality and consciousness, the idea was fairly new and quite threatening. As Christopher Fox ably demonstrates, “when Locke argues ‘that the self is not determined by the identity … of Substance … but only by Identity of Consciousness,’ he is shattering that old substantial vision.” Locke's theory, according to Fox, led to a “conclusion which many of Pope's contemporaries found highly disturbing: that the self is, in [Joseph] Butler's words, ‘not a permanent, but a transient thing’” (10). Pope, Swift, and Arbuthnot would joke about this theory of consciousness in the Memoirs of Scriblerys, composed about the same time as The Temple of Fame,⁷ but it seems clear that the fear of a fragmented self is lurking in Pope's psyche.

In the long, impressive essay that Anthony Wilder appends to his translation of Lacan's Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (originally published in 1968 as The Language of the Self), he offers this analysis for a situation in which I think Pope found himself in the years 1711-1715:

Since the discovery of the lack of object is for Lacan the condition and the cause of desire, the adult quest for transcendence, lost time, lost paradise, lost plentitude, or any of the myriad forms that lack of object might take … can be reduced, if one wishes, to the question at the root of neurosis and psychosis, the question asked by Oedipus: “Who (or what) am I?” The subject, like Oedipus, always knows the answer, but the distinction between knowledge (savoir) and truth repeatedly emphasized by Lacan points up the function of meconnaissance and reconnaissance in human life. Truth for the subject is not knowledge but recognition.

(166)

In Pope's quest for transcendence—a vision where he positions himself petitioning for admission to an illusory temple of fame—we find the poet reconstructing a mythology of immortality, of “honest fame,” and failing to recognize the impossibility of coalescing that mythology with the reality of rumor-ridden London. Thus Wilder's Oedipal question above is appropriate because the “death” mentioned in 1. 506 is not only a physical death, for which immortal fame (if it could be separated from rumor) might be just recompense, but a division of self into a poetic other, who both creates poetic fictions and lusts after fame, subjecting himself to definition by public perception, “that second Life in others' Breath.”

Discussing Pope's later “Epitaph on Himself” (1741), David Morris observes that

no longer did fame pose simply the familiar moral question of whether the artist (tempted by pride) would remain uncorrupted. For Pope fame added a psychological dilemma far more perplexing: could the artist remain unsplintered or whole? Fame, in the new era of print and publicity, splits off from the artist a sizable fragment of character that sometimes seemed to attain nearly an independent existence. Pope belongs in the forefront of a distinct group of writers, including Sterne, Byron, and Wilde, whose contemporary fame created in effect public alter egos.

(29)

Pope publicly expresses this fear most directly, perhaps, in the Preface to the 1717 edition of his Works, which contains the curious remark, “in this office of collecting my pieces, I am altogether uncertain, whether to look upon my self as a man building a monument, or burying the dead?” (TE, 1: 9). Of significance here are two things: that Pope can step aside and view a “self” that is composing and publishing poetry; and that this self at once creates a monument—a permanent memorial to his genius, providing, perhaps, a kind of immortality—and kills and buries him. As Pope says earlier in the Preface, whatever a writer's “fate in Poetry, it is ten to one but he must give up all the reasonable aims of life for it.”⁸ It seems that The Temple of Fame conveys at a deeper textual level much of the same fear of not merely sacrifice but self-annihilation: if publication (the act of going public) involves a kind of death, then “Th' estate which Wits inherit after Death,” “that second Life in others' Breath,” is not merely reputation in the common sense of that term, but a life created and defined by the public.⁹

The poem attempts a solution to this problem confronting all poets, but it does not reside, as standard readings suggest, in the poem's final, hopeful lines. Since there is no internal evidence to indicate that the final section should be separated from the vision, I see the speaker, naively and idealistically, ignoring the double nature of the vision which inextricably links fame and rumor, and requesting an honest fame or none, requesting the impossible. If Pope's great fear is loss of self, then his desire is to suppress the poetic Other, the youthful bard, now demoted to just another petitioner for fame, and to place his own quest for immortality on what he thinks is firmer ground than mere reputation. The vision has demonstrated that if there is permanence here, it resides not in fame—always subject to fickle fortune—but in its highly ordered temple, in the poetry itself: the ordered couplets; the artistic, fictive construction of the new; the fabled works that hold up Homer, Virgil, and the others. His petition is the poem, The Temple of Fame.

In 1700 the minor poet Thomas Yalden published The Temple of Fame: A Poem to the Memory of the Most Illustrious Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, a poem linking death and fame as an elegy to Anne's only heir, whose death in 1700 prompted in the following year passage of the crucial Act of Settlement designating the Protestant House of Hanover as successors to the throne after Anne's death. Like Pope's poem, Yalden's Temple provides a twofold vision: in this case, a grim and gloomy abode for the countless forgotten dead and then a glorious temple providing immortality to select soldiers, poets, and monarchs:

Here Fame presides, here jealous Honour stands,
To guard their Off-spring from the Tyrant's hands;
To keep the Heroe's boasted Name alive,
And make the Glorious after Death survive.

(20)

Yalden patriotically portrays William, who died young, as a kind of martyr to fate, which prevented his attaining his potential. The poet pledges to immortalize the prince in verse: “What Fate deny'd, the grateful Muses give, / And make thy Name to Endless Ages live.” Significantly, then, the immortalizing temple exists both within and without the poem: there is the mythological temple (a poetic commonplace), home for a select few for whom fame cheats death and creates eternal life, to whose ranks Prince William may enter; and there is Yalden's poem, which will also preserve William's name. The poem is both a means to the monument and a monument itself. Yalden's Dedication to Anne makes this point clear:

Behold the glorious Shrine of Fame display'd,
Whilst Death withdraws its formidable shade:
See where your God-like Ancestors in State
Elude the Grave, and triumph over Fate.

(A3)

The shrine is both the visionary description of the temple and the poem that follows the dedication. Something of the same sort exists in Pope's poem.

Though we customarily identify this notion of permanence in art with Romantics like Keats and Shelley, it was Horace who boldly proclaimed:

I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze and loftier than the Pyramids' royal pile, one that no wasting rain, no furious north wind can destroy, … I shall not altogether die, but a mighty part of me shall escape the deathgoddess. On and on shall I grow, ever fresh with the glory of after time.

(279)

We should also recall that The Rape of the Lock, the Epistle to Jervas, and Eloisa to Abelard, all composed during this same period of Pope's career, end with suggestions of the immortalizing power of art. However much Pope would like to believe in the permanence of art and an established hierarchy of great poets, constructed by centuries of proper critical judgment as outlined in An Essay on Criticism, such a belief was being rendered untenable by the changing economics of writing. A new generation of professional classical scholars, whom Swift had attacked in A Tale of a Tub and the Battle of the Books and whom Pope would assail in the Dunciad, was chiseling away at the sacred texts: “the interest in the fragmentary, in dictionaries and compilations, in ancient commentators, and in the obscure constituted,” according to Penelope Wilson, “a real threat to the stable system of literary values expressed in the very concept of the Temple of Fame. The monolith was being turned into a collection of atoms” (86).

What Pope fails to realize, of course, is just how unstable poetic texts are; literary texts are consumer items not just for professional scholars but for succeeding poets as well. If poets are subject to how others perceive them, to “that second Life in others' Breath,” their works are also subject to such second lives. Indeed, in reworking Chaucer's material, Pope is re-creating Chaucer for himself. In translating Homer, his current project, Pope creates what we still call “Pope's Homer,” at once contributing to the Greek's immortality and reconfiguring him into some other for his own purpose and profit. Later, of course, Pope would turn his attention to Horace's monuments themselves.

As David Morris notes, commerce “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” (7). And Pope was well aware of the commodification of literature, especially with regard to imitating works of previous authors. In a 2 July 1706 letter to William Walsh, on “borrowing” for his Pastorals, Pope remarks, “a mutual commerce makes Poetry flourish; but then 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” (Correspondence 1: 20). In a capitalistic world, like Pope's, poetic texts are public commodities, available for use. If, by adapting Chaucer, Pope raised his own name on “the fall'n Ruins of Another's Fame,” (ll. 519-20), turnabout ensued quickly with the appearance in March 1715 of the anonymous burlesque Aesop at the Bear-Garden: A Vision. … In Imitation of the Temple of Fame, a Vision, By Mr. Pope. Thus, Pope's temple is deconstructed barely a month after its publication, a fact that did not go unnoticed by Pope's contemporaries. Thomas Burnet, writing in Grumbler 14 (6 May 1715), remarked that “the inferior Class of Writers is addicted to catching at Applause and Admiration. … Let the unwary take warning from Pope, who not long ago raised a Temple of Fame to himself, which was no sooner finished than it fell to the Ground and buried the Architect under its Ruins” (Guerinot 33). In his Life of Pope, Johnson summarizes the poem's eighteenth-century reputation: “it never obtained much notice, but is turned silently over, and seldom quoted or mentioned with either praise of blame” (3: 226). Thus, if the text of the poem shatters the concept of honest fame, the poem's historical context shatters the concept of permanence in art. Pope would have his immortality, but he would owe it to poems other than this one.

How much Pope understood the fears and anxieties present in The Temple of Fame is, of course, a matter of mere speculation. I do think it is obvious, however, that this early poem is every bit as personal as Pope's later works, and that the naïve hopefulness of the concluding moral lines contrasts sharply with the world-weariness of, say, Epistle I, i (To Bolingbroke, pub. 1738). As Tillotson's textual notes make clear, subsequent editions of The Temple of Fame did not incorporate many substantial changes. We do find, however, Pope substituting in the 1736 Works (and later editions) third person for the earlier first person pronouns in the following lines:

Ease, Health, and Life, for this [fame] we [they 1736]
          must resign

(l. 507)

and

All luckless Wits our [their 1736] Enemies profest.

(l. 511)

Whatever Pope's attitude toward fame at the height of his career in the 1730s, he appears to have a better understanding of the subject. Fame is still fame, but his vantage point is somewhere more advantageous than at the visionary threshold of the temple, and the young petitioners are now more clearly “others,” against whom Pope's loyal servant John might shut, shut the door.

Notes

1. Recent books treating Pope from a historical or psychological perspective include: John Aden, Pope's Once and Future Kings: Satire and Politics in the Early Poems (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1978); Laura Brown, Alexander Pope (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985); Leopold Damrosch, Jr., The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987); Dustin Griffin, Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978); Brean Hammond, Pope and Bolingbroke: A Study of Friendship and Influence (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1984) and Pope (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986); and Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985). To this list must be added numerous articles by Howard Erskine-Hill.

2. See, for example, Geoffrey Tillotson's introduction to the poem in vol. 1 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 2nd ed., rev. (London and New Haven: Methuen and Yale UP, 1954); A.C. Cawley, “Chaucer, Pope, and Fame,” Review of English Literature 3 (1962): 9-19; G. Wilson Knight, Laureate of Peace: On the Genius of Alexander Pope (New York: Oxford UP, 1955); and Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985), esp. pp. 163-67. Notable exceptions to “standard readings” are John Aden, “Pope's Temple of Fame and ‘dark Politicks,’” Papers on Language and Literature 9 (1973): 138-44; and Wallace Jackson, Vision and Re-Vision in Alexander Pope (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1983), pp. 32-39.

3. Quotations from Pope's poetry are from The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, et al., 11 vols. (London and New Haven: Methuen and Yale UP, 1938-1968). Hereafter cited TE, with volume and page number.

4. The poem existed at least by 12 Nov. 1712. In a letter of that date, Steele compliments Pope on the poem, but it is clear from his comments that the poem was quite different from its published form. See Correspondence 1: 152.

5. Spence 1: 12 (Item #24). Perhaps the poem that best reflects Pope's positive attitude toward an idyllic, rural life is the “Ode on Solitude,” which Pope sent to Cromwell on 11 July 1709, claiming to have composed it “when I was not Twelve years old” (Correspondence 1: 68-9). The poem begins:

   Happy the man, whose wish and care
   A few paternal acres bound,
   Content to breathe his native air,
             In his own ground.

6. For a full discussion on the debate over the meaning of “self,” see Christopher Fox, “Locke and the Scriblerians: The Discussion of Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 16 (1982): 1-25.

7. In Chapter 12 of the Memoirs Martin endeavors to discover “the Seat of the Soul” and receives a letter from the Secretary of the “Society of Free-Thinkers.” For a discussion of this episode and its relation to the current controversy on consciousness and the immateriality of the soul, see Fox and the notes by Charles Kerby-Miller (280-93). The following two chapters of the Memoirs—those involving the amusing case of the Siamese-twin mistress—may also owe something to the debate on identity. See Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (New York: Oxford UP, 1988).

8. TE 1: 5. Pope frequently uses a death metaphor in reference to publication. Referring to a delay in publication of the Pastorals, Pope tells Cromwell, “I have been mercifully repriev'd by the Sovereign Power of Jacob Tonson [his publisher], from being brought forth to publick Punishment and respited from Time to Time from the hands of those barbarous Executioners of the Muses. … If often happens that guilty Poets, like other guilty Criminals, when once they are known and proclaim'd, deliver themselves into the hands of Justice only to prevent others from doing it, more to their disadvantage; and not out of any Ambition to spread their Fame by being executed in the face of the world, which is a Fame but short of Continuance” (1 Nov. 1708; Correspondence 1: 51-52). Similarly, Pope refers, in a letter to Parnell, to printing his 1717 Works as “making my last will and testament” (March or April 1717 [?]; Correspondence 1: 396).

9. Though Johnson was probably correct in his assertion that “no authors ever had so much fame in their own life-time as Pope and Voltaire” (Boswell 3: 332), fame, for Pope (as well as for Voltaire), was not always happy fame. Pope had also used the expression “second life” to refer to fame in An Essay on Criticism (1. 480) but apparently did not realize how soon after publication of that poem the “second life” would begin. Following Pope's poem by barely a month was Dennis's Reflections Critical and Satyrical, Upon a Late Rhapsody, Call'd An Essay Upon Criticism, the first full-blown, serious attack on Pope and his writing. While some of Dennis's assaults hit their marks, references to Pope as “a pedantick Slave to Authority and Opinion” (398), “a hunch-back'd Toad” (415), and a “downright Monkey” who differs “so much from human shape” (417) must have stung the young poet. Adding “in others' Breath” to “that Second Life” in The Temple of Fame likely alludes to Dennis's Reflections and the countless attacks preceding the appearance of the first volume of Homer in 1715. (Pope later repeats the expression in the Essay on Man: “What's Fame? a fancy'd life in others breath” [IV, 237].) For an account of the anti-Pope publications in 1715, see J.V. Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope, 1711-1744 (London: Methuen, 1969), esp. pp. 20-34.

I wish to acknowledge the National Endowment for the Humanities, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, and the University of Southern Mississippi, without whose generous support research for this project would not have been possible.

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