SOURCE: “The Politics of Style,” in Essays on Pope, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 27-36.

[Rogers is a prominent literary historian specializing in eighteenth-century studies and a recognized authority on Pope. In the following essay, which originally appeared in his An Introduction to Pope (1976), Rogers describes the principal features of Pope's poetic style and technique, emphasizing his virtuosity with the heroic couplet.]

I

From his earliest years Pope set himself to introduce a new ‘correctness’ to English poetry. It seems an odd ambition to us; and not merely because it implies a censorious attitude towards the ‘irregular’ beauties of Shakespeare and Milton. Beyond all this, we are ill at ease with an aesthetic which places such a high value on what seem to us aridly technical skills. But for the Augustans it was different. The new polish they looked for in art was a matter of glamour, pride, self-confidence. ‘Correct’ poetry was part of a swelling nationalism and a swaggering modernism; it came ready equipped with a justification in cultural history:

… Britain to soft refinements less a foe,
Wit grew polite, and Numbers learn'd to flow.
Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long majestic march, and energy divine.
Tho' still some traces of our rustic vein
And splay-foot verse, remain'd, and will remain.
Late, very late, correctness grew our care,
When the tir'd nation breath'd from civil war.
Exact Racine, and Corneille's noble fire
Show'd us that France had something to admire.
Not but the Tragic spirit was our own,
And full in Shakespear, fair in Otway shone:
But Otway fail'd to polish or refine,
And fluent Shakespear scarce effac'd a line.
Ev'n copious Dryden, wanted or forgot,
The last and greatest Art, the Art to blot.

(Horace, Ep. II. i. 265-81)

Note the precise distinctions drawn between Waller and Dryden, Racine and Corneille, Shakespeare and Otway. Always Pope is busy discriminating.

It is worth looking with some attention at the key words in this passage, especially the honorific epithets. Wit must be ‘polite’—that is, civilized, courtly, free from affectation. ‘Refinements’ may involve the gentler qualities but can also accommodate the ‘energy’ of a vigorous master such as Dryden. The effects to be shunned are ‘rustic’, what Matthew Arnold was to characterize by his phrase ‘the note of provinciality’. Instead, literature should be urbane and agreeable. The ‘exact’ language of the great French dramatists is commended for its classical precision and bite. One can see in all this a conscious programme, a manifesto for contemporary poets, as well as a reductive account of the sloppiness of preceding generations. There are similarities with the Imagist declaration at the start of this century, notably in the attitude of T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound to decadent Romanticism.

This then is anything but a timid defence of arbitrary rules. It is a call to action; Pope belonged to an age-group which believed itself at an important watershed in taste. In fact, some heavy demands are laid on poetry in the high Augustan era. It is permitted to relinquish the quest for false sublimity; the pressure on a major writer to produce an authentic English epic was never again to reach its Renaissance dimensions. But by way of compensation poetry was asked to mirror a social revolution. More than that, it was asked to foster and indeed guide this process. The English nation was to throw off its insularity and attain a new cosmopolitan ease. This meant that society needed a thorough course of education, and poets were to be among the principal instructors. It was no longer acceptable for writing to be crabbed, rough, ill-proportioned. But nor were the dilettante Restoration coterie-poets much help, that ‘Mob of Gentlemen who wrote with Ease’ (Horace, Ep. II. i. 108). A distinct professional competence was required—a solid control masked beneath the suave insouciance of the verse.

It is easy to see how in this situation the heroic couplet acquired its overwhelming attraction. It is a shapely mode of writing, firmly structured but pleasant in appearance. It solicits a clean organization of thought; the poet must know what he wants to say first, and what second, and how he is going to get from one to the other.¹ Yet the couplet has its own aesthetic appeal, deriving from its underlying symmetry. As everyone observes, figures like parallelism and antithesis flourish strongly in the Augustan climate; somehow the ideas seem to fall into such pairings without any effort on the part of the poet. In addition, there was a definite social component in the preference for this form. Blank verse had become associated with high Miltonic aspirations. This was a view which events in Pope's lifetime did little to change. Both good poets like James Thomson in his Seasons (1726-30) and bad poets like Thomas Newcomb in his Last Judgement (1723) helped to preserve the vaunting claims of blank verse. But couplets were quite another thing. They were well bred, gentlemanly, elegant.

Let us be more concrete. Pope devoted his whole career to mastering the couplet, and we should be clear on the advantages he derived.

(1) The heroic couplet was perspicuous; it invited a lucid approach, in that the formal demands make for sequentiality.

On this Foundation Fame's
high Temple stands;
Stupendous Pile! not rear'd by mortal Hands.
Whate'er proud Rome, or artful Greece beheld,
Or elder Babylon, its Frame excell'd.
Four Faces had the Dome, and ev'ry Face
Of various Structure, but of equal Grace:
Four brazen Gates, on Columns lifted high,
Salute the diff'rent Quarters of the Sky.
Here fabled Chiefs in darker Ages born,
Or Worthys old, whom Arms or Arts adorn,
Who Cities rais'd, or tam'd a monstrous Race;
The Walls in venerable Order grace:
Heroes in animated Marble frown,
And Legislators seem to think in Stone.

Temple of Fame, 61-74)

Here the ideas seem to be forming a regular queue to gain admittance to the poem. It is very different from Milton, say, where the struggle to articulate engenders a titanic struggle between thought and expression, registered in the convoluted syntax. Pope moves steadily on, like an experienced rock-climber; he does not make a move until he knows where he is going after that.

(2) The couplet was flexible. It was in touch with conversational rhythms—indeed, Pope's later work shows an increasing tendency to adopt colloquial airs:

P. How Sir! not damn the Sharper,
but the Dice?
Come on then Satire! gen'ral, unconfin'd,
Spread thy broad wing, and sowze on all the Kind.
Ye Statesmen, Priests, of one Religion all!
Ye Tradesmen vile, in Army, Court or Hall!
Ye Rev'rend Atheists!—F[riend].
Scandal! name them, Who?
P. Why that's the thing you
bid me not to do.
Who starv'd a Sister, who forswore a Debt,
I never nam'd—the Town's enquiring yet.
The pois'ning Dame—Fr.
You mean—P. I don't.—Fr. You do.
P. See! now I keep the Secret, and
not you.
The bribing Statesman—Fr. Hold!
too high you go.
P. The brib'd Elector—Fr. There you stoop too low.
P. I fain wou'd please you,
if I knew with what:
Tell me, which Knave is lawful Game, which not?

(Epilogue to Satires, II, 13-27)

But such cross-talk acts are only one of innumerable effects available to Pope. He can be high and sententious, obscene, skittish, tender, or whatever he pleases.

(3) The form was, as it were, poetically neutral. It could carry sustained narrative or the most delicately chiselled epitaph. Pope was able to modulate in and out of the set genres without elaborate formal preparations—thus, Windsor-Forest incorporates a topographical poem, a political panegyric, an economic prophecy, a lyrical interlude, an Ovidian set-piece, and much else. The poet can change gear as smoothly as he does only because of the unassuming, inconspicuous amenity afforded by the couplet.

(4) The couplet is particularly well adapted to a number of rhetorical devices which suited Pope's ends. Among these are paradox, contrived anti-climax, zeugma, syllepsis and parison. Some of these are noticeable only to the reader, a rare one nowadays, who is trained to spot particular ‘turns’. Others, though, are very obvious—like punning. And in any case W. K. Wimsatt has written so well on the subject that detailed treatment is not in order here. In summary, Wimsatt shows how in Pope ‘the abstract logic of parallel and antithesis is complicated and offset’ by these other rhetorical figures, and above all by rhyme.² This can be illustrated by a simple example:

Then flash'd the living Lightning from her Eyes,
And Screams of Horror rend th' affrighted Skies.
Not louder Shrieks to pitying Heav'n are cast,
When Husbands or when Lap-dogs breathe their last,
Or when rich China Vessels, fall'n from high,
In glittring Dust and painted Fragments lie!

(Rape of the Lock, III, 155-60)

Obviously the main satiric impact here comes in the second couplet, with its delicious zeugma in line 158. But the rhyme words enact the same confusion of levels and play the same arch mock-heroic game. In appearance the couplet is a little prim, which is just what the ironist asks of it.

(5) The form obliges the reader to attend carefully. There is none of the open-ended garrulity of free verse; an analytic hold is placed on the material even as it is enunciated. Pope employs the heroic couplet as a placing and discriminating device. In contemporary aesthetics, deriving from Locke and Addison, it was usual to split the creative act between invention (fancy: the synthetic power of the imagination) and judgement (the operation of a critical intelligence). Particular stress was laid on the latter, though the sturdy critic John Dennis for one felt the emphasis was sometimes misplaced. But for Pope, as for the Renaissance writers, concern for ordonnance was a moral issue as well as a technical one. The poet placed his words with minute care, rather as one would set precious stones in a piece of fine jewellery. Precision not merely prettifies, it embodies all the intellectual commitment bestowed on the work. The couplet, indeed, is a machine for thinking in; but it is at the same time a jewel box, to display craftsmanship and to lend allure to finely textured ideas:

The lucid Squadrons round the Sails repair:
Soft o'er the Shrouds Aerial Whispers breathe,
That seem'd but Zephyrs to the
Train beneath.
Some to the Sun their Insect-Wings unfold,
Waft on the Breeze, or sink in Clouds of Gold.
Transparent Forms, too fine for mortal Sight,
Their fluid Bodies half dissolv'd in Light.
Loose to the Wind their airy Garments flew,
Thin glitt'ring Textures of the filmy Dew;
Dipt in the richest Tincture of the Skies,
Where Light disports in every-mingling Dies,
While ev'ry Beam new transient Colours flings,
Colours that change whene'er they wave their Wings.

(Rape of the Lock, II, 56-68)

This would be exquisite writing in any context. But it is the finicky precision of the language and the minute delicacy of the verse movement that give the passage its note of intimacy. Such an impression is hard to attain with any looser-knit metrical scheme. The couplet lets us explore the tiniest detail.

Of course, not all Pope appears within the confines of a single couplet. He learnt to compose in sweeping verse paragraphs, directing the argument with measured authority. As his career went on, he became particularly adept at the larger structural devices—e.g. the resolution of a satiric poem by means of a contrasting block of compliment or celebration (often turned towards the dedicatee, as in the Epistle to a Lady). But it remains true that the fundamental architectural unit is not the paragraph but the couplet. Within these twenty syllables Pope deployed an extraordinary range of artifice. By ceaseless variations he defeats our expectations and avoids monotony. By small shadings of rhythm, tone or syntax he creates surprise and delight:

He look'd, and saw a sable Sorc'rer rise,
Swift to whose hand a winged volume flies:
All sudden, Gorgons hiss, and Dragons glare,
And ten-horn'd fiends and Giants rush to war.
Hell rises, Heav'n descends, and dance on Earth,
Gods, imps and monsters, music, rage and mirth,
A fire, a jig, a battle, and a ball,
Till one wide Conflagration swallows all.

(Dunciad, A, III, 229-36)

The pace quickens or slows at the poet's will (line 234 here has six stresses, line 235 only four) and there is a constant interplay between the strict metrical pattern and the free-flowing syntax, with its catalogues, suspensions, alliterative echoes and so on. For a long time, Pope was bogged down in a sterile debate concerning the relations of ‘sound’ and ‘sense’ in poetry, much of it tediously annexed to the more jejune sort of onomatopoeia. But when he devoted himself to composing, instead of theorizing, everything fell into place. Pope made the couplet into a marvellously supple piece of phonetic engineering.³

II

It would equally be wrong to give the idea that his expressive power derives solely from the vehicle he employed. The twentieth century has been able to find in Pope almost every poetic beauty which has successively arrogated critical notice. There is plangency and lyrical grace, as in Eloisa to Abelard; there is vibrant metaphysical wit, as in The Dunciad; there is arcane symbolism, as in The Temple of Fame; there is myth, virtually everywhere. At present Pope is most admired for a kind of prophetic urgency, evident principally in his later works. But if teasing social badinage ever comes into fashion again, he will satisfy that demand just as easily—and much the same could be said of high moral and discursive writing. There is scarcely any aesthetic canon which would exclude Pope from literary distinction, unless it is the cult of the ill-made poem.

The wider implications of Pope's technique have never been exposed in a wholly convincing manner. In my view, his poetic style is beautifully calculated to express what might be termed (simply for convenience) the Augustan outlook on life. In the first place, it shuns obscurity, as Georgian churches sought to dissipate the gloom of Gothic structures. Second, his style operates in a consecutive manner; it nurtures logic and connection. Other poetic techniques, in other ages, have been designed to blur distinctions—to allow free movement back and forward among the constituent parts of the poem. Milton, Blake and Hopkins can all be shown to favour his mode of working. But the strength of eighteenth-century poetry was that it knew the syntactic moment to leave. Pope's verse gains momentum and verse precisely from its refusal to merge one statement into another:

Turn then from Wits; and look on Simo's Mate,
No Ass so meek, no Ass so obstinate;
Or her, that owns her Faults, but never mends,
Because she's honest, and the best of Friends:
Or her, whose Life the Church and Scandal share,
For ever in a Passion, or a Prayer:
Or her, who laughs at Hell, but (like her Grace)
Cries, ‘Ah! how charming if there's no such place!’
Or who in sweet vicissitude appears,
Of Mirth and Opium, Ratafie and Tears,
The daily Anodyne, and nightly Draught,
To kill those foes to Fair ones, Time and Thought.
Woman and Fool are two hard things to hit,
For true No-meaning puzzles more than Wit.

(Epistle to a Lady, 101-14)

The successive antitheses make their point because they arrive in a prepared environment. Line 106 is full of rhetorical charge. It involves antithesis and zeugma, with a hint of paradox. The small reservation ‘or a Prayer’ would easily get lost in the thrashing syntax of (say) Gerard Manley Hopkins. But it springs straight out at us here, so orderly is the grammatical context.

Third, Pope's style asserts the intelligibility and connectedness of things in a genteel, elegant idiom. It manages to avoid dislocation and disruption, as the work of Pope's friend Swift did not. Again the poetic vocabulary chimes in with the prejudices of the age. As Geoffrey Tillotson, a brilliantly observant analyst of linguistic effect, once noted, ‘Correctness elicits and does not abuse the reader's confidence. … His alertness is intensified, his curiosity, his trust increased.’⁴ Many of Pope's greatest achievements rely on this delicate negotiation with the reader; and it is crucial that Pope should get the audience on his side. Other writers in other situations can afford to alienate or insult the people whom they are addressing. Shock tactics are a common feature in modern literature. But Pope needs first to enlist our sympathy. He makes writing seem a civilized business, a polite form of communication as unthreatening as (to take extreme examples) a wine list or a bus timetable. Of course, there are really the most powerful undercurrents of feeling ready to surface within the poem. But, like most of his contemporaries, Pope found a posture of innocence, a demure manner, a placid front, useful to his purposes. If his style had been less witty, polished and agreeable, he would not have been able to do many of the things he did.

Finally, Pope's style is adapted not just to contemplating or celebrating—it compares, contrasts, judges. Where other writers, before and since, have evolved a use of language which would maximize other attributes of experience, Pope was chiefly occupied by sorting and ranking functions. A comparison is needed here, in fact, to make this plain. Here is Milton's Eden:

Thus was this place,
A happy rural seat of various view:
Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme,
Others whose fruit burnisht with Gold Rinde
Hung amiable, Hesperian Fables true,
If true, here onely, and of delicious taste:
Betwixt them Lawns, or level Downs and Flocks
Grasing the tender herb, were interpos'd,
Of palmie hilloc, or the flourie lap
Of some irriguous Valley spread her store,
Flours of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose:
Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves
Of coole recess, o're which the mantling Vine
Layes forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps
Luxuriant; mean while murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake,
That to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crownd,
Her chrystall mirror holds, unite their streams.
The Birds thir quire apply; aires, vernal aires,
Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune
The trembling leaves, while Universal Pan
Knit with the Graces and the Hours in dance
Led on th' Eternal Spring

(Paradise Lost, IV, 246-68)

Now Pope's ‘Groves of Eden’, transported to England, and embodying a conscious Miltonic recollection: we join the passage a few lines later than in the previous essay (p. 14 above):

Here waving Groves a chequer'd Scene display,
And part admit and part exclude the Day;
As some coy Nymph her lover's warm Address
Not quite indulges, nor can quite repress.
There, interspers'd in Lawns and opening Glades,
Thin Trees arise that shun each others Shades.
Here in full Light the russet Plains extend;
There wrapt in Clouds the blueish Hills ascend;
Ev'n the wild Heath displays her Purple Dies,
And 'midst the Desart fruitful Fields arise,
That crown'd with tufted Trees and springing Corn,
Like verdant Isles the sable Waste adorn.
Let India boast her Plants, nor envy
we
The weeping Amber or the balmy Tree,
While by our Oaks the precious Loads are born,
And Realms commanded which those Trees adorn.
Not proud Olympus yields a nobler
Sight,
Tho' Gods assembled grace his tow'ring Height,
Than what more humble Mountains offer here,
Where, in their Blessings, all those Gods appear.
See Pan with Flocks, with Fruits Pomona crown'd,
Here blushing Flora paints the enamel'd
Ground,
Here Ceres' Gifts in waving
Prospect stand,
And nodding tempt the joyful Reaper's Hand,
Rich Industry sits smiling on the Plains,
And Peace and Plenty tell, a stuart
reigns.

(Windsor-Forest, 17-42)

Milton shows us a scene; Pope takes us on a guided tour. His landscape is composed, planned, resonant with meanings. Milton is taken up with the sheer sensuous wonder of Eden; Pope maps out his groves with fastidious care. He starts with a contrast on the accented ‘These’ (line 9) and proceeds through a whole series of antitheses, explicit or implicit. Milton's ‘here’ is a vague locative: Pope's is set directly against a clear cut ‘there’. Milton alludes for a moment to classical myth, but simply to compass his atmospheric ends—to enrich the awe and mystery. Pope applies directly to the classics, as a touchstone and contrast. His style is always quick to detect rivalries:

While by our Oaks the precious
Loads are born,
And Realms commanded which those
Trees adorn.

Pope's language is full of small direction signs, which control the relationship of one thing to another—not/but, part/part, nor/nor, not/than. In short, Milton presents experience, Pope arranges it. He has been shown to import into his Homer a strong emphasis on perspectives, not present in the original; and we have the same organizing process at work in Windsor-Forest. Pope needed a poetic language of location and comparison: and the couplet—sharp and sequential—was a key part of this language.

Notes

1. See pp. 1-26 above; and more generally, J. A. Jones, Pope's Couplet Art (Athens, Ohio, 1969).

2. W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (London, 1970), p. 180.

3. See I. Ehrenpreis, ‘The Style of Sound: The Literary Value of Pope's Versification’, The Augustan Milieu, ed. H. K. Miller, E. Rothstein and G. S. Rousseau (Oxford, 1970), pp. 232-46, especially pp. 244-5.

4. G. Tillotson, On the Poetry of Pope (Oxford, 2nd edn, 1950), p. 116.

Abbreviations

Corr: The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1956)

EC: The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. W. Elwin and W. J. Courthope, 10 vols. (London, 1871-90)

Mack, Garden and City: Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope 1731-1743 (Toronto, 1969)

Mack, Life: Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven and London, 1985)

Prose Works: The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, vol. 1, ed. Norman Ault (Oxford, 1936); vol. 2, ed. Rosemary Cowler (Oxford, 1986)

Spence: Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. J. M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1966)

TE: The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. J. Butt et al., 11 vols. (London, 1939-69)

The Dunciad is quoted, unless otherwise indicated, from the ‘B’ text, that is the four-book version of 1743.

The following abbreviations are used for journal titles:

ECS: Eighteenth-Century Studies

JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology

MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly

N&Q: Notes & Queries

PBA: Proceedings of the British Academy

PLL: Papers on Language & Literature

PQ: Philological Quarterly

RES: Review of English Studies

SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

SP: Studies in Philology

YES: Yearbook of English Studies