Unit%20Six%20-%20Satire

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Unit Six - Satires Apotheosis

• Lesson 13 Pope

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Important Texts

• Jack, Ian. Augustan Satire intention and idiom
  in English poetry, 1660-1750. Oxford Clarendon,
  1964.
• Sutherland, James R. A Preface to 18th Century
  Poetry. Oxford Oxford UP, 1948.
• Tillotson, Geoffrey. On the Poetry of Pope.
  Oxford Clarendon, 1950.

3
Pounds Definitions for Poetry

• Logopoeia - words you use, process of your
  argument
• Phonopoeia - matter of imagery. What pictures
  does the poet evoke?
• Melopoeia - sounds of poetry

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Changes with Pope

• Imagery goes way down in the period leading to
  Pope, and then it balloons after him.
• Logopoeia increases rapidly with Pope then
  practically disappears. Same with Melopeoia.

5
Popes Aesthetic

• The poetic ideal Pope presents is very much like
  haiku.
• Come as close as you can to boredom and monotony.
• Popes poetry is deceptively simple.
• He always writes in heroic couplets
• each one is incredibly distilled.

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Characteristics of Heroic Couplet

• Each couplet must be a unit of sense detachable
• Each line must end with a definite pause.
  Enjambment is very rare in Pope, and if you see
  it, look at why he uses it.

7
The Caesura

• The caesura must be handled with great care to
  avoid monotony
• Caesura is the pause in a line of verse dictated
  not by metrics but by the natural cadence of the
  language.
• There is usually a caesura in verses of ten
  syllables or more, and the handling of this pause
  to achieve metrical variety is a test of the
  poets skill.

8
Popes Use of Caesura

• Note Popes skill in shifting the caesura in this
  passage
• A little learning / / is a dangerous thing
• Drink deep,/ / or taste not of the Pierian
  spring
• These shallow draughts / / intoxicate the brain,
• But drinking largely / / sobers us again.
• An Essay on Criticism

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More on the Heroic Couplet

• Usually iambic. Trochees and spondees will show
  up sometimes. Monosyllables only get the stress
  if they need it rhetorically.
• Rhymes must be exact rhymes.
• Preferably on nouns or verbs.
• Sounds must echo sense.

10
Alexander Pope

• Pope was born in 1688, the year William and Mary
  come over to take the throne.
• He dies in 1744.

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Early Achiever

• Most of his major poems were written, in one form
  at least, by the time he was 25.

12
Moving during Childhood

• When young Pope was born, his father was a cloth
  merchant living in the City (a part of London)
• At some point (ca. 1700) in Alexander's
  childhood, the Pope family was forced to relocate
• in compliance with a statute forbidding Catholics
  from living within ten miles of London or
  Westminster.
• They moved to Binfield in Berkshire.

13
Education

• Very poor formal education partly because his
  family was Roman Catholic in a time of intense
  anti-Catholic feeling.
• Once they moved to Binfield, he was self-taught.
• As a Catholic, would be barred from Oxford and
  Cambridge.

14
Ill Health

• Pope's disease--apparently tuberculosis of the
  bone--became evident when he was about twelve.
• Later in Pope's life, Sir Joshua Reynolds
  described him as "about four feet six high (132
  cm) very humpbacked and deformed."

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From Maynard Macks Biography

• Pope was "afflicted with constant headaches,
  sometimes so severe that he could barely see the
  paper he wrote upon, frequent violent pain at
  bone and muscle joints...shortness of breath,
  increasing inability to ride horseback or even
  walk for exercise...."

16
Early Reputation

• William Wycherley, impressed by some of Pope's
  early poetry, introduced him into fashionable
  London literary circles (in 1704 when he was 16).
  
• Public attention came with the publication of
  Pastorals in 1709.
• The Rape of the Lock helped secure Pope's
  reputation as a leading poet of the age.

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Twickenham

• Pope moved to his villa in Twickenham in 1717
• outside the city limits thanks to restrictions on
  where Catholics could live.
• He moved in Catholic circles and remained a
  Catholic all of his life.

Contemporary sketch of Pope in his grotto in
Twickenham. His house is no longer there.
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Country Life

• While there he received visitors (just about
  everyone)
• attacked his literary contemporaries (just about
  eveyone, although notable exceptions were Swift
  and Gay, with whom he had close friendships)
• Continued to publish poetry.
• He died on his birthday, 1744, at Twickenham.

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Literary Heroes

• Pope loved the work of Dryden (who died when Pope
  was almost 12). He had his picture on the wall,
  alongside that of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton.

20
Hatred of Self

• He had a real hatred of his physical body, and by
  the time he retired to Twickenham, he could no
  longer sit or stand unsupported due to his weak
  spine.
• As ugly as his physical body was, he was said to
  have a very expressive face. People who knew him
  usually really loved him.

21
Unrequited Loves

• Lady Mary Wortley Montegu (1689-1762)

22
Martha Blount

• Subject of Epistle to a Lady
• The National Portrait Gallery, London, has a
  portrait, but its not available on-line right
  now!
• Pope left her in his will 1000, many books, all
  his household goods, and made her residuary
  legatee

23
Critical Response

• Although such late eighteenth-century tastemakers
  as Samuel Johnson acknowledged Pope as a gifted
  satirist, translator, and poet, none thought of
  his major poems as poetry of the highest degree.
• These appraisals foreshadowed Victorian critical
  views on Pope's canon, when romantic aesthetics
  flourished, which marked his poetic style as
  dated, even prosaic, and his themes as petty and
  ill-advised.

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Changes in the 20th Century

• These attitudes persisted well into the twentieth
  century, when the critical strategies that define
  New Criticism revived interest in Pope's body of
  works, renewing appreciation of his poetics in
  terms of its own art.

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Proto-Romantic

• Modern scholarship also has refuted the common
  perception that Pope's later satire detracts from
  the grace of his early poetry. In recognition of
  the poet's keen intellect and emotional
  sensitivities, some critics have explored his
  verse for prototypical elements of Romanticism.

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More Biographical Information

• With the mid-twentieth-century publication of the
  definitive edition of his complete
  correspondence, critical biographers emerged to
  fill the gaps in our knowledge of Pope's life.

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Feminist Interest

• By the close of the twentieth century, feminist
  scholars and cultural critics have investigated
  Pope's writings for signs of emerging modern
  ideologies surrounding diverse issues.

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Post-modernist Interest

• Postmodern commentators have begun to negotiate
  the role gender played in the poet's and
  culture's imaginative life as well as gauge the
  influence of colonial ideology on formation of
  the professional writer and mark out changes in
  the social obligations of literature.
• Others have described the relation between
  burgeoning print and mercantile cultures,
  deconstructed linguistic ambiguities, and
  analyzed political implications of Pope's texts.

29
The Rape of the Lock

• Written over a literal event
• in order to deflate it.

Contemporary sketch of Pope
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Qualities of the Epic Pope Uses

• Invoking the Muse
• Heroes of wonderful proportion
• Belinda
• The Lord
• Battles
• cards
• slyphs
• Belinda--her bodkin has a heritage

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More Epic Qualities

• Supernatural elements
• Trip to the Underworld
• Catalogues of names
• Long speeches
• Elevated language

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More Epic Qualities

• In medias res
• in the middle of things
• Episodic with digressions
• Divisions--books, cantos
• Gives a picture of society

33
Zeugma

• Putting two completely disparate objects with the
  same verb
• Stain her honor, or her new brocade
• Found throughout the poem. Look for them.

34
Perfectly Circular Poem

• Begins with Belinda opening her eyes and ends
  with her closing them in death.
• She doesnt really die--the narrator alludes to
  her death in the future.

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Bringing More to the Poem

• Having important things--ideals, goals in
  life--is more important than beauty
• Might want to be something other than beautiful

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Miltons Influence

• The main structural design of the poem seems to
  depend on its sequences of allusions and
  parallels to Milton's Paradise Lost
• the "Morning-Dream" summoned to the sleeping
  Belinda by Ariel, her "Guardian Sylph," which not
  only warns her of some impending "dread Event"
  and encourages her to know her "own Importance,"
  but also recalls the dream, similarly encouraging
  of excessive self-esteem, insinuated into Eve's
  mind by Milton's Satan

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Other Miltonic influence

• The scene at Belinda's dressing table, where she
  appears to worship her own image in her mirror,
  is reminiscent of the newly created Eve's
  narcissistic admiration of her self as reflected
  in the Edenic pool

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More Borrowing from Milton

• Just before the Baron's cutting of Belinda's
  lock, the moment when Ariel seeks out the "close
  Recesses of the Virgin's Thought" and finds an
  "Earthly Lover lurking at her Heart" clearly
  recalls the scene in Paradise Lost when, after
  Adam's fall of his own free will, his angelic
  guardians, "mute and sad," depart from him, as
  powerless as Ariel finds himself to be before
  Belinda's own free choice of an earthly rather
  than a sylphic lover. (which we didnt read in PL)

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Belindas Fall

• Belinda's fall, in one sense, appears merely to
  be part of the normal human process of "falling"
  in love, or a maiden's innermost and private
  decision not to spurn so attractive and eligible
  a suitor as the Baron.

40
Rape vs. Deflowering

• From this point of view the state of her heart at
  her moment of choice deserves sympathy more than
  censure neither she nor the world in general
  would wish her to remain a virgin forever (as the
  poem later says, "she who scorns a Man, must die
  a Maid").
• But if she secretly acquiesces to the Baron's
  courtship she has no right to consider the
  cutting of her lock equivalent to a "rape" of her
  person it is a desired rather than a forced
  "deflowering."

41
Hypocritical Prude?

• In light of Belinda's apparent compliance in the
  Baron's act, her immediate response to the loss
  of a lock seems utterly prudish and hypocritical,
  particularly since her outraged and tearful
  denial of any complicity in the event is made in
  defense of an "Honour" at whose "unrival'd
  Shrine," in the words of her friend Thalestris,
  "Ease, Pleasure, Virtue, All, our Sex resign.

42
Influence of Horace

• Smoothness of language
• Use humor and irony
• Less threatening that Juvenalian mode
• Not hostile to the subjects
• Urbane and witty

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Influence of Juvenal

• Angry (Clarissas speech)
• Verbal jabs--darker, more sarcastic
• At every word, a reputation dies

44
Not as Innocent as It Seems

• Throughout the poem, there are many double-edged
  usages.
• This is a society grounded on pretence.
• There are also sexual notions.

45
Epistle to a Lady

• The imaginary setting for part of the poem is an
  art gallery, with the speaker conducting the
  reader past portraits of various female
  characters exemplifying the notion that,
• "good as well as ill, / Woman's at best a
  Contradiction still."