Probably no one but Shakespeare was more read than Pope during his lifetime, and now, among the major “great poets,” probably no one is read less. We’re just too put off by anything called “Neo-Classicism.” Even wit seems to be out of fashion. But as this enchanting, touching, wise poem indicates, Pope can still speak to us if we have the ears to listen. Thank you for reminding us how good he is, how breathtakingly skillful in his versification, how easily he slips ordinary but sophisticated speech into heroic couplets, and how much feeling underlies his elegance. It’s not so hard to translate Pope’s vivid descriptions of poor Miss Blount’s 18th-century boredom into the absence of cell phones, Facebook, and video games. And courting—is it nearly 300 years ago now?—doesn’t seem so very different from today’s under-the-table passes. For me, the highlight is Pope’s inclusion of himself, his unsentimental self-awareness of his own frailty and loneliness, his easy reference to his good friend who is the source of reminding him of his unhappy state. I wish everyone who reads this will seek out a longer and even greater Pope letter: the “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” in which he writes—talks—to his doctor/friend about how he became a poet, the awfulness of his superstardom, the invasion of his privacy by bad poets who want letters of recommendation, his illness (“this long disease, my life”), and even his death and how he imagines his friends reacting to it.

I'm all in agreement, Lloyd. It's wonderful to see such enthusiasm for Pope in this fray. I actually just spent a good bit of the last few hours setting up a new name to get into the discussion, as the program still won't give me back my forgotten password (while retaining my original name, e-mail etc.)--I wonder what Pope would make of this. But it was worth it to have a chance to engage the poem and read what you, MaryAnn, pcampion (Pope in the workshop!) and others have had to say about it.

Many thanks, Robert, for choosing this and for the terrific reading--I love the little pause before "three times a day." As several folks have noted, Pope's ear is exquisite. I especially like what he's able to do with lists. The way "dull aunts" thuds in the middle of "Old-fashioned halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks," with the meter leading us to read "dull" as the unstressed syllable in the iamb but speech rhythms tending to stress it, really brings out their deadliness. Or this couplet--"She went from opera, park, assembly, play / To morning walks, and prayers three times a day"--where the contrast between the alliteration and rapid "light" rhythms of city life in the first line and the heaviness of the second, which, to my ear, pauses both at the comma after the first two feet and then again slightly after "prayers"--nails that boredom once again.

Beyond the sound qualities in these lists, Pope has an almost cinematic eye for the order of details: from the broad (and I would imagine deadening) "old-fashioned halls," to the "dull aunts" lurking presumably in those spaces, and then out to the "croaking rooks" those aunts resemble (and rooks in old-fashioned halls seem quite appropriate). Or that list near the end that you mention, Robert--"streets, chairs and coxcombs," where he moves swiftly from long shot, to medium with those moving chairs, to a close-up that perfectly catches his vision of urban traffic. "Coxcombs" is not a word I'd use, but I do have several contemporary terms for the oblivious folks in their motorized "chairs" when I'm trying to cross the street.

Pope is a master, and Mozart does come to mind, with that astounding fluency in the forms of his time. You never feel that the heroic couplet restrains him in any way. Rather it's a springboard for his inventiveness, his sensitivity, and, of course, his wit. Great to have him on our computer screens.

Hi D:

Whose laughs are hearty, tho' his jests are coarse,

And loves you best of all —all but his horse.

(or)

Whose laughs are hearty, tho' his jests are coarse,

And loves you best of all things—but his horse.

D: “Pope is a master, and Mozart does come to mind”

I couldn’t agree with you more.

Lloyd raises (or gives focus to) the interesting idea that Neo-Classicism, the 18th Century, etc. are terrifically out of style: the opposite of contemporary taste: a taste that is sometimes portrayed as extremely wide ranging, eclectic, omnivorous.

Maybe my adverb in that sentence, "terrifically," has more point than I thought when I typed it? That is, the 18th Century is where a tremendous number of modern things began: coffee houses, dictionaries, pianos, the Masons, novels, condoms, the U.S. Constitution, lollipops, clubs . . . well, my list may be defective, but you get the idea.

And we in the 21st Century think of ourselves as similarly innovative on levels profound and shallow: pcampion and others have pointed out how contemporary this Miss Blount poem is . . . it teases the idea of celebrity culture, though they had Earls for Superstars. Is the 18th century, including this brilliant piece of writing, a scarey mirror for us?

Just a thought . . . inspired by dbogen (thanks for the effort re-enrolling), Lloyd, MaryAnn, dbogen and others.

Here's an excerpt from "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" in which Pope satirizes his former friend, Joseph Addison ("Atticus" in this excerpt) --

…but were there one whose fires
True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires,
Blest with each talent and each art to please,
And born to write, converse, and live with ease:
Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,
Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne,
View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes,
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise;

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,

Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike;
Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,
A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend;
Dreading even fools, by flatterers besieged,
And so obliging, that he never obliged;
Like Cato, give his little senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause;

While wits and templars every sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise.
Who but must laugh, if such a man there be?
Who would not weep, if Atticus were he?

As in the "Essay on Criticism"-- written when he was about college-age, as I recall-- the Arbuthnot epistle is often a surprisingly accurate guide to our own, contemporary literary world.

Pope's decline in critical esteem mirrors Milton's---it's the familiar battle over tradition and "form" and all they signify socio-politically as well as artistically. Pope was the quintessential Age of Reason triumphalist, brimming with pride and confidence in human potential and technological accomplishment, which based on his epoch seemed unlimited---"God said 'Let Newton be, and all was light", and all that. This ebullience came to be associated, fair or not (I've no idea of Pope's personal views---was he a "public" poet?) with the "establishment", religious, governmental, and educational, and then with the dread Industrial Revolution, once the bloom on that rose faded, and the Romantics arose with their disdain for the artificial, the "unnatural", the machine; with their desire to pay deference to Nature on her own terms instead of as an object of human dominion. Alongside the preferred "free" and "natural" subject-matters, like flowers and one's personal feelings, the victorious and still-dominant Romantic ethos and aesthetic devalued or even openly eschewed the classical traditions of form and convention in poetry and other arts. Pope and to a lesser extent Milton suffered from this critical shift in rather the same way Kipling and Tennyson suffered as a function of progressive rejection of Victorian, empire-building sensibilities.

Intriguing thought, Robert. If our time and Pope's have a lot in common, what comes in between--Romanticism--seems to have permanently altered how poets respond to the public world. I love Romantic poetry, but I do long for the more public focus of Pope, and the sense of poetry as discourse that you described a good while back now in The Situation of Poetry and illustrated in An Explanation of America and other work since then. There are wonderful recent poems that engage our shared world--James McMichael's Capacity (not to mention his Four Good Things), C.S. Giscombe's Giscome Road, C.D. Wright's Deepstep Come Shining, to name a few--but they tend to be more "internal" than Pope's work: meditations, say, rather than public discourse.

It's impossible for poets today to work in a contrext like Pope's--though we do have coffee houses--and I'm not sure anyone could stand that world for long. But perhaps these cyber-forums have a little something in common (but, thankfully, with a more democratic range) with the talk among his circle of acquaintances. And we don't even have to dress up to attend.

Thanks for the versions, HAP. "all--all" is great: almost a kind of sound chiasmus with "best of all--all but his." I'm not sure Pope would take kindly to revisions from three hundred years in the future, but this is a good one.

...wonderful tribute to Pope: "And he who dribbled couplets like a snake/Coiled to lithe precision in the sun"

the victorious and still-dominant Romantic ethos and aesthetic devalued or even openly eschewed the classical traditions of form and convention in poetry and other arts.

It's a challenge, today, to wrap our minds around the convention of addressing experience so indirectly. The poet and reader (that is Miss Blount) share a common culture in a way hardly imaginable to us. I suspect we are more eclectic, if only to survive, but we must speak more directly, or be misunderstood.

dbogen:

Thanks for the versions, HAP. "all--all" is great: almost a kind of sound chiasmus with "best of all--all but his." I'm not sure Pope would take kindly to revisions from three hundred years in the future, but this is a good one.

Hi D, I didn’t mean to imply my changes were an improvement. I had to look up chiasmus; I shouldn’t say had to, it was a get to. It happens all the time to me on this Fray.

And loves you best of all things—but his horse.

That’s a great line.

Mary Ann alluded to “his health and physical ailments” on the thread opened up by Robusto. I appreciated to link to Wikipedia by Mr. Pinsky and I like to think I would have hunted it down were it not provided.

His Art Was

the opposite

of himself

(diminutive

and misshapen).

…Must have been a tough row to hoe.

Tate's first stanza also referred to Pope's disfigurement:

When Alexander Pope strolled in the city
Strict was the glint of pearl and gold sedans.
Ladies leaned out more out of fear than pity
For Pope's tight back was rather a goat's than man's

Thanks enginist (that was fast), I came back to delete and re-post: His Art Is is my revision.

Re: For Pope's tight back was rather a goat's than man's

I didn’t get the reference, the first time around, other than not being very flattering because I have seen goats – in petting zoos and on farms – and I don’t remember them having pronounced humps: <link>

Mountain goats have humps.

The English Goat: It is tractable, docile, but capricious, naturally.

Very glad you brought up Tate's poem, one of his best. Perhaps overrated during his life, Tate is underrated now.

I've always thought this an extremely misgiving tribute. The ending suggests that Pope's genius was tragically misdirected:

What requisitions of a verity
Prompted the wit and rage between his teeth
One cannot say. Around a crooked tree
A moral climbs whose name should be a wreath.

We look for the "requisitions of a verity" that motivate the "wit and rage," but unable to discern them, we are left with an anger in excess of its occasion. Pope leaves behind a "moral . . . whose name should be a wreath": Should be, but isn't--the laurel has been sacrificed to the moral.