Eighteenth Century Poetry Dominated by Alexander Pope

7/2/2019 English Poetry in the Eighteenth Century Analysis - eNotes.
com
The Dominance of Alexander Pope

(CRITICAL EXPLORATIONS IN POETRY)
The eighteenth century in Britain saw the blossoming of seventeenth century poetic modes and the sprouting
of modes that would blossom into Romanticism. It was an age of reason and sentiment, of political
turbulence, of growing colonialism and wealth, of beautiful landscapes and parks, of gin addiction and
Evangelicalism, of a burgeoning middle class and growing respect for middle-class values, of increasing
literacy and decreasing dependence on patronage, and of cantankerous Tories and complacent Whigs. As
England became the center of world commerce and power, so, too, it became the center of literary
achievement.
John Dryden died in 1700, but his death signaled no dramatic change in poetic style. Poets walked in his
footsteps, moving away from Metaphysical conceits—from the style of those poets who glittered “Like
twinkling Stars the Miscellanies o’er”—to search for smoothness and a new style of thinking. Symptomatic
of the eighteenth century’s passion for order and regularization was the tinkering by Alexander Pope (1688-
1744) with the poetry of John Donne: He made Donne’s numbers flow melodiously and corrected his
versification. Heroic couplets and lampoons and political satires such as Dryden’s were written throughout
the century. Common Restoration subjects such as the imperious mistress and the cacophony of critics
continued to be used.
Dryden named William Congreve (1670-1729) his poetical successor, but Pope was his true heir. From the
appearance of his Pastorals in 1709 until William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Pope dominated
poetry. His influence, for example, pervades Robert Dodsley’s Collection of Poems, by Several Hands
(1748), and it is evident in William Mason’s Museaus (1747), in the half dozen other poems concerned
chiefly with Pope, and in the many others that refer respectfully to him. If the poets of the latter part of the
century did not imitate him, they at least grudgingly admired him while...
(The entire section is 822 words.)
Epics and mock-epics

The most popular genres were epic, ode, satire, elegy, epistle, and song. To show their fealty to Homer and
Vergil, nearly every eighteenth century poet at least thought of writing an epic. Pope, for one, was planning
an epic on Brutus when he died. None of the plans for writing epics or the epics that were written brought
forth anything but sour fruit (Aaron Hill’s biblical epic Gideon, 1749, is a prime example); however, the
mock-epic form in this possibly nonheroic age brought forth delicious fruit, including Pope’s The Rape of
the Lock (1712, 1714) and The Dunciad (1728-1743).
Odes
https://www.enotes.com/topics/english-poetry-eighteenth-century/in-depth 1/9
Eighteenth
7/2/2019 century poets had more success writing
English Poetry odes
in the than Century
Eighteenth they did writing
Analysis epics. In the early years of the
- eNotes.com
century, poets looked to Pindar or to Horace as models for writing odes. They used Pindaric odes for exalted
subjects and Horatian odes for various urbane, personal, and meditative themes. In the seventeenth century,
Abraham Cowley had popularized irregularities in the Pindaric odes; after Congreve denounced them in his
A Pindarique Ode on the Victorious Progress of Her Majesties Arms (1706), most poets knew the duty of
Pindaric regularity but still preferred the laxness of Cowley’s form. Thomas Gray (1716-1771) was an
important exception: He wrote two Pindaric odes—“The Bard” and “The Progress of Poesy”—in rigidly
correct form.
In the second quarter of the century, a new type of ode appeared, inspired by Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il
Penseroso.” The “descriptive and allegorical ode” centered around a personified abstraction, such as pity or
simplicity, and treated it in a descriptive or pictorial way. Collins and the Warton brothers did much to
popularize this mode in the 1740’s.
Satire
The eighteenth century was, of course, the golden age of satire. Satirists such as Jonathan Swift and Pope
attacked the frivolity of polite society, the corruption of politics, and false values in all the arts. The aim of
satire, as Pope explained it, was not wanton destruction: Satire “heals with Morals what it hurts with Wit.”
Satirists, he claimed, nourished the state, promoting its virtue and providing it everlasting fame.
Eighteenth century poetry has been accused of monotony and weak feeling. The zeal of the satirists for truth
and virtue, however, blazes through many lines, and the warmth of their compassion for the poor, the sick,
the mistreated, and the aged glows through many others. Pope, in the Moral Essays (1731-1735), for
example, pities the ancient belles of court: “See how the World its Veterans rewards!/ A Youth of Frolicks,
an old Age of Cards.” The age, particularly the state under the administration of Sir Robert Walpole, may
not have been as black as the satirists painted it—it was an age of increasing wealth and progress—but the
satirists were obsessed by the precariousness of intellect and of civilization, by the threat of fools and bores
and pedants, by the fear of universal darkness burying all. In a world where human intellect alone keeps
society from the disintegration caused by unthinking enthusiasts and passionate pig heads, dullness is
morally objectionable—an aspect of vice. Satirists thus became moral crusaders for truth, virtue, and
intelligence. They believed in an ancient state of purity which humans could not re-create; humans could,
however, “relume the ancient light” (in Pope’s words) for the future.
Elegies
Elegies in Latin and Greek were composed in elegiac couplets rather than the hexameter lines of the epic
and the pastoral. Donne wrote amatory elegies in the seventeenth century, but by the eighteenth century,
elegies were meditative pieces, often about death. Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751),
said by some to be the best poem of the eighteenth century, is an elegy for all “average” and obscure men. It
achieves the ideals of its day in its attempt to work in universal terms and in its purity and harmony of
diction; it approaches Romanticism in its placid melancholy and rustic setting. In “Elegy to the Memory of
an Unfortunate Lady” (1717), the other important elegy of the eighteenth century and one of the only works
of Pope that the Romantics could tolerate, Pope laments the mortality of a young suicide victim and his own
mortality, stressing the threats to human feeling and the glory of its intensity.
7/2/2019 English Poetry in the Eighteenth Century Analysis - eNotes.com
Epistles
The epistle, or verse letter, an important form in the seventeenth century, reached its height in the epistles of
Pope in the 1740’s, and continued to be popular until the end of the nineteenth century. Horace provided the
classical model for the verse epistle. The familiar form of the epistle allowed poets to seem to speak
sincerely and intimately to a close friend while addressing the public about general issues. Almost all
epistles were written in heroic couplets, began in a rather rambling way, and finally came to a point about
halfway through the poem. Charles Churchill’s Epistle to William Hogarth (1763), for example, begins with
a miscellaneous discussion of satire. The effect of this structure is comic and optimistic: Order is brought
out of disorder.
Lyric poetry
Lyric poets used the song to achieve brevity and, at times, elegance. Songs were collected and written
throughout the period, but the greatest of the songwriters—Robert Burns (1759-1796)—came at the end. He
not only composed his own songs but also reconstituted and invigorated old Scottish songs, turning a
drinking song into “Auld Lang Syne” and a disreputable ballad into “John Anderson My Jo.”
Epigrams
Other popular genres included the epigram, the fable, and verse criticism. The tradition of the epigram,
modeled on Martial and on Horace, began in the Renaissance and appealed to the eighteenth century
because of its conciseness and the opportunity it provided to display wit. The average epigram was at most
six lines long, beginning with something to arouse curiosity or anticipation and closing with humor or
surprise. Common topics included love and the characters of people, though some epigrams were obscene.
A specialized form of the epigram was the epitaph, which several poets composed for themselves. John
Gay’s epitaph reads: “Life is a jest, and all things show it/ I thought so once; but now I know it,” and Swift’s
Latin epitaph, roughly translated, says that he is now gone where bitter indignation no longer lacerates his
heart.
Fables
The fables of the eighteenth century demonstrate the ability of Augustan writers to enrich and vary a genre.
The favorite form for the fables was the iambic tetrameter couplet. Gay wrote the best English fables (1727-
1738), though Swift, Bernard Mandeville, Prior, Christopher Smart, Cowper, Beattie, and Johnson also
wrote
7/2/2019 them. Far from being childlike,English
Gay’sPoetry
Fables
in the(1727, 1738)
Eighteenth expressed
Century a disillusioned cynicism toward
Analysis - eNotes.com
humankind, particularly emphasizing foolish human pride. No English fable, however, could measure up to
those written in France by Jean de La Fontaine in the seventeenth century.
Poetry, patronage, and politics

Eighteenth century poets generally came from good families in much reduced circumstances. Prior, Swift,
and Johnson fit this generalization, though Pope was the son of a wealthy linen draper. Poets still sought
patrons, praising their parks and estates, but more and more their writings at least partially supported them.
Prior, for example, apparently netted four thousand guineas from his Poems on Several Occasions (1707,
1709). The audience for literature was growing, thanks in large measure to the graduates of charity schools
and the newly founded grammar schools. Political preferment also proved lucrative for poets. Addison
served as undersecretary of state and later secretary to the lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and Burns collected
excise taxes. Johnson’s letter to Lord Chesterfield on his tardy recognition of the Dictionary of the English
Language (1755) is said to have given the final blow to patronage, though the letter was not printed until
near the end of the century.
In the first half of the century, poets aligned themselves according to politics. Addison and Whigs such as
Ambrose Philips reigned at Button’s coffeehouse. The Tories—Swift, Gay, Thomas Parnell, Pope, and John
Arbuthnot—formed the Scriblerus Club and met at Arbuthnot’s apartments in St. James’s Palace. Parnell
and Gay both worked closely with Pope and yet remained independent: Parnell published his Miltonic
poems chiefly in miscellanies, and Gay became the king of burlesque. Barbs flew back and forth between
the Whig and Tory parties, the deadliest of which was Pope’s portrait of Addison in Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
(1735).
Humor and satire

Though there undoubtedly was venom in these attacks, there was also a good measure of humor written in
the early decades of the century. Gay was a chief contributor with Wine (1708), a burlesque of Milton and
John Philips’s Cyder (1708) and Trivia: Or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716). Swift, Lady
Mary Wortley-Montagu, and others helped to popularize “town eclogues.” The most delightfully
imaginative and amusing of the exposés of society was Pope’s mock-heroic The Rape of the Lock, with its
sylphs and gnomes and diminution of Homeric epic. The Rape of the Lock is much more complicated than
Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe: Or, A Satyre upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T. S. (1682): Pope reveals the
confusion of moral values in society in such catalogs as “Puffs, Powder, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.” Pope
simultaneously laughs at the foibles of society and warns of the fragility of beauty.
Most poets wrote in heroic couplets, a pair of rhyming pentameter lines. In Shakespeare’s time, couplets
closed sonnets or scenes in blank verse dramas; in the later seventeenth century, couplets were adapted to
correspond to the elegiac couplet of classical verse and to the heroic, unrhymed Greek and Latin hexameter.
Pope was the master of the heroic couplet; he knew how to build two or three couplets, each technically
closed, into a unified, easy period. Throughout the century, poets in England and America tried to equal his
artistry. By the end of the century, poets such as Cowper still attempted heroic couplets, but with little
success. Cowper could achieve the Horatian simplicity admired in the eighteenth century, but his verses
lacked Horatian polish and piquancy.
Even
7/2/2019 in the early part of the century, however, poets
English Poetry in the such as Swift
Eighteenth Centuryand Prior
Analysis ignored heroic couplets in favor
- eNotes.com
of tetrameter couplets. Prior criticized the heroic couplet, complaining that it cuts off the Sense at the end of
every first Line, which must always rhime to the next following, and consequently produces too frequent an
Identity in the Sound, and brings every Couplet to the Point of an Epigram.
Short poems and irregular meters, on the whole, were not highly regarded.
The nature of humankind

After the 1640’s, England’s civil war left deep scars that lasted well into the eighteenth century. Religious
and political factions still strained the country, and the atmosphere was at once one of compromise and
tolerance and one of skepticism. It was a time when writers questioned and strove to understand the nature
of humanity, human limitations, and the limitations that must be set on human passions. Answers to these
questions differed significantly: Some optimistic moralists believed in the essential goodness of humankind,
some satirists and cynics bemoaned humanity’s incorrigible pride, which would forever keep people from
the truth, and some realists insisted that humanity and the world must be accepted as they are,...
Landscape and philosophical discourse

While Pope inherited satire and heroic couplets from Dryden, there was another poetic movement in the
eighteenth century whose ancestors were Milton, reflective poetry, and blank verse. Poets increasingly used
landscape as material for their poetry and wedded it to philosophical discourse. Thomson’s The Seasons was
both the crowning effort of this movement and a stimulus to its further development. Thomson patterned
Autumn (1730) and Winter (1726) on the chronological progress of the season and Summer (1727) on the
events of a typical day. The passages alternate between description and meditation, with description being
the most innovative. Thomson excelled in the presentation of exuberant motion and tightly packed detail.
Pope and Philips had written lovely pastorals earlier in the century, and Gay incorporated much folklore and
the sights and sounds of the country in his Rural Sports (1713) and The Shepherd’s Week (1714); but
Thomson’s work differed sharply from the pastoral in its description of nature for its own sake, with human
incidents as background rather than nature as background for human drama. The Seasons started a tradition
of descriptive poetry, which at its extreme became a love of what Shenstone called “odd picturesque
description.” The descriptive poem usurped the place of the epic as the most honored poetic form, and
Thomson was invested as the preeminent English poet of nature until Wordsworth succeeded him.
Thomson has been accused of having an overly latinate style with false ornamentation. His strength lies in
his minute observation of nature, in his almost scientific curiosity. A professed deist, Thomson saw in nature
a revelation of the attributes of God; other deists, and even the more orthodox, upheld him in this belief. The
scientist in Thomson admired the orderliness of the mathematical universe. Like Pope, Thomson insisted on
intelligence and reason; he believed that a study of nature frees people from superstition and ignorance. He,
too, reflected on the wants and miseries of human life.
Didactic poetry
Encouraged by The Seasons and An Essay on Man, many poets began to write in a moralizing, didactic
manner, including William Somerville (The Chace, 1735), Henry Brooke (Universal Beauty, 1735), Mark
Akenside (The Pleasures of the Imagination, 1744), and Young (Night-Thoughts). Akenside’s The Pleasures
of the Imagination, based on Addison’s discussion of the same subject in The Spectator, insists on the
interconnection of truth, goodness, and beauty. Akenside’s training in religion, philosophy, science, and art
is evident throughout the poem, which is more a document for a historian of ideas than for an appreciator of
poetic beauty.
...
Bibliography
Brunström, Conrad. William Cowper: Religion, Satire, Society. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press,
2004. A re-assessment of Cowper, emphasizing his attempt to reconcile the idea of retirement into rural life
with his own version of social responsibility. Torn between these extremes, Cowper symbolizes a conflict
that was not uncommon among eighteenth century intellectuals. Bibliographical references and index.
Fairer, David. English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789. Annotated edition. Harlow, Essex,
England: Longman, 2003. Discusses a variety of topics, ranging from ways of feeling, such as the search
for...
Sensibility and melancholy

Another important movement in the literature of England and the Continent in the first half of the eighteenth
century has been named “sensibility.” By this is meant an exquisite sensitiveness to the beautiful and the
good, a sensitiveness that induces melancholy or sorrow. All that is noble and generous in human conduct
was thought to have its source in this exquisite sensitivity, and nature assisted as a moral tonic to the human
heart. The pensive mood, even though it induced melancholy, also induced pleasure because it freed the
emotions and the imagination from the conventions of civilization and from the vanity and corruption of
humankind. Milton’s “Il Penseroso” partly influenced this new mode, and Richard Steele...
From society to the individual

The latter half of the century produced no English poet equal to Pope, but it did produce a large number of
important writers and did serve as a transition period from concentration on society as the preserver of the
best in humanity to concentration on the nobility and potential of the individual. The beautiful city of Bath
was built in the classical style, and the Adam brothers designed and built new streets and squares in
Edinburgh. Advances were made in the art of writing history because men had come to believe with Pope
that the “proper study of mankind is man.” Shaftesbury’s doctrine of humanity’s natural goodness coupled
with materialistic rationalism had led to optimistic political programs based on the...
Gothicism
In addition to the fertile soil found in humble, everyday life, poets found new material in the Middle Ages,
in castles and ruins and anything “Gothic.” The Frenchman Paul Henri Mallet and his work Northern
Antiquities (1770) did more than any other individual to set Europe ablaze with enthusiasm for ancient
Germanic mythology and the medieval manners and customs of the North. In England, Horace Walpole
built his monument to Gothicism, Strawberry Hill. Thomas Warton, the elder, wrote “A Runic Ode,” and
Thomas Warton, the younger, wrote three volumes on the history of English poetry from the twelfth to the
close of the sixteenth century (1774-1781). Pope earlier in the century had chronicled love pangs in an...
Ballads
Concurrent with the interest in medievalism came the reawakening interest in the ballad. Popular ballads in
the first half of the century include Henry Carey’s Sally in Our Alley, Gay’s ’Twas When the Seas Were
Roaring (1715) and the ballads in his The Beggar’s Opera (1728), and Henry Fielding’s Roast Beef of Old
England (1731). Even Swift’s two saints found broadside ballads plastered on the walls of the cottage of
Baucis and Philemon. Many of the ballad songs are narratives. Allan Ramsay, an important publisher of
ancient Scottish ballads, modernized and “improved” the texts. In America, many complaints against the
British took the form of ballads.
Considered a...
Primitivism
The same yearnings that the eighteenth century felt for native poetry and nature stimulated the glorification
of the “noble savage.” Particularly in the latter half of the century, writers expressed longing for a “return to
Nature” and brought primitivism into vogue. They contrasted the innocent child of the wilderness with the
selfish adult of artificial civilization. Urban life and civilization departed from the “natural.” Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, the greatest European supporter of the “Return to Nature,” believed that nature had originally
made people good and happy but that civilization had made them criminal and miserable. Poets such as
Cowper escaped to the countryside for tranquillity, and in those times nature...
Children’s poetry
The spread of education and the longing for innocence produced another new literary form, literature for
children. Before the eighteenth century, poets wrote about children, particularly about their deaths, in hopes
of parental patronage, but few poems were written for children. At the beginning of the century, Isaac Watts
wrote Divine and Moral Songs for Children (1715) and at the end of the century Blake wrote Songs of
Innocence and of Experience (1794) specifically for children. Blake did not condescend to children or
indulge in humorous play to amuse the adults who read to children. His verses are childlike but never
childish. Other writers for children include Philips and Prior. Philips, a writer of...
Hymns
Another new flowering in the eighteenth century was hymn writing. As more and more sects formed in
opposition to established churches, new music for worship had to be created. In the first part of the century,
Watts was one of the best and most scholarly of the Dissenting writers. His hymns, including “God our help
in ages past,” expressed the popular view that the universe displays the Almighty’s hand. With fresh and
independent critical ideas, Watts believed that the cultivation of faith can elevate poetry. Watts’s hymns and
others in the early part of the century tended to be “congregational” in point of view.
In Germany, pietism revived and left its traces in the sphere of religious poetry. The main...
Progress poems
The two best poets of the new belief in secular progress were Collins and Thomas Gray. Both accomplished
scholars, they expressed their poetic ideals of liberty and simplicity in historical surveys or “progress
poems.” Collins excelled in writing odes: His “Ode to Evening” is particularly beautiful in its delicate
“dying fall” of cadence. His “Ode Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746” has a delicate and pensive
melody. Emotional apostrophes fill Collins’s work, making it more exclamatory than reflective and making
it less warm and personal. He chiefly appeals with his curious, ornate fantasies and his creation of dim and
dreamlike effects.
Even though Gray and Collins resembled each other in...
(The entire section is 1,666 words.)
Toward Romanticism
The most significant event of the end of the eighteenth century was, of course, the French Revolution. In
German literature, it was regarded as a warning about the problem of liberty. In English literature, it kindled
enthusiasm in poets, but their celebratory poetry did not sparkle. Cowper and Burns saw in the revolution a
declaration of the worth of all people, a manifesto of the political rights of the people. Beyond this, the
revolution generated a millennial movement in English thought and life. Blake was the greatest of the
millennial prophets, imagining a day when a new Jerusalem would arise in England after the reconciliation
of Urizen (reason) with Los (imagination) and Luvah (passion).
The classical myths were...

Eighteenth Century Poetry Dominated by Alexander Pope

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Eighteenth Century Poetry Dominated by Alexander Pope

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

7/2/2019 English Poetry in the Eighteenth Century Analysis - eNotes.

The Dominance of Alexander Pope

(The entire section is 822 words.)

Epics and mock-epics

Poetry, patronage, and politics

Humor and satire

The nature of humankind

(The entire section is 629 words.)

Landscape and philosophical discourse

(The entire section is 184 words.)

(The entire section is 685 words.)

Sensibility and melancholy

(The entire section is 247 words.)

From society to the individual

(The entire section is 692 words.)

(The entire section is 353 words.)

(The entire section is 318 words.)

(The entire section is 149 words.)

(The entire section is 148 words.)

(The entire section is 403 words.)

Even though Gray and Collins resembled each other in...

(The entire section is 1,666 words.)

The classical myths were...

(The entire section is 317 words.)

You might also like