Paper-102 Assignment: Alexander Pope
Name: Avani Jani
Batch: M.A. Sem.1 (2022-2024)
Enrollment N/o.: 4069206420220014
Roll N/o.: 04
Subject code & Paper N/o.: 22393- Paper 102: Literature of the Neoclassical period
E-mail Address: avanijani.18@gmail.com
Submitted to: Smt. S.B. Gardi Department of English- M.K.B.U.
Date of submission: 7th November, 2022
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"Amusement is the happiness of those who can not think"
- Alexander Pope
Pope is in many respects a unique Figure. In the first place, he was for a generation “The Poet” of a great nation. (Long #) Personally, I am highly motivated by the life of the Pope. Though had so much trouble in his life and has such a weak body but his marvellous works are enough capable to inspire us today also.
Pope was born in London in 1688, the year of the Revolution. His parents were both Catholics, who presently removed from London and settled in Binfield, near Windsor, where the poet's childhood was passed. because of his own weakness and deformity, Pope received very little school education, but browsed for himself among English books and picked up a smattering of the classics (Long #) His bodily infirmity, which amounted almost to deformity, caused him to be privately educated; and to the end of his life, his knowledge had that extensive range, joined to the liability to make the grossest blunders, which is so often the mark of an eager and precocious intelligence imperfectly trained.
Alexander Pope had serious and major physical deformities and disabilities which set him apart from healthy people. It is only recently, however, that serious attention has been paid to the influence of Pope's major physical infirmities upon his writings and upon the friendly or hostile writings of others who made pointed and often unfriendly comments about his physical appearance. A useful work to fill the void of adequate assessment of Pope's severe and chronic illnesses on his work is the study of Marjorie Nicolson and G S Rousseau in their book This Long Disease, My Life' (Rosseau #)
Pope's religious faith, though he was never excessively devout as a Roman Catholic, closed to him all the careers, professional and political, in which a man of his keen intelligence might have been expected to succeed. He was thus forced into the pursuit of letters as his only road to fame. From his earliest youth, we find him passionately desirous of making his name as an author. His youth was passed at Binfield, his father's small estate near Windsor Forest. Before he was twenty years old he got into touch with Wycherley, now old and besotted. Through him, the pope became acquainted with
Addison, Swift, and Steele, whose friendship he eagerly cultivated. His early verses, admirably attuned to the ear of the age, brought him recognition and applause; his translation of Homer brought him wealth, and from that point, he never looked back. He became the dominating poetical personality of the day. In 1719 he removed to his house at Twickenham, whose pinchbeck beauties became the wonder, envy, and derision. of literary and social London. It remained his home till ‘’that long disease, his,’’ was finished in 1744. (Albert #)
Early works:
Windsor Forest was near enough to London to permit Pope’s frequent visits there. He early grew acquainted with former members of John Dryden’s circle, notably William Wycherley, William Walsh, and Henry Cromwell. By 1705 his “Pastorals” were in draft and were circulating among the best literary judges of the day. In 1706 Jacob Tonson, the leading publisher of poetry, had solicited their publication, and they took the place of honour in his Poetical Miscellanies in 1709. This early emergence of a man of letters may have been assisted by Pope’s poor physique. As a result of too much study, so he thought, he acquired a curvature of the spine and some tubercular infection, probably Pott’s disease, that limited his growth and seriously impaired his health. His full-grown height was 4 feet 6 inches (1.4 metres), but the grace of his profile and the fullness of his eye gave him an attractive appearance. He was a lifelong sufferer of headaches, and his deformity made him abnormally sensitive to physical and mental pain. Though he was able to ride a horse and delighted in travel, he was inevitably precluded from much normal physical activity, and his energetic, fastidious mind was largely directed to reading and writing.
When the “Pastorals” were published, Pope was already at work on a poem on the art of writing. This was An Essay on Criticism, published in 1711. Its brilliantly polished epigrams (e.g., “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” “To err is human, to forgive, divine,” and “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread”), which have become part of the proverbial heritage of the language, are readily traced to their sources in Horace, Quintilian, Boileau, and other critics, ancient and modern, in verse and prose; but the charge that the poem is derivative, so often made in the past, takes insufficient account of Pope’s success in harmonizing a century of conflict in critical thinking and in showing how nature may best be mirrored in art.
Notable Works:
“An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot”
“An Essay on Criticism”
“An Essay on Man”
“Eloisa to Abelard”
“Epistle to the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Burlington”
“Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus”
“The Dunciad”
“The New Dunciad”
“The Rape of the Lock”
“Windsor-Forest”
Pope’s father, a wholesale linen merchant, retired from business in the year of his son’s birth and in 1700 went to live at Binfield in Windsor Forest. The Popes were Roman Catholics, and at Binfield, they came to know several neighbouring Catholic families who were to play an important part in the poet’s life. Pope’s religion procured him some lifelong friends, notably the wealthy squire John Caryll (who persuaded him to write The Rape of the Lock, on an incident involving Caryll’s relatives) and Martha Blount, to whom Pope addressed some of the most memorable of his poems and to whom he bequeathed most of his property. But his religion also precluded him from a formal course of education, since Catholics were not admitted to the universities. He was trained at home by Catholic priests for a short time and attended Catholic schools at Twyford, near Winchester, and at Hyde Park Corner, London, but he was mainly self-educated. He was a precocious boy, eagerly reading Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, which he managed to teach himself, and an incessant scribbler, turning out verse upon a verse in imitation of the poets he read. The best of these early writings are the “Ode on Solitude” and a paraphrase of St. Thomas à Kempis, both of which he claimed to have written at age 12.
Early works :
Windsor Forest was near enough to London to permit Pope’s frequent visits there. He early grew acquainted with former members of John Dryden’s circle, notably William Wycherley, William Walsh, and Henry Cromwell. By 1705 his “Pastorals” were in draft and were circulating among the best literary judges of the day. In 1706 Jacob Tonson, the leading publisher of poetry, had solicited their publication, and they took the place of honour in his Poetical Miscellanies in 1709.
This early emergence of a man of letters may have been assisted by Pope’s poor physique. As a result of too much study, so he thought, he acquired a curvature of the spine and some tubercular infection, probably Pott’s disease, that limited his growth and seriously impaired his health. His full-grown height was 4 feet 6 inches (1.4 metres), but the grace of his profile and the fullness of his eye gave him an attractive appearance. He was a lifelong sufferer of headaches, and his deformity made him abnormally sensitive to physical and mental pain. Though he was able to ride a horse and delighted in travel, he was inevitably precluded from much normal physical activity, and his energetic, fastidious mind was largely directed to reading and writing.
When the “Pastorals” were published, Pope was already at work on a poem on the art of writing. This was An Essay on Criticism, published in 1711. Its brilliantly polished epigrams (e.g., “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” “To err is human, to forgive, divine,” and “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread”), which have become part of the proverbial heritage of the language, are readily traced to their sources in Horace, Quintilian, Boileau, and other critics, ancient and modern, in verse and prose; but the charge that the poem is derivative, so often made in the past, takes insufficient account of Pope’s success in harmonizing a century of conflict in critical thinking and in showing how nature may best be mirrored in art. 'An Essay on Criticism' gave lots of famous quotes which is still popular in today's generation also.
The well-deserved success of An Essay on Criticism brought Pope a wider circle of friends, notably Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, who were then collaborating on The Spectator. To this journal, Pope contributed the most original of his pastorals, “The Messiah” (1712), and perhaps other papers in prose. He was clearly influenced by The Spectator’s policy of correcting public morals by witty admonishment, and in this vein, he wrote the first version of his mock epic, The Rape of the Lock (two cantos, 1712; five cantos, 1714), to reconcile two Catholic families. A young man in one family had stolen a lock of hair from a young lady in the other. Pope treated the dispute that followed as though it were comparable to the mighty quarrel between Greeks and Trojans, which had been Homer’s theme. Telling the story with all the pomp and circumstance of epic made not only the participants in the quarrel but also the society in which they lived seem ridiculous.
The age of the Pope intensified the movement that, as we have seen, began after the Restoration. The drift away from the poetry of passion was more pronounced than ever, the ideals of 'wit' and 'common sense were more zealously pursued, and the lyrical note was almost unheard. In its place, we find in poetry the overmastering desire for neatness and perspicuity, for edge and point in style, and for correctness in technique. These aims received expression in the devotion to the heroic couplet, the aptest medium for the purpose. In this type of poetry, the supreme master is Pope; apart from him, the age produced no great poet. On the other hand, the other great names of the period--Swift, Addison, Steele, Defoe-- are those of prose-writers primarily, and prose-writers of very high quality.
Words - 1722
Works Cited
Long, William J. History of English Literature. https://www.google.co.in/books/edition/English_Literature/nagTDgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1.
Rosseau, George Sebastian. Princeton University Press, https://www.google.co.in/books/edition/This_Long_Disease_My_Life/6RnWCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=this+long+disease+my+life&printsec=frontcover.
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