The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings: Poems and Other Writings (Penguin Classics)
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Figures ill paired, and similes unlike.
She sees a mob of metaphors advance,
Pleased with the madness of the mazy dance:
How Tragedy and Comedy embrace,
How Farce and Epic get a jumbled race …33
In the hands of the hacks, all that was beautiful becomes gross. In ‘Windsor Forest’ Pope had written,
Through the fair scene roll slow the ling’ring streams,
Then foaming pour along, and rush into the Thames.34
In those days he loved to make sound echo sense, as roll slow and ling’ring enact the hesitation before pour along and rush. Now, in the gutters of urban streets, everything is choked and degraded:
To where Fleet Ditch with disemboguing streams
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames …35
The ‘Dunciad’ turned out to be more process than product, with successive editions in which some names dropped out – often because their owners interceded with Pope for mercy – while new offenders found themselves included. Pope’s own bland explanation was that the whole lot of them were merely symptoms of a larger disease: ‘There may arise some obscurity in chronology from the names in the poem, by the inevitable removal of some authors, and insertion of others in their niches. For whoever will consider the unity of the whole design will be sensible that the poem was not made for these authors, but these authors for the poem; and I should judge they were clapped in as they rose, fresh and fresh, and changed from day to day, in like manner as when the old boughs wither, we thrust new ones into a chimney.’36 Even the hero of the poem got changed, as Theobald was replaced by Cibber. A fourth and final book was added to the ‘Dunciad’ in 1742, fourteen years after the original version, incorporating reflections on education and intellectual fads that had once been intended for the unrealized Opus Magnum, and it rose to an apocalyptic vision of the triumph of Dullness:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,
And universal darkness buries all.37
But Pope’s mood was not always this bleak, and the ironies could be playfully tolerant rather than corrosive. Consider the two-line poem entitled ‘Epigram. Engraved on the Collar of a Dog which I gave to his Royal Highness’:
I am his Highness’ dog at Kew;
Pray tell me sir, whose dog are you?
On the face of it, this challenging couplet is calculated to embarrass whoever bends down to read it, since only a person of very high standing would be in a position to examine the collar of the Prince of Wales’s pet. But eighteenth-century society was profoundly hierarchical, and to say that a courtier needs to obey and flatter those still higher than himself was a simple fact, not an insult. In a genial commentary William Empson brings out further layers of implication: ‘The joke carries a certain praise for the underdog; the point is not that men are slaves but that they find it suits them and remain good-humoured. The dog is proud of being the prince’s dog and expects no one to take offence at the question. There is also a hearty independence in its lack of respect for the inquirer.’38
A man of his age who longed to separate himself from his age, a caustic satirist who claimed to be a satirist against his will, Pope was above all a poet from start to finish. Art brought him fame and wealth, but most of all it gave shape and meaning to a life that was filled with frustration and pain. In one of his Horatian imitations, admitting that there was something compulsive about his tireless composition, he acknowledges that it defines who he is and gives meaning to his life. In sad, meditative lines he catalogues the irreplaceable losses of each successive year:
Years foll’wing years steal something ev’ry day;
At last they steal us from ourselves away.
In one our frolics, one amusements end,
In one a mistress drops, in one a friend.
This subtle thief of life, this paltry time,
What will it leave me, if it snatch my rhyme?
If ev’ry wheel of that unwearied mill
That turned ten thousand verses, now stands still?39
In that heavy final line nearly every syllable receives a stress, as the turning wheels of a lifelong vocation slow down, and at last cease to turn. But the poems have lived on, and two and a half centuries after Pope’s death, their energy and freshness continue to astonish.
NOTES
1. ‘An Essay on Man’, I, 95.
2. ‘An Essay on Criticism’, 525, 625, 215, 298.
3. ‘Essay on Man’, IV, 168.
4. ‘Observations on “Observation”: A Second Letter to John Murray, Esq. (1821)’, The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero (London: John Murray, 1901), V, p. 591.
5. Samuel Johnson, Life of Pope, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), III, p. 217.
6. ‘An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’, 132.
7. Pope to John Caryll, 25 January 1711, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), I, p. 113.
8. Pope to Lord Bathurst, 18 December 1730, Correspondence, ed. Sherburn, III, p. 156.
9. ‘The Rape of the Lock’, II, 59–62, 77–8; I, 71–6; II, 117–20; III, 19–22.
10. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–50), IV, 46.
11. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), ch. 2, I, p. 26n.
12. Life of Pope, pp. 220–21.
13. ‘Essay on Criticism’, 362–3.
14. ‘Rape of the Lock’, (1712 version), in The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, vol. II of the Twickenham edition, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (London: Methuen, 1962), I, pp. 13–18.
15. ‘Rape of the Lock’ (1714 version), I, pp. 13–18. My comments are indebted to those of John Sitter, ‘Pope’s Versification of Voice’, in The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope, ed. Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 45–6.
16. ‘Verses on the Death of Dr Swift’, 47–52, in Jonathan Swift, The Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 486.
17. Joseph Addison, ‘The Campaign’, in Addison, Works (1721), I, p. 65.
18. ‘Windsor Forest’, 107–10, 131–4.
19. Ibid., 211–16.
20. Life of Pope, p. 119.
21. ‘Arbuthnot’, 341.
22. Wycherley, introductory poem in Pope’s Works (1717).
23. ‘Epilogue to the Satires’, II, 246–7.
24. ‘Epistle I To Cobham’, 68.
25. ‘Arbuthnot’, 197–204, 213–14.
26. Ibid., 326–33.
27. Horace Walpole, Commonplace Book of Verses, quoted in Walpole, Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), XVII, p. 274n.
28. [Imitations of Horace], Satire, II, i, 69, 105; ‘Arbuthnot’, 306; Satire, II, i, 121.
29. Epistle, I, i, 132–3.
30. Satire, II, i, 64.
31. Life of Pope, p. 202.
32. ‘Arbuthnot’, 164.
33. ‘Dunciad’, I, 65–70.
34. ‘Windsor Forest’, 217–18.
35. ‘Dunciad’, II, 271–2.
36. ‘Dunciad Variorum’, Appendix I, in the Twickenham edition, V, pp. 205–6.
37. ‘Dunciad’, IV, 655–6.
38. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 247.
39. Horace, Epistle, II, ii, 72–9.
Further Reading
EDITIONS
Ault, Norman, and Rosemary Cowler, The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, 2 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936, and Hamden, CT: Archon, 1986) Butt, John, et al. (eds.), The Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope, 11 vols. (London: Methuen, 1938–68). The standard edition, and the basis for the single-volume The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Butt (London: Methuen, 1963) Davis, Herbert (ed.), Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966) Erskine-Hill, Howard (ed.), Alexander Pope:
Selected Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Goldgar, Bernard A., Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965) Kerby-Miller, Charles (ed.), Memoirs of the Life of Martinus Scriblerus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950; repr. Oxford University Press, 1989). The collaborative writings of Pope and his ‘Scriblerian’ friends Mack, Maynard (ed.), The Last and Greatest Art: Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of Alexander Pope (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984) Rumbold, Valerie (ed.), The Dunciad in Four Books, rev. edn. (Harlow: Longman, 2009) Shankman, Steven (ed.), The Iliad (London: Penguin, 1996) Sherburn, George (ed.), The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) Wall, Cynthia (ed.), The Rape of the Lock (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998)
BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL
Erskine-Hill, Howard, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example, and the Poetic Response (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975) Johnson, Samuel, Life of Pope, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), III, pp. 82–276. Classic study by a younger contemporary of Pope (available in many modern editions) Mack, Maynard, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). The standard biography —, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731–1743 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969) McLaverty, James, Pope, Print, and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, and G. S. Rousseau, ‘This Long Disease, My Life’: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) Sherburn, George, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934) Spence, Joseph, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. J. M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). Important record of conversations with Pope
BIBLIOGRAPHIC RESOURCES
Baines, Paul, The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope (London: Routledge, 2000) Barnard, John, Pope: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1973) Bedford, E. G., and R. J. Dilligan (eds.)., A Concordance to the Poems of Alexander Pope, 2 vols. (Detroit: Gale, 1974) Rogers, Pat, The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004)
CRITICAL STUDIES
Brower, Reuben A., Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959) Damrosch, Leo: The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) Deutsch, Helen, Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996) Fairer, David, Pope’s Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) Griffin, Dustin H., Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) Hammond, Brean S. (ed.), Pope (London: Longman, 1996). Collection of essays King, Christa Knellwolf, A Contradiction Still: Representations of Women in the Poetry of Alexander Pope (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998) Leranbaum, Miriam, Alexander Pope’s ‘Opus Magnum,’ 1729–1744 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) Mack, Maynard (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope (Hamden, CT: Archon, rev. edn., 1968). Includes many studies that have been widely influential Morris, David B., Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984) Nuttall, A. D., Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’ (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984) Rogers, Pat, Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) — (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) Rumbold, Valerie, Women’s Place in Pope’s World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Spacks, Patricia M., An Argument of Images: The Poetry of Alexander Pope (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) Stack, Frank, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) Williams, Aubrey, Pope’s ‘Dunciad’: A Study of Its Meaning (London: Methuen, 1955) Winn, James A., A Window in the Bosom: The Letters of Alexander Pope (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977)
A Note on the Texts
The poems and prose writings in this volume are presented in order of publication, with the exception that the Imitations of Horace are grouped in logical order, rather than in the rather confusing sequence in which they originally appeared over a five-year period. All of Pope’s major poems are here, and nothing is abridged except the Iliad excerpts and the prose writings. The texts given in this edition follow three sources: (1) for the majority of poems, the 1751 edition of Pope’s executor William Warburton, which is the one used in the Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope, 11 vols. (London: Methuen, 1938–68); (2) for the ‘Dunciad’ of 1743 and the ‘Epistles to Several Persons’ of 1744, the first editions are used, as they are by Herbert Davis in his edition of Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966); Warburton chose to publish these in rearrangements of his own devising – possibly having obtained Pope’s approval at the very end of his life, but certainly not under his direct supervision; (3) for works in prose, the first editions, as used likewise in Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope, ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). The letters are taken from The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).
In order to present Pope’s writings in their full freshness, the text is modernized throughout, eliminating typographical conventions that confer an inappropriately antiquarian flavour. In particular these are the capitalization of ordinary nouns; italics when they indicate names or quotations rather than emphasis; oddities of punctuation, especially colons where semicolons would be used today; and unnecessary apostrophes (thus, ‘produc’d’ is replaced by ‘produced’, and ‘seem’d by ‘seemed’). Pope himself, it should be noted, used all of these devices much less in his later works than in earlier ones, and soon after his death printers began dropping them altogether. Moreover, Warburton himself frequently altered Pope’s punctuation to suit his own taste.
Apostrophes do appear, however, whenever they indicate elisions that support the metre, for example ‘gen’rous’ and ‘wand’ring’; otherwise the reader would be likely to hear both as three syllables rather than two. When Pope writes ‘disposing Pow’r’, he intends an exact rhyme with ‘mortal hour’ (‘Essay on Man’, I, 287–8). (The ubiquitous ‘ev’ry’ is more ambiguous, but has been retained to confirm its disyllabic status.) Pope used commas much more heavily than is normal today, which may seem at times to slow the verse down unnecessarily, but his pauses are important, with constant weighing and balancing of phrases, and for the most part these have therefore been retained. In other subjective editorial decisions, capitals are retained when they seem integral to the meaning, e.g. ‘Man’ is capitalized in ‘An Essay on Man’, ‘Nature’ when personification is evident, and ‘Heaven’ when the religious term is clearly intended (but not in casual expressions such as ‘heaven forbid’).
Spellings, too, are modernized when neither meaning nor pronunciation is affected. ‘Money’ replaces ‘mony’ and ‘bias’ replaces ‘byas’; but ‘corse’ and ‘gripe’ are retained (for ‘corpse’ and ‘grip’).
The occasional triplet – a sequence of three lines with the same rhyme – is indicated in the margin as it was in the original, allowing the eye to anticipate what the ear will hear.
The notes are necessarily extensive, since Pope names hundreds of contemporaries and frequently incorporates literary allusions, most of which need to be identified for modern readers. The notes also give help in two additional ways: by sorting out syntax at times when Pope’s condensed style makes it hard to grasp his meaning, and by defining words whose usage has changed from his day to ours. For these Samuel Johnson’s great 1755 Dictionary is an invaluable guide, especially since many of its illustrative quotations are taken from Pope himself, and Johnson’s definitions are frequently quoted here.
In addition, there are interpretive headnotes, preceding the notes on individual lines, that provide contexts and perspectives for each major poem or group of poems.
I owe especial thanks to Melissa Pino for her painstaking care in helping to prepare the text.
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br /> EARLY POEMS
An Essay on Criticism
Si quid novisti rectius istis,
Candidus imperti; si non, his utere mecum.
HORACE
Part I
Introduction. That ’tis as great a fault to judge ill as to write ill, and a more dangerous one to the public. That a true taste is as rare to be found as a true genius. That most men are born with some taste, but spoiled by false education. The multitude of critics, and causes of them. That we are to study our own taste, and know the limits of it. Nature the best guide of judgement. Improved by art and rules, which are but methodized Nature. Rules derived from the practice of the ancient poets. That therefore the ancients are necessary to be studied by a critic, particularly Homer and Virgil. Of licences, and the use of them by the ancients. Reverence due to the ancients, and praise of them.
’Tis hard to say if greater want of skill
Appear in writing or in judging ill;
But of the two, less dang’rous is th’ offence
To tire our patience than mislead our sense:
Some few in that, but numbers err in this,
Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss;
A fool might once himself alone expose,
Now one in verse makes many more in prose.
’Tis with our judgements as our watches, none
10 Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
In poets as true genius is but rare,
True taste as seldom is the critic’s share;
Both must alike from Heav’n derive their light,
These born to judge, as well as those to write.
Let such teach others who themselves excel,
And censure freely who have written well.