[In the following essay, Aubrey suggests that Pope's landscaping at Twickenham reflects an overarching principle that informs his poetic oeuvre, namely, the traditional literary theory that ranks genres of poetry.]

Historians of landscape gardening agree that Alexander Pope is an influential figure, but how to account for his various practices and pronouncements is less certain. Labels such as ‘inconsistent’, ‘eclectic’, and ‘transitional’ have been offered. Morris Brownell calls Pope's garden at Twickenham a perfect paradigm of the picturesque garden that would come into fashion later in the century. Others see Pope's practices more as an extension of classical and Renaissance gardens, as Pope understood them.

An idea from traditional literary theory, that there is a hierarchy of kinds, or genres of poetry, may have enabled Pope to avoid recognising what we tend to see as inconsistencies in his attitudes towards gardens. Renaissance critics differed about how many kinds of poetry there were, and how the kinds should be ranked, but Dryden's translation of Boileau's Art of poetry contains a typical arrangement of poetic categories, in this ascending order: pastoral, elegy, ode, epigram, satire, tragedy, and epic. Such a hierarchy of kinds provided a conceptual framework which helped to constitute Pope's thinking about poetry, which he considered a sister art to gardening as well as to painting. Joseph Addison had applied the idea to gardening in The Spectator no.477, where he suggested that ‘there are as many Kinds of Gardening, as of Poetry’. Since Pope tended to evaluate art on the basis on hierarchical assumptions, and since he considered gardening to be a sister art to poetry and painting, he may also have regarded the diverse parts of his garden like the various kinds of poetry.

In his Discourse of pastoral poetry, Pope associates pastoral poems with the tradition of the ‘Golden Age’. His own Windsor Forest can be seen as an English pastoral representation of an idealised, fecund countryside. Pope's quotation of Homer's pastoral interlude from the Odyssey in the 1712 Guardian essay ‘On gardens’ indicates that Pope senses an opposition between formal topiary gardens and productive gardens with social utility. In his own garden at Twickenham, according to John Serle's plan of 1745, Pope devoted about one-tenth of the space to a ‘Kitchen Garden’, where he would have grown fruits, herbs and vegetables. The adjoining vineyard would have provided associations with Rome, as well as fruit and wine. These areas were of a different kind from the rest of Pope's garden, like a farm in a larger landscape, or like a Georgic in a corpus of poetic works, or like a pastoral interlude in an epic poem.

As Pope's works include an Elegy to the memory of an unfortunate lady, his garden contained an elegiac spot, where he erected an obelisk to the memory of his mother. This part of the garden would have provided a locus for meditation on elegiac themes of loss and mortality, as a ruined arch planned for the entrance to the grotto also would have done, at the opposite end of the garden from the obelisk.

Above pastoral and elegy is the lyrical ode, poems such as the one Pope claimed to have written at the age of twelve and which anticipates his situation at Twickenham: ‘Happy the man, whose wish and care / A few paternal acres bound.’ Even though his site was only five acres in extent, Pope created the illusion of more space by planting darker trees, and closer together, as they were farther from the house, so that his garden could generate pleasures similar to those felt when one looks at a landscape painting—or at a similar view of the countryside. Likewise, Pope's raising of mounts seems meant to express and multiply his pleasure in the broken views of the Thames which they afforded. Other pleasurable sensory surprises were available in the grotto, Pope's tunnel leading to the garden, under his house and the London road. Such devices, for expression and manipulation of the feelings, constituted the gardening equivalent of a lyrical ode.

In the middle of the Boileau-Dryden hierarchy is the epigram. Addison had referred to ‘makers of Parterres and Flower-Gardens as Epigrammatists and Sonneteers in this Art’, evidently for their analogous formal control. Pope is not known to have planted flowers at Twickenham, but he seems to approve of them in the line from his Epistle to Burlington where, of Villario's pleasant garden, it is said that ‘A waving Glow his bloomy beds display.’ The open space on Serle's plan of Pope's garden, labelled the Bowling Green, resembles a parterre, and the area laid to lawn between the house and the river was called ‘a parterre’ by a visitor in 1747. But Pope's use of open space seems less deliberate than, say, Le Nôtre's at Versailles. As in the best epigrams, Pope's artistry was disguised, or at any rate did not call attention to its artificiality as formal gardens tend to do.

Satire is above epigram, and the perversions of good gardening described in Pope's Epistle to Burlington are verse representations of satirical gardening. His description in The Guardian of a hedge sculpted to look like St George slaying the dragon but lacking a season's growth before the lance will quite reach its target, is satirical gardening in prose. Satire in gardening in practice is rare, if one looks for an ironic witty dimension, but such a dimension can be found in the gardens of Stowe, the place Pope holds up for praise as ‘a work to wonder at’, where the Temple of Modern Virtue is built as a ruin and the Temple of British Worthies has a subversive inscription to a canine ‘Signor Fido’. Several features at Twickenham were, like satire, intended to arouse the beholder's moral sense and to guide his or her thoughts in a socially responsible way. The statues evidently included busts of Dryden and Newton, a satirist and a theorist, both of whom were able to envisage an order of things beyond the historical moments in which they were living.

The second highest kind of poetry Dryden calls ‘Tragic’, though another seventeenth-century critic refers to the genre as ‘Dramatic’. Pope's Eloisa to Abelard is a dramatic monologue about a tragic situation, but how Pope might have imagined analogies between dramatic or tragic poems and gardens is difficult to determine. He did sometimes personify landscapes, as if a garden were the residence of a deity or spirit presiding over the site, as he advises the would-be gardener to ‘Consult the Genius of the Place in all’; to design a landscape garden might require such deities to act in concert, like characters in a well-conceived dramatic production. In a less fanciful sense, Twickenham included dramatic gardening as it invited people who walked in it to respond as if they were an audience at a play, or even characters participating in a drama. The unlabelled oval area in Serle's plan appears to have been an amphitheatre, perhaps an execution of Pope's advice in Epistle to Burlington to ‘scoop in circling theatres the Vale’. In yet another sense of the word theatre, Romances are theatrical, are dramatisations; Dryden does not mention the Romance as a genre, but it would be a sub-genre of dramatic poetry. Addison mentions four devices as elements of Romance gardening: ‘Bowers and Grottos, Trelliages and Cascades’. Pope mentioned an enchanted bower in a letter, sketched a trellis on a manuscript, and built a grotto with an artificial rill—all four of the devices mentioned by Addison.

The highest-ranking in any hierarchy of genres is the epic. Pope's work with this kind of poetry includes his translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the fragment of his intended epic Brutus, and his ironic epics The Rape of the lock and The Dunciad. The gardening equivalent of an epic, according to Addison, was the work of London and Wise, royal gardeners to Queen Anne, but Pope would have considered their formal gardens conceptually misguided and not examples to the nation, as an epic poem should be. Near the end of his Epistle to Burlington, Pope praises him ‘Who plants like Bathurst, or who builds like Boyle’. Boyle's—that is, Burlington's—architecture is said to be ‘worthy Kings’, and Bathurst's gardening may be inferred likewise to be a model in that his 5,000-acre estate with its oak forest could supply the Royal Navy with timber. Another way of gardening on an epic scale is to sculpt the landscape, as Pope once proposed doing with a Welsh mountain so that it would resemble Alexander the Great reclining.

There is another kind of epic gardening, akin to the sub-genre of sacred epic, in which a poet or painter represents sacred themes. At Twickenham, when Pope returned to work on his grotto late in his life, he was not just adding more shells but imagined himself to be creating a miniature earthscape. He wanted exotic minerals to be arranged as they would be found in a mine, he explained in a letter, so that his grotto would re-create the processes of nature without owing anything to chisel or polish. In the sense that Pope's garden artistry was re-creating divine Creation, Pope's grotto was sacred gardening of the highest order.

Ralph Cohen has observed that eighteenth-century critics ‘saw the forms as hierarchical, comprehensively embodied or capable of being harmoniously embodied in the drama or epic’. Pope demonstrated his virtuosity as a poet by writing in the different kinds of poetry, and his villa at Twickenham likewise demonstrated his versatility as a gardener, where the diverse kinds of garden are unified harmoniously in his comprehensive, epic gardening statement. Pope's garden was worthy to serve as a revolutionary prototype, though Pope probably saw what he was doing as traditional, partly in terms of the hierarchy of genres. However he thought of what he was doing, the landscape garden Pope constructed became a model for the nation in his lifetime.