SOURCE: “Conclusion,” in The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope, University of California Press, 1987, pp. 282-304.

[In the following excerpt, Damrosch demonstrates the rhetorical nature of Pope's literary achievement by comparing the aims of his poetry with those of earlier and later poets as well as with strategies of contemporary writers in other genres, particularly novels.]

The Rape of the Lock, written at the same period as Windsor-Forest, is a good-humored mock-epic; the Dunciad is not really mock-epic at all, but rather an anti-epic that rejects the prevailing attitudes of a whole civilization.¹ In such a culture, pastoral harmony is utterly defeated by urban squalor. The mirror passage in Windsor-Forest ends with energetic lines that modulate from the emblematic river to the real one:

Through the fair scene roll slow the ling' ring streams,
Then foaming pour along, and rush into the Thames.

(217-18)

In the Dunciad the same rhyme is expressive of wretchedness:

To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames.

(II.271-72)

The lofty term disemboguing is dragged down from its heroic origins,² and instead of the shepherd-poet musing on images of nature, we now have Grub Street hacks frolicking in urban nastiness:

Who flings most filth, and wide pollutes around
The stream, be his the Weekly Journals bound.

(279-80)

All is not lost, of course. At many points in the Dunciad Pope laughs at the impotence of the ephemeral city poets:

Now night descending, the proud scene was o'er,
But lived, in Settle's numbers, one day more.
Now may'rs and shrieves all hushed and satiate lay,
Yet eat, in dreams, the custard of the day;
While pensive poets painful vigils keep,
Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep.

(I.89-94)

These writers are absurd weaklings, not Satanic monsters, and in themselves they are no threat to Pope. The burden of his lament is not that bad writing exists, but that bad wit is parasitical upon good and is rewarded by a culture that can no longer tell the difference. The Dunciad has rightly been called an exploration “not of meaninglessness but of the partial subversion of meaning.”³ Meaning was disturbingly rootless in this period, and Pope, just as much as the Grub Street writers, had to piece it together as best he could. Milton despised the godless culture of the Restoration, but it is inconceivable that Milton would have written a Dunciad.

“Earless on high, stood unabashed Defoe” (Dunciad II.147). Socially, politically, and culturally these two writers had virtually nothing in common. What would Pope have made of modern literary histories that give Defoe equal space with himself? Defoe's apparently artless narratives did mark one of the main paths into the future, and as Sitter has shown, so did a mode of private lyric whose maternal muse has curious affinities with Pope's goddess of Dulness.⁴ If one thinks of the three major kinds into which literature was traditionally divided—narrative, dramatic, and lyric—then it has to be said that Pope (like Johnson after him) was hostile to the direction all three were taking. But it should also be said that all three ran into deep trouble in the later eighteenth century, precisely because the relation between art and reality, with which Pope was so steadily preoccupied, continued to pose serious difficulties. The lyric in that period, as I have argued elsewhere, was compromised by fear of overt subjectivity.⁵ The best plays were preoccupied with the duplicities of acting and unmasking. The greatest narratives were in what a librarian would call nonfiction: Hume's History of England, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Boswell's Life of Johnson. The massiveness of these works deserves remark, reflecting a need to get it all in; details supply the life and justification of the narrative. These developments clearly flow from the problems that Pope faced, but he himself needed to retain more authorial control than such modes of writing would permit. Atossa, Sporus, and the rest are presented by the poet, not imagined in themselves. Fielding's Tom Jones, which asserts a classical ideal of the probable and glories in artifice, is the last Augustan narrative. But Tom Jones too is remote from Pope, for he is deeply resistant to narratively, preferring dynamic stasis to development.

In thinking about Pope's cultural situation, the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin are particularly suggestive. In The Dialogic Imagination Bakhtin distinguishes between the unitary language to which poems aspire, and the “heteroglossia” of mingled languages in the novel. Poetic language tends to seek “correctness” (perceived differently in different times and places) and is “ideologically saturated” in that it embodies a single ideology, rather than establishing tensions among disparate ideologies as the novel does.⁶ In the terms of Bakhtin's theory, one can say that the novelistic impulse in the eighteenth century extends very widely, not only in the multiple ideologies of epistolary novels like Clarissa and Humphry Clinker, but also in “factual” works that juxtapose competing versions of experience.⁷

Faced with a novelistic world, many eighteenth-century poets walled themselves off in a realm of poetic diction, whose status as poetry depended on its willed evasion of ordinary speech. Richard Rorty speaks of “poetic” moments as occurring at times when a culture ceases to converse in terms that are mutually agreed upon and begins to be conscious of neologisms or stylistic innovations that are explicitly contrasted with an older mode.⁸ “Gray thought his language more poetical,” Johnson said, “as it was more remote from common use.”⁹ In his youth, Pope certainly aspired to a style of high correctness, and poetic diction was certainly prominent:

To thee, bright goddess, oft a lamb shall bleed,
If teeming ewes increase my fleecy breed.

Winter, (81-82)

Similarly, Pope's Homer is not so much a translation into eighteenth-century speech as transubstantiation into an exalted “literary” language. But in his later poems it would be impossible to say that the high style suppresses the babel of contrary voices that rise from below. In Bakhtin's account of the ideal poetic style, “Each word must express the poet's meaning directly and without mediation; there must be no distance between the poet and his word. … Everything that enters the work must immerse itself in Lethe, and forget its previous life in any other contexts” (p. 297). In the novel, on the contrary, “all words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour” (p. 293). Heteroglossia comes to the fore in times of cultural breakup, when a standard language loses its stable support in religious, political, and ideological authority (pp. 370-71). Pope is a poet of just such an age, and unlike Gray he confronts the challenge instead of evading or escaping it: he imposes a poetic style upon a novelistic imagination, and tries to colonize the novelistic world with the authority of poetry.

As early as The Rape of the Lock, Pope uses comic dialogue to reproduce the slang, expletives, and inflections of particular types, “placing” his speakers with authorial irony much as Fielding or Dickens would place them.

(Sir Plume, of amber snuff-box justly vain,
And the nice conduct of a clouded cane)
With earnest eyes, and round unthinking face,
He first the snuff-box opened, then the case,
And thus broke out—“My Lord, why, what the devil?
Zounds! damn the lock! ‘fore Gad, you must be civil!
Plague on't! ‘tis past a jest—nay prithee, pox!
Give her the hair”—he spoke, and rapped his box.

(IV.123-30)

To this inept splutter, the Baron responds with a cool irony that both invokes the “high” mode and pokes fun at it:

It grieves me much (replied the peer again)
Who speaks so well should ever speak in vain.
But by this lock, this sacred lock I swear,
(Which never more shall join its parted hair,
Which never more its honours shall renew,
Clipt from the lovely head where late it grew).

(131-36)

Pope's later poems are filled with brilliant recreations of particular modes of speech, which (as Bakhtin says) can be embodied in narration as well as in direct dialogue.

Sir Balaam now, he lives like other folks,
He takes his chirping pint, and cracks his jokes:
“Live like yourself,” was soon my lady's word;
And lo! two puddings smoked upon the board.

(To Bathurst, 357-60)

Papillia, wedded to her doting spark,
Sighs for the shades—“How charming is a park!”
A park is purchased, but the fair he sees
All bathed in tears—“Oh odious, odious trees!”

(To a Lady, 37-40)

“Lives like other folks,” “cracks his jokes,” and “live like yourself” are phrases from a bourgeois world that Pope satirizes by mimicking it; “doting spark,” “charming,” and “odious” are expressions from fashionable society.¹⁰

But it is not a trivial observation to say that in actual life Sir Plume and Sir Balaam's wife and Papillia would not speak in rhyme, let alone in the inexhaustibly supple rhythms of Pope's verse. Rhythm, indeed, according to Bakhtin, is precisely the means by which a poet gains control of his materials, destroying in embryo “those social worlds of speech and of persons that are potentially embedded in the word” (p. 298). And his conclusion from this observation reads like an analysis of Pope's satires: “We experience a profound and conscious tension through which the unitary poetic language of a work rises from the heteroglot and language-diverse chaos of the literary language contemporary to it” (p. 298). Ruskin's description of “sententious pentametre” exactly catches the way in which Pope, whom Arnold depreciated as a classic of prose, concentrates and adjusts prose into richer meaning:

In this kind of verse, the structure and rhyme (if rhyme be admitted) are used merely to give precision and weight to a prose sentence, otherwise sifted, abstracted, and corrected into extremest possible value. Such verse professes always to be the result of the writer's utmost wisdom and utmost care; it admits therefore of no careless or imperfect construction, but allows any intelligible degree of inversion; because it has been considered to the end, before a word is written, and the placing of the words may afterwards be adjusted according to their importance. Thus, “Sir Plume, of amber snuff-box justly vain,” is not only more rhythmic, but more elegant and accurate than “Sir Plume, justly vain of his amber snuff-box”: first, because the emphasis of rhyme is laid on his vanity, not his box; secondly, because the “his,” seen on full consideration to be unnecessary, is omitted, to concentrate the sentence; and with a farther and more subtle reason … that a coxcomb cannot, properly speaking, possess anything, but is possessed by everything, so that in the next line Pope does not say, “And the nice conduct of his clouded cane,” but of a clouded cane.¹¹

Swift parodies his satiric victims with a kind of ventriloquizing, so that he himself disappears from view, the skillful counterfeiter of whom Kenner has written so provocatively.¹² Where is the real narrator of A Tale of a Tub? When does Gulliver speak for himself and when for Swift? How are Swift's positive religious views expressed in these works, which notoriously offended many contemporary readers? In the Rabelaisian tradition, Bakhtin says, “Truth is restored by reducing the lie to an absurdity, but truth itself does not seek words; she is afraid to entangle herself in the word, to soil herself in verbal pathos” (p. 309). Thus Swift can mimic the rattling colloquialisms of a servant in The Humble Petition of Mrs. Frances Harris, and minor poets can similarly catch the tone of casual speech in a wholly un-Popean way:

—“Oh, Madam, I must beg your pardon there,”
The General cried, “for—‘twas in the year ten—
No, let me recollect, it was not then;
‘Twas in the year eight, I think, for then we lay
Encamped with all the army, near Cambray—
Yes, yes, I'm sure I'm right by one event,
We supped together in Cadogan's tent.”(13)

The unobtrusive rhymes are the poet's, but the words are the character's, in an altogether novelistic way. In Pope's poems, even when he adopts one or another “persona,” we can always see behind the mask, and truth always seeks words. The words it seeks, in contrast to the slang and jargon of the debased “dunces,” are inherited verities that are supposed to retain their immemorial cultural authority. Even while he brilliantly deploys the idioms of his culture, Pope strives to raise them to a level of civilized harmony, in the spirit of the modern saying “My language is the universal whore whom I have to make into a virgin.”¹⁴

It hasn't been sufficiently noted that when the Essay on Man was published anonymously, contemporary readers failed to recognize it as Pope's. Anonymity was in part a defensive maneuver to forestall hostile criticism,¹⁵ but it was also an assertion of universality: the poem was meant to speak for the ages as well as for Pope. But as Johnson comments sarcastically, “The reader feels his mind full, though he learns nothing; and when he meets it in its new array no longer knows the talk of his mother and his nurse.”¹⁶ It would be wrong to say that Pope has bungled his task; rather, he has attempted a task that is no longer possible. For as Bakhtin says,

The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers. … It is a prior discourse. It is therefore not a question of choosing it from among other possible discourses that are its equal. … It can be profaned. It is akin to taboo, i.e., a name that must not be taken in vain.

(p. 342)

All of this is true of Paradise Lost, which is deeply aware of competing ideologies but makes a virtue of the tension that they create, defining tension indeed as the fruit of sin. The Essay on Man constantly tries to harness tension and to make it productive, not to say domestic, and represents a sustained effort to put the cultural lid back on.

Much of the interest in Pope's poems arises, however, from the irrepressibility of the languages and ideologies that refuse to stay suppressed, and the thin-skinned anxiety of Pope the man as opposed to the equanimity of Pope the oracle. To quote Bakhtin once more,

We can go so far as to say that in real life people talk most of all about what others talk about—they transmit, recall, weigh and pass judgment on other people's words, opinions, assertions, information; people are upset by others' words, or agree with them, contest them, refer to them and so forth. … One must also consider the psychological importance in our lives of what others say about us, and the importance, for us, of understanding and interpreting these words of others (“living hermeneutics”).

(p. 338)

Pope's later poems are a medley of voices and modes, of attacks and counterattacks, immersed in a changing literary culture that reflects a changing world. He never stopped trying to control his rivals through language, embedding them like grubs in amber. But the obsessiveness with which he did so confirms the power of living hermeneutics, “what others say about us.” As Johnson magisterially observes, Pope's pose of Olympian detachment was only a pose:

He pretends insensibility to censure and criticism, though it was observed by all who knew him that every pamphlet disturbed his quiet, and his extreme irritability laid him open to perpetual vexation. … He very frequently professes contempt of the world, and represents himself as looking on mankind, sometimes with gay indifference, as on emmets of a hillock below his serious attention; and sometimes with gloomy indignation, as on monsters more worth of hatred than of pity. These were dispositions apparently counterfeited. … He passed through common life, sometimes vexed and sometimes pleased, with the natural emotions of common men.¹⁷

Pope's world of truth was empiricist, not Platonic, and try as he might, he could not compel language to reassume the authority it possessed during the Renaissance. Apart from the brief episode of high Romanticism, indeed, it has never succeeded in doing so again. Sidney said that nature gives us a brazen world and poetry a golden; in the eighteenth century it becomes obvious that poetry henceforth will be brazen too.

At the outset of his career Pope adapted Addison's prose description of St. Peter's (TE I, 268n) as a model for poetic achievement:

Thus when we view some well-proportioned dome,
(The world's just wonder, and ev'n thine O Rome!)
No single parts unequally surprise;
All comes united to th' admiring eyes;
No monstrous height, or breadth, or length appear;
The whole at once is bold, and regular.

(Essay on Criticism 247-52)

Pope's later poems reluctantly abandon this dream of perfect integration, or rather they confine it to the local perfection of the couplet. Single parts often surprise, the Dunciad grows to monstrous length, and if “the whole” appears bold it seldom seems regular.

There is an emblematic appropriateness in the “Gothic” analogy as used by Pope and later by Wordsworth. Pope ends his preface to The Works of Shakespeare with praise that is not so much ambiguous as perplexed:

I will conclude by saying of Shakespeare, that with all his faults and with all the irregularity of his drama, one may look upon his works, in comparison of those that are more finished and regular, as upon an ancient majestic piece of Gothic architecture, compared with a neat modern building. The latter is more elegant and glaring, but the former is more strong and more solemn. It must be allowed that in one of these there are materials enough to make many of the other. It has much the greater variety and much the nobler apartments, though we are often conducted to them by dark, odd, and uncouth passages. Nor does the whole fail to strike us with greater reverence, though many of the parts are childish, ill-placed, and unequal to its grandeur.¹⁸

Puzzlement at Shakespeare's “irregular” greatness was of course usual throughout the century, but it is interesting to see the Gothic analogy start to turn positive, remembering that “Goth” still had the pejorative connotations that “Vandal” does today:

A second deluge learning thus o'er-run,
And the monks finished what the Goths begun.

Essay on Criticism 691-92)

The Augustan ideal of luminous simplicity is breaking down, and Gothic strength begins to seem superior to Greek (or Georgian) elegance even if it entails darkness, oddness, and inequality.

Wordsworth too uses the Gothic analogy. The Excursion, he says, should be seen as subordinate to a larger whole:

The two works have the same kind of relation to each other, if [the author] may so express himself, as the ante-chapel has to the body of a gothic church. Continuing this allusion, he may be permitted to add, that his minor pieces, which have been long before the public, when they shall be properly arranged, will be found by the attentive reader to have such connection with the main work as may give them claim to be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in those edifices.¹⁹

Smallness and incompleteness are no longer drawbacks, as Pope had believed them to be. Fragments can have their own kind of adequacy. Yet Wordsworth too longed for a larger structure to which the fragments might be subordinated; but like Pope's Opus Magnum, the mighty Wordsworthian cathedral was never completed.

Looking into an uncongenial future, Pope sought to accept his deposition with Horatian equanimity.

Learn to live well, or fairly make your will;
You've played, and loved, and ate, and drank your
          fill:
Walk sober off, before a sprightlier age
Comes titt'ring on, and shoves you from the stage.

(Epistle II.ii. 322-25)

If in nothing else, Pope is at one with pedantic Bentley in his unsuitability to the frivolous world of the future:

In flowed at once a gay embroidered race,
And titt'ring pushed the pedants off the place.

(Dunciad IV.275-76)

But this vision turned out to be wrong. The future was more solemn than tittering, and a decade after Pope's death Warton, one of the lyric poets of the next generation, was regretting the absence of poésie pure in Pope's poems:

We do not, it should seem, sufficiently attend to the difference there is betwixt a man of wit, a man of sense, and a true poet. Donne and Swift were undoubtedly men of wit and men of sense: but what traces have they left of pure poetry?²⁰

Warton dismisses the “Alps on Alps” analogy in the Essay on Criticism, which Johnson was to find so exact,²¹ as “too general and indistinct” and prefers a prose passage of rapturous sublimity from Shaftesbury (p. 142). “Poetry” begins to mean a heightened mode of language that purports to embody a heightened mode of experience. One realizes how much “Alps on Alps” is a metaphor of limitation, and how much deeper Warton's dislike runs than an objection to “indistinct” description. Whereas a Romantic poet would rejoice that there are always higher peaks to aspire to—Wordsworth suffers a kind of despair in the Prelude when crossing the Alps proves anticlimatic—Pope expresses weariness at a journey that never ends.

By the 1750s Edward Young, formerly the author of pallid Characteristical Satires, was proclaiming the new poetic ideal in terms that would have astounded Pope: “In the fairyland of fancy, genius may wander wild; there it has a creative power, and may reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chimeras.”²² Fancy, whose ambiguous relation to reality had so preoccupied Pope and his contemporaries, is now hailed as absolute master of its own creations, though perhaps of nothing else. Young's formulation is well on the way to Romantic notions of the poem as imaginary heterocosm and as revelation of its author's soul. Expressivism replaces mimesis as the basis of composition, and unconscious sources of imagery are suddenly of interest:

Few authors of distinction but have experienced something of this nature at the first beamings of their yet unsuspected genius on their hitherto dark composition: the writer starts at it as at a lucid meteor in the night; is much surprised; can scarce believe it true. During his happy confusion it may be said to him, as to Eve at the lake,

What there thou seest, fair creature, is thyself.

(p. 288)

Pope's goal was a public self and a public poetry, expressed in Horatian verse bordering closely on prose; he would have found Young's allusion to Eve's narcissism all too apt.

Pope's career is a sustained acceptance of limits, which produces results very different from the post-Romantic crisis poem with its fear of losing one's visionary imagination. (Collins's Poetical Character, which seemed a very minor poem to his friend Johnson, becomes a seminal poem in the system of Harold Bloom.) Stooping to truth means accepting mundane subjects, diminished though they may be, and thereby achieving something of permanent value:

Truth guards the poet, sanctifies the line,
And makes immortal, verse as mean as mine.

(Epilogue II.246-47)

To compare Pope with the Romantics is to realize that if their aspirations were more exalted than his, their failures were more crushing. Pope left the Renaissance behind and knew he was doing so; it is really Romanticism, with its passionate longing for adequate symbols, that represents the last nostalgic echo of the Renaissance. But the Romantic project was fatally compromised by the simultaneous recognition that all “truth” is imprisoned in consciousness, a function of one's private world of imagination.

Platonic images of living unity are so pervasive in Western culture that one can quote phrases from the Essay on Man that sound exactly like Wordsworth: “blossoms in the trees … lives through all life … one nature … one common blessing” (I.272-73, III.117, IV.62). The crucial difference between the two poets is that Wordsworth has to ground his vision in subjective experience.

From Nature overflowing in my soul,
I had received so much, that all my thoughts
Were steeped in feeling …(23)

Pope speaks of “our soul” (I.275), not “my soul.” His aim is to utter universal truths, not to trace them up from his own inner life, and with his balanced parallelisms he stresses the correspondence of parts as well as the whole which they comprise:

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul;
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth, as in th' aethereal frame,
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees …

(I. 267-72)

The difference lies in the greater ontological security that Pope enjoys. He grounds his Platonic vision in a received religion, deistically diluted though it may be, for which God is the soul of the universal body:

Heav'n breathes through ev'ry member of the whole
One common blessing, as one common soul.

(IV.61-62)

Since religious truth lies deeper than any metaphor, the poet can celebrate God in all things without fearing that he has deified the created world. Wordsworth, on the other hand, is constantly haunted by the threat of irreligious pantheism. In the 1805 Prelude he wrote, “I saw one life, and felt that it was joy” (II.430). In a late revision this line disappeared and was replaced by orthodox pieties about “the Uncreated,” whom all created things must adore (1850 Prelude, II.413). Pope knows that one life flows through all things, and is free to feel it (“refreshes in the breeze”); Wordsworth feels that one life flows through all things, but fears that he does not know it.

Northrop Frye has remarked that the Bible has become fabulous just as, in early Christian times, the classical myths became fabulous.²⁴ Wordsworth's hope is that fiction can be rescued from fictionality by being psychologized:

                                                                                          Paradise, and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic Main—why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?(25)

But the Romantic solution turned out to be a very temporary one, whether one admires it as natural supernaturalism or dismisses it as split religion. The second half of the eighteenth century might best be seen not as a prologue to Wordsworth and Blake, but rather as an anticipation of our own time. Its history of departed things was founded on observation and investigation rather than on doctrine and myth. And its most memorable achievement—to invert Wordsworth's formulation—was an imaginative nonfiction of what really was.

Pope's poems are full of telling, and increasingly he tries to make us believe that they are inseparable from life as experienced, translated into rhetoric and form but not otherwise changed. “Unlike writing, life never finishes,” Lowell wrote,²⁶ meaning perhaps that poems can have definitive endings whereas life stops but does not finish. But as Pope's veering and ever-surprising career reminds us, writing never finishes either, and Lowell's own career was much more like Pope's than like Spenser's or Milton's or even Yeats's. In his honesty and receptiveness to the events of his time, we can surely admire Pope, particularly now that idealizing modes of eighteenth-century scholarship are falling out of fashion. His critique of militarist rhetoric depends not only on a sense of the folly of Marlborough's wars, but also on an expectation that his readers will confirm his attitude from their own experience. The converse ought to hold when, in his late Patriot phase, Pope allowed himself to abuse Walpole for pacifism:

Lo! at the wheels of her triumphal car,
Old England's genius, rough with many a scar,
Dragged in the dust! his arms hang idly round,
His flag inverted trails along the ground!

(Epilogue I.151-54)

Keener's comment is admirable, in both its severity and its generosity: “Pope was bidding beyond his means, and we have bought whatever sensitivity we have on the subject at too dear a price ourselves.”²⁷

If much in Pope seems to anticipate our own moment, cultural experience is always historically specific, and it is well to end by recognizing that his preoccupying themes were rooted in an age that was rapidly coming to an end. In his celebrated Speech for Conciliation of 1775, Edmund Burke reviewed the economic importance of America and then ascended a historical pinnacle to survey its deeper significance. Searching for a contemporary figure whose life might link the old Britain to the new, Burke singled out Pope's friend Bathurst. His celebratory rhetoric needs to be heard in its full amplitude:

We stand where we have an immense view of what is, and what is past. Clouds indeed, and darkness, rest upon the future. Let us, however, before we descend from this noble eminence, reflect that this growth of our national prosperity has happened within the short period of the life of man. It has happened within sixty-eight years. There are those alive whose memory might touch the two extremities. For instance, my Lord Bathurst might remember all the stages of the progress. He was in 1704 of an age at least to be made to comprehend such things. … Suppose, Sir, that the angel of this auspicious youth … should point out to him a little speck, scarce visible in the mass of the national interest, a small seminal principle rather than a formed body, and should tell him,—“Young man, there is America—which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men, and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world. Whatever England has been growing to by a progressive increase of improvement, brought in by varieties of people, by succession of civilizing conquests and civilizing settlements in a series of seventeen hundred years, you shall see as much added to her by America in the course of a single life!” … Fortunate man, he has lived to see it!²⁸

Burke is the spokesman for a proto-Romantic conservatism that is very different from Pope's classical conservatism, and that helps to define the imaginative divide between Pope's generation and the next. To adopt the analysis of J. G. A. Pocock,²⁹ Burke insisted that politics could not embody rational systems but must reflect a society's slowly evolving structure of relationships and obligations. History is a river that carries us constantly into the future, and the future is inevitably contingent. Institutions should never break irreparably with their past (as the French were to do in their revolution), but neither should they attempt to stand still (as Britain was seeking to do with respect to America). In Pocock's words, “Custom was constantly being subjected to the test of experience, so that if immemorial, it was, equally, always up to date, and … ultimately rooted in nothing other than experience” (p. 213).

This might sound congenial to Pope, but it is only superficially so. For Pope, experience is the basis of everything we know, but universal principles can and should be extracted from it. From psychological incoherence we extract the ruling passion, from political incoherence the structure of coordinate members. The mainstream view in the eighteenth century, against which Burke's evolutionary conservatism protested, is in Pocock's words “a quasi-classical image of ‘an ancient and balanced constitution,’ founded on principles from which … the present constitution was degenerate” (p. 265). The “corruption” that Pope constantly excoriates is not simply a concomitant of all institutional forms, but rather a destructive erosion of the one true form that men and women of virtue should return to. The subjective trend of later-eighteenth-century poetry, in Pope's eyes, would probably seem a symptom of the same corruption:

Find virtue local, all relation scorn,
See all in self, and but for self
be born.

(Dunciad IV.479-80)

And the baffling world of speculative finance somehow underlay it all, even if Pope had trouble defining the relation except in terms of selfishness and greed.

Pocock suggests elsewhere that Burke's evolutionary model was a product of an economy based on speculative exchange—the “paper credit” that Pope so abhorred—which has a stake in the openness and unpredictability of the future. Pope is not interested in the future. The older kind of republican virtue depends upon personal autonomy, which in turn depends upon “a material foundation in the form of property … the inheritable freehold or fee simple in land.”³⁰ One thinks of Pope's passionate attachment to his Twickenham estate, and his regret that it was neither inherited from his parents nor transmissible to heirs of his own. But a paradox lurks just barely below the surface here, since autonomy based on property was manifestly the motive force of the hated credit economy, in which Defoe for instance was an eager participant. As Pocock puts it,

Culture and liberty, it began to appear, were ultimately incompatible; the Goths were both despicable as artists and admirable as freemen; and what raised man above the condition of the savage must ultimately sink him below the level of the citizen. Man's quarrel with his own history, that most characteristic feature of the modern mind, may be dated in England from about the foundation of the National Debt.

(p. 96)

The national debt was a symbol of the open and unchartable future, and Pope hated it.

The conflict between liberty and culture lies very deep in Pope's work, and as early as the Essay on Criticism it is explicitly related to literature. Gothic freedom not only led to feudal “tyranny” (687), but also was inseparable from obscurantist repression as “the monks finished what the Goths begun” (692). The renaissance of culture, however, was embodied in “rules” that were themselves repressive.

Thence arts o'er all the northern world advance,
But critic learning flourished most in France.
The rules, a nation born to serve, obeys,
And Boileau still in right of Horace sways.
But we, brave Britons, foreign laws despised,
And kept unconquered, and uncivilized.

(711-16)

Boileau played a servile Horace to Louis XIV, Pope an independent Horace to three successive Georges. But British independence seemed to be a thing of the past, and “pure poetry” might be seen as a shameless evasion of the social and political realities that give art its value and significance.

Confine the thought, to exercise the breath,
And keep them in the pale of words till death.
Whate'er the talents, or howe'er designed,
We hang one jingling padlock on the mind:
A poet the first day he dips his quill;
And what the last? a very poet still.

(Dunciad IV.159-64)

In league with political opportunism that only pretended to uphold liberty, Dulness had learned to exert a tyranny of its own that degraded language into an instrument of state power:

For sure, if Dulness sees a grateful day,
'Tis in the shade of arbitrary sway.

(IV.181-82)

Without passing judgment on the historical accuracy of Pope's analysis, one can say that much more is involved here than neoclassical taste. Or rather, neoclassical taste reflects the largest possible concerns. Pope's formal style is very much an expression of his political and social world, just as Burke's sinuous and ever-evolving prose is expressive of his. But Pope's classical conservatism found itself paralyzed and helpless in the end:

The plague is on thee, Britain, and who tries
To save thee in th' infectious office dies.

(One Thousand Seven Hundred and Forty, 75-76)

So Pope wrote in his final, unfinished satire, and there is perhaps an even deeper bitterness in the conclusion to the Epilogue to the Satires two years earlier:

Alas! alas! pray end what you began,
And write next winter more Essays on Man.

(254-55)

In the long run, the future belonged to Collins and Gray, and to blank verse poets such as Blair:

The wind is up—hark! how it howls! Methinks
Till now I never heard a sound so dreary.
Doors creak, and windows clap, and night's foul bird,
Rooked in the spire, screams loud.(31)

This is hardly Dejection: An Ode, but it belongs in the line that leads to Coleridge. That does not mean that Blair was a more significant poet than Pope, or even that Blair foresaw the future. Leslie Stephen remarks, “The deepest thinker is not really—though we often use the phrase—in advance of his day so much as in the line along which advance takes place.”³² Even if he could have seen the future, Pope would not have cared to join the line. His thoughts turned rather to the lines of filiation that connected his generation with the past. “Who sees not that De F——was the poetical son of Withers, T——te of Ogilby, E. W——rd of John Taylor, and E——n of Bl——k——re?”³³ The same thought appears in verse as Dulness surveys her sons:

She saw old Pryn in restless Daniel shine,
And Eusden eke out Blackmore's endless line.

(Dunciad Variorum I.101-2)

As Christopher Ricks notes, this couplet hints at a very different “endless line” of succession that descends from Milton to Pope.³⁴

Most of all Pope saw himself as the true heir of Dryden, just as Dryden saw himself as Jonson's heir. Garth says in praise of Dryden, “As the tyranny of rhyme never imposed on the perspicuity of the sense, so a languid sense never wanted to be set off by the harmony of rhyme.” That is exactly how Pope wanted his own verse to be admired, as also for “the peculiar delicacy of his periods”—the movement of phrases—that Garth goes on to describe.³⁵ In contrast to this careful and subtle art, the twin criteria of the “dunces” are volume and duration:

All hail him victor in both gifts of song,
Who sings so loudly, and who sings so long.

³⁶But however much he might equal or surpass Dryden in poetic skill, Pope could never hope to enjoy the cultural authority of his master. Dryden had plenty of enemies, of course, and his polemical Catholicism was politically much more inflammatory than Pope's. Still he was at the center of his age in a way in which Pope, for all his gifts, could never be. Dryden was deeply engaged in politics, whereas Pope was always politically marginal, and Dryden trusted in a conservative myth that seemed adequate to all requirements. He lived through great events, rode their current with intense feeling, and could even believe that he helped to influence them. And in addition to his role as poet, Dryden as play-wright stood at the center of Restoration court culture, to whose in-group members his superb prologues are addressed. Pope's career, after its confident beginnings, always betrays a sense of vicariousness and isolation. And it is from the struggle to come to terms with that situation—to become an insider or at least to speak as one—that Pope's imagination draws its deepest energies.

Notes

1. See John E. Sitter, The Poetry of Pope's Dunciad (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), ch. 2.

2. Pope twice used this word in the Odyssey. See Max Byrd, London Transformed: Images of the City in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 54-55.

3. Fredric V. Bogel, “Dulness Unbound: Rhetoric and Pope's Dunciad,” PMLA, 97 (1982), 847. I am not convinced, however, by Bogel's claim that Dulness is the “anterior” chaos (p. 852) from which meaning and order arise.

4. John E. Sitter, “Mother, Memory, Muse and Poetry after Pope,” Journal of English Literary History, 44 (1977), 312-36; and see also Sitter's Literary Loneliness in Mid Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).

5. “Burns, Blake, and the Recovery of Lyric,” Studies in Romanticism, 21 (1982), 637-60.

6. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. and tr. by Michael Holquist and Carol Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 270-71.

7. Bakhtin's list of stylistic types in the novel applies precisely, for instance, to Boswell's Life of Johnson: direct narration by the author; stylized versions of ordinary oral narration and of semiliterary forms such as diaries and letters; extraliterary forms such as oratory, topographical descriptions, and memoranda; and finally, speeches by individual characters (The Dialogic Imagination, p. 262).

8. “Deconstruction and Circumvention,” Critical Inquiry, 11 (1984), 4.

9. Samuel Johnson, Life of Gray, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), III, 435.

10. When Mirabell mentions the child that may result from “our endeavours,” Millamant retorts, “Odious endeavours!” and a little later exclaims, “I toast fellows, odious men! I hate your odious provisos” (William Congreve, The Way of the World, IV.i). Johnson makes a female correspondent refer to “this odious fashion” of card playing in Rambler 15.

11. John Ruskin, “The Pentametre,” Elements of English Prosody (1880), in The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1965), p. 351.

12. Hugh Kenner, The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy (New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1973).

13. Charles Hanbury Williams, Isabella: Or, The Morning, in The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 330. In the Gentleman's Magazine, where the poem first appeared, it is said to be printed “from the MS. written many years ago,” and has an epigraph adapted from Pope, “In serious talk th' instructive hours they passed” (Gentleman's Magazine, 35 [1765], 38; Rape of the Lock III.11)

14. Karl Kraus, quoted by W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 23.

15. Maynard Mack describes the embarrassment of Pope's enemies who were tricked into praising the Essay on Man before they knew who wrote it (Alexander Pope: A Life [New York: Norton, 1985], pp. 522-53).

16. Lives, III, 243.

17. Ibid., 209-10.

18. Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 175.

19. William Wordsworth, Preface to The Excursion (1814), in Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), pp. 469-70.

20. Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (1756), I, iv.

21. See p. 253 above.

22. Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), in English Critical Essays, ed. Edmund D. Jones, World's Classics (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 283.

23. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850 version), II.397-99.

24. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 14.

25. William Wordsworth, Prospectus to “The Recluse,” 47-51.

26. Robert Lowell, History, in Lowell, Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 159.

27. Frederick M. Keener, An Essay on Pope (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 155. Keener quotes Burke in the Letters on a Regicide Peace: “For the war Pope sang his dying notes.”

28. Speech Moving His Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies, 22 Mar. 1775, in The Works of Edmund Burke (London: Rivington, 1826), III, 41-43.

29. “Burke and the Ancient Constitution: An Essay on Traditions and Their Understanding,” ch. 6 in Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1973).

30. J. G. A. Pocock, “Modes of Political and Historical Time in Early Eighteenth-Century England,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Volume 5, ed. Ronald C. Rosbottom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), p. 95.

31. Robert Blair, The Grave, in The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, p. 369.

32. English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1904), p. 10.

33. Peri Bathous, in Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope, p. 61. The references are to Defoe, Nahum Tate, Edward Ward, Laurence Eusden, and Richard Blackmore.

34. “Allusion: The Poet as Heir,” in Studies in the Eighteenth Century III, ed. R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 235.

35. Samuel Garth, Preface to the Translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1717), in The Works of Celebrated Authors, Volume the First (1750), p. 401.

36. Dunciad Variorum II.255-56. The target is Blackmore once again.

20 TE VIII, p. 574.