Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

By his early twenties, Pope was established as the foremost poet of his generation, but if success came easily to him, tranquility did not. He was deeply conscious of physical deformity, having suf­fered in childhood from tuberculosis of the spine, which left him hunchbacked and dwarfish. More­over, his Roman Catholic faith excluded him from the university education and public positions that he might otherwise have expected. Pope's tireless literary labors were in some sense a compensation for the frustrations of what he called "this long dis­ease, my life." But he strove with all his might to be more than just a clever poet. He formed friend­ships with many of the leading figures of the day, among them John Gay (author of The Beggar's Opera), Jonathan Swift, and Lord Bolingbroke, who for a time was Secretary of State and who suggested to Pope the composition of the Essay on Man. Pope devoted many hours to creating a harmonious world of his own in his house and gardens at Twickenham, just outside London.

In his youth, when Pope revealed himself to be a literary prodigy, he mapped out a career along clas­sical lines, and began by publishing pastorals as Virgil, Spenser, and Milton had done. The obvious goal would have been a great epic poem, but for various reasons Pope came to believe that heroic ideals were no longer viable in the society of his time. He translated all of Homer into English verse, and in The Rape of the Lock (1712) wrote an affectionately humorous mock epic, but the bitter anti-epic of The Dunciad (1728) was his final as­sessment of the debased values (as he saw them) of eighteenth-century culture. While Pope is the great poet of civilization, he is far from compla­cent; the civilization he praises is under constant attack from corrupt politicians and the mindless hack writers whom he satirized as "dunces." Pope saw himself as drawn irresistibly to satire by an age that deserved rebuke. And it was for this reason, he declared, that he had to give up the more lyrical ef­fects of his early works.

Pope wrote a number of "Essays" in verse. The first of these, An Essay on Criticism, appeared in 1711, when Pope was only twenty-three. In this long poem, Pope summed up neoclassical doctrine about literature and literary criticism. The Essay on Man, published in 1733-1734, was Pope's ambi­tious attempt to summarize the human condition, what he called a "general map of Man." It marked the beginning of his work as a philosophical poet. The Moral Essays appeared between 1731 and 1735. Pope considered these poems to be his best work. In them he set out to construct a system of ethics in imitation of Horace.

Pope's mastery of the heroic couplet seemed the perfect expression of the moral and intellectual values of an age that admired clarity and order. Part of Pope's skill was in reducing his meaning to un­forgettable aphorisms, so that many of his lines have become proverbial: "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread"; "To err is human, to forgive, divine"; "Hope springs eternal in the human breast"; "The proper study of mankind is man." But above all he succeeded in giving infinite vari­ety to the potentially rigid couplet, by subtle alter­ations of rhythm and vowel sounds. As Samuel Johnson remarked later in the century, "A thou­sand years may elapse before there shall appear an­other man with a power of versification equal to that of Pope."