Hello and welcome to the Discourse. Alexander Pope was one of the most distinguished poets, satirists, and translators of the Augustan Period of the Enlightenment Age. He was born on May 21, 1688, in London in a Catholic family and his father was a successful wholesale linen merchant. It was the year of the Glorious Revolution by which, Catholic monarch James II was replaced by his protestant daughter Mary II and her husband William III of Orange. His father suffered losses in business and in 1700, he was forced to leave London and shift to live at Binfield in Windsor Forest. There were many other Catholic families at Binfield. It was a safer option and Alexander Pope made some really close friends including John Caryll the younger who became the second Baron Caryll of Durford in the future. John Caryll persuaded and financed Alexander Pope to write a satirical poem based on a real incident involving his relatives. That poem was titled The Rape of The Lock. Another of Pope’s close friends was Martha Blount to whom he dedicated some of his most famous poems and bequeathed most of his property to her. However, there were some repercussions of leaving London. Pope was 12 years old and he failed to attain any formal education at Binfield. Though he was a precocious child who wrote his first poem Ode to Solitude in 1700. He got some academic help from Catholic priests at his home but mostly, he was a self-taught boy who enjoyed solitude and invested most of his time in books, learning Latin, Greek, French, and Italian. He then translated Greek and Roman classics and which influenced his own writing. One other reason for his remaining in solitude was his illness as he suffered from Pott disease, a kind of tuberculosis that attacks the spine. As a result, his spine became weak and he grew a hunchback and failed to attain proper height. As an adult, his height was 4 feet 6 inches with a hunchback.
Being a Catholic, he couldn’t get admission to any of England’s Universities. But he continued to visit London frequently and made friends with some students of John Dryden including William Wycherly, Henry Cromwell, and William Walsh. Alexander Pope admired John Dryden and considered Dryden his idol. By 1705, Alexander Pope had already written his Pastorals which were being circulated among the best critics and literary groups in London. In 1709, Jacob Tonson published Pastorals in the poetic collection titled Poetical Miscellanies and it became Pope’s first published work. Pastorals are a series of seasonally themed four short poems which shows Pope’s love for Classics. These poems were based on Virgil’s work Ecologues. The four shepherds of Alexander Pope’s Pastorals are named Alexis, Damon, Lycidas, and Thyrsis and they all appear in Virgil’s Ecologues too. The first poem is titled Spring in which he reflects art as natural beauty. The second poem is titled Summer in which he personifies the season. The third poem is Autumn, in which he uses metaphor in place of personification and the fourth poem is Winter in which the poet becomes the absolute force. Through these four poems, Pope explains that art does not reflect nature, but that nature is just a poetical device to depict man. The Pastorals were written in Heroic couplets and iambic pentameter.
Despite his weak health and a hunchback, Pope had an attractive personality though he continued to suffer migraines throughout his life. He learned to ride a horse and enjoyed traveling but was restricted by his medical helpers from doing most of the physical activities. As a result, he had all the time and mental strength to invest in reading and writing. In 1711, Pope published An Essay on Criticism which was a verse essay (an essay in poetic form). The structure of this poem was influenced by Horace’s Ars Poetica and Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. Pope used the Horatian style of satire and Heroic couplets (pairs of adjacent rhyming lines in iambic pentameter) again in An Essay on Criticism. The poem contains some brilliantly polished epigrams that were later used as proverbs such as “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” “To err is human, to forgive, divine,” and “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” The main theme of this poem was to introduce and demonstrate the ideals of poetry and teach critics how to avoid doing harm to poetry. The poem got strong reactions from critics including Thomas Rymer, John Dennis, and Jonathan Swift. While Thomas Rymer and John Dennis strongly criticized Pope for this poem (John Dennis attacked Pope in his criticism by mentioning him as a hunch-back’d toad), Jonathan Swift supported Alexander Pope and that developed a friendship between the two. In 1713, Alexander Pope joined the Scriblerus Club, an informal group of writers who were Tori supporters. The group included John Gay, Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot, Henry St, John, and Thomas Parnell who became close friends with Alexander Pope. Pope became so close to this group that he addressed one of his epistles, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot who was a physician, and it as a memorial to their friendship.
However, the success of An Essay on Criticism brought Alexander Pope close to some authors related to the Whigs group too, including William Congreeve, Nicholas Rowe, Richard Steele, and Joseph Addison. Steele and Addison were working on the publication of The Spectator, a socio-political periodical journal. Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and his most successful and original pastoral poem The Messiah was published in The Spectator in 1712. Pope was influenced by Steele and Addison and their idea of reforming public morals and attitudes through satire and admonishment. He exercised the same technique in writing The Rape of The Lock to satirize a real argument between two Catholic families. The first two cantons were published in 1712 and the remaining 3 were published in 1714. This mock-heroic was also written in Heroic couplets.
In 1714, Queen Anne died, and that caused a dispute of succession. During the Jacobite rising of 1715, Pope, being a Catholic was suspected of helping the rebels. This created a distance between Pope and Richard Steele and Joseph Addison. Steele and Addison were staunch Whigs supporters. While Pope maintained friendly relations with some Whigs supporters including Congreeve and Rowe, he grew strong closeness with Tories involved in the Scriblerus Club (Gay, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Parnell).
In 1717, Pope wrote another poem titled Eloisa to Abelard in which he experimented with Ovid’s ‘heroic epistle’ to tell the story of Eloisa who opts for nunnery but struggles to quench her sexual passion while maintaining her dedication to a life of celibacy. The symbols of religious ecstasy further fan the sexual fire in her while she is determined to resist any temptation.
Pope translated Homer’s Iliad in 1720. he translated Odyssey in collaboration with William Broom and Elijah Fenton in 1725. The Tory writers of the Sriblerus Club supported Pope’s translation of Homer. But John Addison and Richard Steele introduced Thomas Tickell, a rival translator of Homer. Undoubtedly, Tickell’s translation was way too inferior to Pope’s work but Addison praised Tickell while ridiculing Pope. Pope wrote the mock epic The Dunicad in 1728 in which he satirized Lewis Theobald as the Goddess of Dullness’s favorite son.
Pope wrote Peri Bathous; or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry in 1728 which was an essay in which he ridiculed contemporary poets. In 1741, a part of "Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus" was published in which all those works that Pope wrote by the shared pseudonym Martinus Scriblerus, were included. The other writers who used the same pseudonym in collaboration included John Gay, Jonathan Swift, Dr. Arbuthnot, and Thomas Parnell.
In 1716, Pope and his parents left Windsor Forest and shifted to Chiswick. After his father died in 1717, Pope rented a villa on the Thames at Twickenham and started living there. He engaged in gardening and often gave advice to his friends including Jonathan Swift and henry Saint John on maintaining their landscapes. In 1731, Pope wrote Epistle to the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Burlington in which he offered some advice regarding architecture and gardening to Henry Saint John in a poetical manner of Horace. Pope wrote An Essay on Man in 1734 which examined the relationship between man, nature, and society. While Pope continued ignoring Addison’s attacks and criticism for a long, he wrote An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot in 1735 in which he satirized Addison as the character of Atticus, the insincere arbiter of literary taste.
Pope published Epilogues to Satire in 1738 in which he imitated Horatian themes adapted to contemporary societal and political situations. In 1742, he published The New Dunicad in which he replaced Theobald with Colley Ciber who was newly appointed as Poet Laureate of England. He was writing Brutus, an epic poem in heroic couplet when he died in 1744 and it remained incomplete.
So this is it for today. We will continue to discuss the history of English literature. Please stay connected with the Discourse. Thanks and Regards.
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