The works of Pope in British English Literary.

     The literary works of Alexander Pope (1688-1744) may be separated into three groups, corresponding to the early, the middle and later period of his life. In the first, he wrote his Pastorals, Windsor Forest, Messiah, Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock. In the second he wrote his translations of Homer and in the third period, he wrote The Dunciad and the Epistles. His earlier poems are notable for their metrical smoothness and perfection and for certain passages of pleasant fancy. More notable is his Essay on Criticism written when he was twentyone. This work contains little original thought. It sums up the art of poetry as taught first by Horace, then by Boileau and the seventeenth century classicists. It is valuable as showing what is meant by the age of reason in poetry. It testifies to Pope's meticulous care for rules, Nature and wit in poetry. Pope's heroic couplet is here polished, incisive and antithetical. Windsor Forest has some fine passages and presents a great advance on the earlier Pastorals. But these are imitative of Roman writers like Virgil and Theocritus. They are stiff and artificial.

Alexander Pope

      In 1712 Pope published the first draft of The Rape of the Lock - a poem celebrating in light and spirited mockheroic verse the exploits of a certain Lord Petre who had cut a lock from the hair of the beautiful Arabella Fermor. Pope here had a subject which suited him exactly, because it evoked fancy without challenging imagination. We may agree with Dr. Johnson that The Rape of the Lock is the most airy, most ingenious and the most delightful of all Pope's compositions". The poem is notable for it expresses the artificial life of the age - the life of cards parties, toilets, lapdogs, tea-drinking, snuff-taking and idle vanities. It marks the excellence of mock-heroic art. It has the epic devices of Invocation, supernatural agencies, epic battle, descent to the underground. There is maximum imitation of the epic. The contrast between the slight subject and the epic style produces the humour. The feud between two families is ridiculed and settled.


      The Translation of Homer's Iliad brought Pope both fame and money. The success of the book consisted in the fact that Pope interpreted Homer in the elegant artificial language of his time. Not only do his words follow literary fashions, but even the Homeric characters lose their strength and became men of the court. Mr. Bently rightly said, "it is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer". Pope translated also half of The Odyssey. These translations were, however, a daring thing for one knowing but little Greek and it was hardly less daring for one to choose the riming couplet as the equivalent of the Homeric Hexameter.


      Pope directed his next work The Dunciad (1728 and 1742 with the addition of a fourth book) against his rivals, It is an elaborate satire on the dunces - the bad poets, pedants and preterntious critics of Pope's day. The epic machinery was obviously suggested by Dryden's Mac Flecknoe, but the inspiration came from Pope's many quarrels with all sorts of people. His main target of attack was Theobald who criticised his edition of Shakespeare published in 1725. His many mistakes and cavalier treatment of the text were quickly seized upon by his entries, particularly by the Shakespearean scholar Theobald in Shakespeare Restored (1726). Pope dethroned Theobald in favour of Colley Cibber. In this poem, modelled on Dryden's Mac Fecknoe, Pope satirises the host of minor writers whose attacks made his life miserable. But the poem is not merely the settlement of old scores; Pope is concerned with the integrity of art for which he lived. It is charged with biting wit; it has vigour and variety of pace, but is spiteful and often coarse. An Essay on Man is a poem in four epistles in which Pope undertakes a detence of the moral evil in it. The work is, however, the influence of his friends and specially of Lord Bolingbroke. He had no natural leanings towards philosophy. As a result, the work is hopelessly contused and self contradictory. Other Moral Essays (1731-1735) are philosophical poems - To Lord Batlurst, Of the use of Riches, Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men, Of the Characters of Women.


      The best of Pope's later works (1733-1737) consists of his epistles and satires in imitation of Horace, in which he returns to the satiric and colloquial vein. In Epistles to Dr. Arbuthnot, he attacks many of his contemporaries - Hervey, Halifax, Theobald etc. He indulges in selflaudation. It is a Horatian satire because here he employs his triend Arbuthnot as adversary, but in its melicious attacks and moral indignation it is close to Juvenal. Prologue to the Satires better known as Epistles to Dr Arbuthnot contains brilliant portraits of Lord Hervey and Addison. His couplet here has all its old strength, together with a certain new ease and flexibility.


      Pope represents many essential qualities ot his age. He imitated the ancients and insisted on the rules of poetry thoroughly in accordance with the spirit of the age. Not only does he represent many of the opiniois of his generations regarding life and literature, but he possesses in an astonishing degree the polish and brilliance which his age valued so much. He is a marvellously clever and adroit literary craftsman and has perfected the neat, compact and epigrammatic style of writing which was the classical ideal of writing. But he lacks the imaginative power and depth of feeling without which great poetry is impossible. Hazlitt remarks He was not distinguished as a poet of lofty enthusiasm, or strong imagination with passionate sense of the beauties of nature and deep insight into the workings of huaian heart. But modern critics, chiefly Tillotson, Ker and Eliot have made a fresh appraisal of Pope's poetry. Tillotson points out that the function of poetry is not simply to feed the imagination and cater for the highest sensibility. Eliot further says: "Pope makes poetry out of the most polished drawing room manners". It is from this point of view the point of view of perfect craftmanship and a clear, intelligible, well written and yet telling manner of expression that Pope should be assessed as a poet. Modertn critics also point out, that some of his poems particularly his Pastorals and Windsor forest anticipated the romantic ideal of landscape painting and colourtul deseriptions.