Alexander Pope (1688–1744)

Pope is one of the major figures of the Restoration, and his poem "The Rape of the Lock" will almost certainly be on your exam. Apart from "The Rape of the Lock," Pope has a number of works that have a high probability of showing up.

Note that Pope wrote almost exclusively in heroic couplets, like many Restoration poets. Noting that a poem is written in heroic couplets is a good step toward identifying a work of Pope's

"The Rape of the Lock"

"The Rape of the Lock" is not a terribly long poem, and given that it is very likely to appear on your exam, take the time to read it.

"The Rape of the Lock" is a mock-heroic poem, first published in 1712 in two cantos, and then reissued in 1714 in a much-expanded 5-canto version.

The poem is based on an incident involving friends of Pope. Arabella Fermor and her suitor, Lord Petre were both from aristocratic Catholic families at a time, in England, when Catholicism was legally proscribed. Petre, wooing Arabella, had cut off a lock of her hair without permission, and the resulting argument had created a breach between the two families. Pope wrote the poem at the request of a friend in order to "laugh the two together". Pope refigures Arabella as Belinda and introduces an entire system of "sylphs", or guardian spirits of virgins, a parodic version of the gods and goddess of conventional epic. Pope satirizes a petty squabble by comparing it to the epic world of the gods.

Pope is criticizing the over-reaction of contemporary society to trivial things.

What dire offence from am'rous causes springs,
What mighty contests rise from trivial things
— Canto I

The humour of the poem comes from the position of this tempest in a teapot of vanity with the elaborate, formal verbal structure of an epic poem. When the Bar, for example, goes to snip the lock of hair, Pope says,

The Peer now spreads the glittering Forfex wide,
T' inclose the Lock; now joins it, to divide.
Ev'n then, before the fatal Engine clos'd,
A wretched Sylph too fondly interpos'd;
Fate urged the Sheers, and cut the Sylph in twain,
(But Airy Substance soon unites again)
The meeting Points the sacred Hair dissever
From the fair Head, for ever and for ever!
— Canto III

Pope used epic battle imagery to describe a small pair of ladies' scissors, hence satirizing the ridiculous nature of the whole situation. The useless and transient nature of the sylphs is seen here. One, cut in half by the "fatal engine" is unharmed.

*“Essay on Criticism”

The poem is the nearest thing in eighteenth-century, English writing to what might be called a neo-classical manifesto, although it is never as categorically expounded as the term implies. It comes closer, perhaps, to being a handbook, or guide, to the critic's and poet's art, very much in the style of Horace's Ars Poetica, or, to take the English models with which the young Pope was especially familiar, the Earl of Roscommon's translation of Horace, The Art Of Poetry, (1680), and John Sheffield's (the Duke of Buckingham's) Essay On Poetry, (1682). It is accordingly of great value to us today in understanding what Pope and many of his contemporaries saw as the main functions and justifications of criticism in early, eighteenth-century England.

The poem is articulated through a more consciously epigrammatic style than anything found elsewhere in Pope's poetry. It is built upon a series of maxims, or pithy apothegms, such as “To Err is Humane; to forgive, Divine,” (525), or “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.” (625). Pope's ability to sum up an idea tersely and memorably in a phrase, line, or couplet, of packed, imaginative clarity is a hallmark of An Essay on Criticism. Few other poems in the language contain so many formulations that have gone on to achieve an independent, proverbial existence in our culture. The polished couplets encapsulate points that reverberate in the manner of conversational repartee.

“Essay on Man”

"The Essay on Man" is a philosophical poem, written, characteristically, in heroic couplets, and published between 1732 and 1734. Pope intended it as the centerpiece of a proposed system of ethics to be put forth in poetic form: it is in fact a fragment of a larger work which Pope planned but did not live to complete. It is an attempt to justify, as Milton had attempted to vindicate, the ways of God to Man, and a warning that man himself is not, as, in his pride, he seems to believe, the center of all things. Though not explicitly Christian, the Essay makes the implicit assumption that man is fallen and unregenerate, and that he must seek his own salvation.

The "Essay" consists of four epistles, addressed to Lord Bolingbroke, and derived, to some extent, from some of Bolingbroke's own fragmentary philosophical writings, as well as from ideas expressed by the deistic third Earl of Shaftsbury. Pope sets out to demonstrate that no matter how imperfect, complex, inscrutable, and disturbingly full of evil the Universe may appear to be, it does function in a rational fashion, according to natural laws; and is, in fact, considered as a whole, a perfect work of God. It appears imperfect to us only because our perceptions are limited by our feeble moral and intellectual capacity. His conclusion is that we must learn to accept our position in the Great Chain of Being--a "middle state," below that of the angels but above that of the beasts--in which we can, at least potentially, lead happy and virtuous lives.

The Dunciad

The Dunciad expresses Pope's deep dismay concerning the feared loss of Britain's literary, cultural and ethical inheritance. Pope takes this idea, of the personified goddess of Dulness being at war with reason, darkness at war with light, and extends it to a full Aeneid parody. His poem celebrates a war, rather than a mere victory, and a process of ignorance, and Pope picks as his champion of all things insipid Lewis Theobald and Colley Cibber. (Theobald was Pope’s nemesis in editing Shakespeare. Cibber was Pope’s poetic nemesis who because laureate over Pope.)

The poem was loosely modelled on Dryden's MacFlecknoe, but where Dryden's poem was a lampoon of 217 lines attacking a single person, Thomas Shadwell, Pope's was a more fully developed satirical anti-epic, attacking all those who had slandered him over many years, in a poem more than four times the length.

“Eloisa to Abelard”

It is an Ovidian heroic epistle inspired by the 12th century story of Eloisa's (Heloise's) illicit love for, and secret marriage to, her teacher Pierre Abélard, perhaps the most popular teacher and philosopher in Paris, and the brutal vengeance her family exacts when they castrate him, not realizing that the lovers had married.

It is from this poem that the title for the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comes.

“To a Lady”

Although the target of the satire appears at first to be aristocratic and wealthy women, the venom that Pope expends upon them clearly spreads to encompass women as a sex. For readers today Pope's text, like Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, presents serious problems of interpretation. Whereas in his other satires Pope targets either particular vices, or particular individuals, in An Epistle To A Lady he attacks the entire female sex. Paradoxically his misogyny weakens rather than strengthens his satire.

The “Lady” to whom it is addressed, and whom it praises so glowingly at the end, was Pope's closest female friend, Martha Blount

Epistle II begins:
NOTHING so true as what you once let fall,
"Most Women have no Characters at all."
Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,
And best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair.