Brief History of Alexander Pope's Criticism
"In death as in life Pope has been the centre of a storm of controversy. His reputation has been fought over repeatedly, and with passion, for he is too big a poet to be quietly ignored."" always
When Pope died in 1744 he was a national figure. He was acknowleged by his contemporaries as the first poet of the age. But some critics led by personal animosity or party interest, tried to pretend that Pope was no more than a malignant libeller. However, his preeminence as poet was allowed by most people who took an interest in literature.
From his earliest years informed criticism had professed itself dazzled by his brilliance: Addison, Wycherley, and the Earl of the youthful g Mulgrave had signified approval of the youthfu youthful genius. In subsequent years of his life, Pope made many enemies, and thus was the target of a perpetual fusillade of hostile criticism. But such criticism was always directed not against his poetry but against his person. This state of warfare persisted in the year immediately following his death.
By 1781, when Johnson published his Life of Pope, the tables had turned. Two views of Pope's poetry on genuinely literary grounds could be viewed then. In 1756 Joseph Warton had published his Essay on Pope and declared that Pope lacked 'imagination'. For Warton the word 'imagination' meant originality, enthusiasm, sublimity, the intangible poetic fury. In his opinion satirical and didactic poetry is somehow less imaginative, and so less poetical than lyrical poetry. He was influenced in his critical precepts by Longinus' theory of 'Sublime' and its interpretation by Boileau. Warton's criticism made it clear that in the second half of the 18th century two sets of critical values existed simultaneously. Johnson typified one and Warton the other. 'Johnson saw Pope as the complete poet, Warton saw him as the complete master of an inferior kind of poetry.'
In Warton's criticism the seeds of the attitude that came to dominate the nineteenth century had already been sown. And it was natural that the poets and critics of the Romantic Revival should react strongly against the literary values of the eighteenth century. At the heart of this reaction was a new theory of the imagination and hence of the nature of poetry itself. Henceforward, the imagination was to 'dissolve, diffuse, and dissipate in order to recreate'; it was to 'idealise and to unify' rather than to:
This new view of the imagination, of the nature of poetry, this new criticism meant a new view of the poet. The proper study of the poet was obviously no longer seen in this normal environment; it was to be 'the essential passions of the heart.' In the sweep of Go Back to Nature, urban life was a subject that was just not sublime or profound or moving enough to be poetry.
Hence Wordsworth doubted whether personal satire could be poetry at all; Coleridge, by implication, reckoned Pope deficient in true poetic imagination and complained that he wrote about men in an artificial state of society. For Hazlitt, Pope was the poet of art, not of nature; he was a wit, a critic, and to be this was to be less than a poet in the Romantic sense of the word. All these Romantic critics, except Wordsworth, criticised Pope with serious reservations. Hazlitt said that Pope 'must have been a great writer of some sort'. He acknowledged the greatness of Pope's mock-heroic and complimentary verse. Coleridge, too, recognised Pope's faultless position and choice of words.
Others went further. Byron admired him greatly. He made a strong claim for him as 'an ethical poet' and stressed the variety of his excellence and the vivacity of his imagery. De Quincey drew attention to Pope's impassioned thinking, powerful description, pathetic reflection, and brilliant narration. Campbell in Specimens of the British Poets (1819) recognised Pope's 'moral elegance', and denied a necessary opposition between art and nature and pointed out that poetry deepens our interest in social existence. He thus refused to recognise the romantic implication that there is a higher and a lower kind of poetry.
The most remarkable feature of Romantic Criticism on Pope was that it was literary criticism; it was about Pope's poetry, not about his personality. But most of the criticism of Pope in the nineteenth century came from scholars who had undertaken editions of his works. A large part of their endeavour was biographical and elucidatory information relevant to the poems. Their condemnations were fortified by the Romantic belief. The most influential achievements were the massive edition of Elwin and Courthop (1871-80), Matthew Arnold's remarks in his essay, The Study of Poetry (1880), and Leslie Stephen's biography of the poet (1880). They read Pope with moral and aesthetic blinkers on.
In the twentieth century a more sympathetic view of Pope has been visible largely after 1918, since poetry and criticism have broken free of the limitations of nineteenth-century romanticism. Critics like J.W.Mackail and Lytton Strachey clearly enjoyed Pope much more than Arnold had done. The editors of Twickenham Edition came to Pope free from the disabling belief that satire is an inferior kind of poetry and prepared to treat him as they would treat any other poet. Other attempts at Pope's glorification are those of Dr. F.R.Leavis and Wilson Knight.
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