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The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.
eBook
The Club : Johnson, Boswell, and the friends who shaped an age
\"In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as \"the Club.\" In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the \"odd couple\" Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth-century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.\"-- Publisher's description.
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The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope
The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope examines the complex and multilayered world created by one of the most significant poets of the 18th century. The book focuses on how Alexander Pope, while rooted in the ideals of the Augustan age, bridges the transition to modern poetic sensibilities. Central to this exploration is Pope's effort to reconcile the traditional symbolic orders of the Renaissance with the emerging uncertainties of modernity. By \"stooping to truth,\" as Pope himself phrased it, he sought to reflect the external world with a sharp moral lens while grappling with the limitations of subjective perception and societal fragmentation. His works, including Essay on Man and the biting satires of his later career, reveal his struggle to balance the idealized order he aspired to uphold with the chaotic and evolving realities of his time. This thematic study presents Pope as both an inheritor of classical traditions and an innovator navigating the birth of the modern age. Drawing extensively from Pope's contemporaries, letters, and cultural context, the book highlights the poet's nuanced position as both a critic and participant in the socio-political currents of 18th-century England. It also challenges traditional and reductive interpretations of his work, proposing that Pope's fragmented sense of order and his deeply personal connections to his era provide the foundation for his enduring relevance. In doing so, it offers a fresh perspective on Pope as a pivotal figure whose imaginative world continues to resonate, embodying the tensions and contradictions of his age with remarkable vitality. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.
eBook
Society, Money, Class
The line “Let us be fixed, and our own masters still” concludes a poem that ruefully acknowledges Pope’s disappointment at inheriting no estate from his father, and makes pointed reference to his temporary occupancy at Twickenham. The descriptions he applies to himself are spoken in the original not by Horace but by a dispossessed tenant farmer:
My lands are sold, my father’s house is gone;
I’ll hire another’s, is not that my own?…
Pray heav’n it last! (cries Swift) as you go on:
I wish to God this house had been your own.…
Let lands and houses have what lords
Book Chapter
The Descent to Truth
Pope’s short preface to his 1717 Works is full of gracefully deprecated anxieties, beginning by regretting that readers expect a writer to sacrifice his whole life to their entertainment, and ending by confessing that this early bid for completeness (he was not yet thirty) might turn out to be an elegy rather than a manifesto. “In this office of collecting my pieces, I am altogether uncertain whether to look upon myself as a man building a monument, or burying the dead” (TE I, 9). Throughout the preface Pope agonizes over the intimate affinities between great writers and dreadful ones. Readers
Book Chapter
The Shaping of a Self-Image
More than any poet before him, Pope makes his personality and experience central to his poems. He does not celebrate or deplore his uniqueness like a post-Romantic poet; he could not have written Lowell’s “Shed skin will never find another wearer,” or even Blake’s “O why was I born with a different face?”¹ Yet Pope does manage to tell a great deal about himself. There is far more subjectivity in Wordsworth’s Prelude, but far less personal detail: we learn very little about Wordsworth’s parents, his friends, his way of working, even his physical appearance. Pope increasingly presents such matters, and
Book Chapter
Politics and History
The landed interest to which Pope’s friends belonged was being rudely pushed aside by two centers of power, the financial City and the job-bestowing Westminster court. We have already touched on the former, and noticed that moneymaking was perceived as the behavior of individuals rather than as the operation of a system. As for the court, Pope like others tended to exaggerate the obsolescent structure of personal relationships centering on the monarch, which had been weakened by the playboy Charles II, further damaged by Dutch William, and fatally wounded by the German Georges. Robert Walpole emerged as the new symbolic
Book Chapter
The Vocation of Satire
Although Swift was a lifelong satirist, Pope was not. Of the three great poems of his twenties—An Essay on Criticism, Windsor-Forest, and The Rape of the Lock—only the last is satiric, and it is as much a comedy as a satire. Pope devoted the next decade to Homer, whom he translated with the utmost seriousness—Dryden’s Aeneid is much jauntier and more ironic—and only in his forties did he turn to satire, with the first version of the Dunciad and the Horatian imitations.
Yet it is certainly as a satirist that posterity best remembers Pope. Why satire,
Book Chapter