Why did Alexander Pope write satires?

             Was it, then, personal spite, the vindictiveness of wounded vanity, as some critics suggest, or was it, as he professed himself, "the thought that he had now some opportunity of doing 'good', that moved Pope to write the 'Dunciad'?" The truth probably lies between the two views. Both motives may have operated, as well as third not so obvious-an unscrupulous love of fun; and delight in the creations of a humorous imagination. "Certainly to represent the 'Dunciad' as the outcome of mere personal spite is to give an exaggerated idea of the malignity of Pope's disposition, and a wrong impression of his character. He was not a morose, savage, indignant satirist, but airy and graceful in his malice, writing more in fun than in anger; revengeful perhaps, and excessively sensitive, but restored to good humour, as he thought over his wrongs by the ludicrous conceptions with which he invested his adversaries.....He loved his own comic fancies more than he hated his enemies. His fun at the expense of his victims was so far cruel that he was quite regardless of their sufferings, probably enjoyed them but it was an impish and spritelike cruelty, against which we cannot feel any real indignation, because it is substantially harmless, while its ingenious antics never fail to amuse." (William Minto).

               The first impression of Pope is of a satirist visiting the blame for his many infirmities and privations on the whole of society, and finding in his habitual metre an instrument dedicated to his vindictiveness. It is indisputable, indeed, that he commonly used criticism as a hangman's noose. But in fine, its chequered nature like his, a spring of tenderness is hardly to be expected. 

               We should also take into account, in this connection, Pope's physical constitution. From the day of his birth, Pope was weak and sickly in body; and the extreme sensibility of his nerves, the feebleness of his digestive organs, and the general fragility of his constitution, made his life, in his own phrase, a long disease. In boyhood he nearly sank under the influence of an uncontrollable hypochondria; such indulgences of town life as he afterwards permitted himself had speedily to be relinquished; in middle age he was dependent for ordinary comfort on the constant care of women. He was bald and deformed and almost a dwarf; his wearing-apparel had to be stiffened here and padded there, and his bodily wants were in consequence those of a child and habits those of a valetudinarian. If his treatment of his maladies was sometimes petulant and sometimes unwise, his friends might have spared posterity their anecdotes of these inevitable failings; nor need Dr. Johnson, of all men, have gravely recorded the fact that Pope 'loved too well to eat'. Naturally such a physical constitution highly affected the progress of his literary carcer. His frail machine was heavily over-engined; and the body reacted on the mind. Hence this mixture of feverish ambition and morbid timidity, the self-consciousness which he could rarely shake off, the dissatisfaction with even his own best work that would never let him leave it alone, the fastidiousness which was not kept under control by either his pride or his good sense. Thus a genius which in a healthier and happier nature might have expanded magnificently, failing to find outlet, festered inwardly, became toxic, poisoned his life, and infected his poetry.

                   Let us see what Louis Cazamian has to say about Pope's satires: "It is in 1733 that Bolingbroke advises his friend (Pope) to enliven his satire by a modernised adaptation of Horace. This method has already been used in France by Boileau and in England by Rochester, Oldham and Swift; Pope discovers in it a fit instrument for his verse, employs it with delightful effects. His ironic praise of George II, under the crushing name of 'Augustus', is a masterpiece. The aftertaste of parody so natural to classical art is here co-mingled with the intellectual pleasure which accrues from the continual sense of the relations, of the suggested and implicit analogies of differences, between the present and the past....Underneath disguised names, or recognisable initials, Pope has left us the picture-gallery of all his enmities and his hatreds."

                    We may mention in conclusion that Pope was different as a satirist from his teacher. Dryden regards his victim with an air of assured superiority and amused unconcern, but Pope shrieks out his unsavoury abuse as one who engages in a street fight on equal terms. He pitilessly uncovers the miseries of the obscure literary hack, starving in his garret; "he revels", says Thackeray, "in base descriptions of poor men's wants." poor "What paving stones" exclaims Taine, "to crush flies!"