Alexander Pope
An Essay on Man
Contents:
- Alexander
Pope’s
biography
- The Rape of
the Locke
- An Essay on
Man
Alexander Pope’s biography
Alexander Pope (21 May 1688- 30 May 1744) is generally
regarded as the greatest English poet of the early eighteen
century, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of
Homer.
Pope was born in London to Alexander Pope, a linen merchant,
and Edith who were both Roman Catholics. Pope was taught to
read by his aunt and then sent to two Catholic schools, at
Twyford and Hyde Park Corner. From early childhood he
suffered numerous health problems, including Pott’s disease (a
form of tuberculosis affecting the spine) which deformed his body
and stunted his growth. He never grew beyond 1,37 m.
In 1700, his family moved to a small estate in Binfield, Berkshire.
With his formal education now at an end, Pope embarked on an
extensive campaign of reading. As he later remembered: ‘ In a few
years I had dipped into a great number of the English, French,
Italian, Latin, and Greek poets. This I did without any design but
that of pleasing myself, and got the languages by hunting after the
stories… rather than read the books to get the languages.’ His
favourite author was Homer.
First published in 1709 in a volume of Poetical Miscellanies by Jacob
Tonson, The Patorals brought instant fame to the twenty year old
Pope. They were followed by An Essay of Criticism (1711).
Around 1711, Pope made friends with John Gay, Jonathan Swift,
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. In 1712, Pope, Gay, Swift
and Thomas Parnell formed the Scriblerus Club. The aim of the club
was to satirise ignorance and pedantry in the form of the fictional
scholar Martinus Scriblerus. Pope’s major contribution to the club
would be Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728), a
parodic guide on how to write bad verse. The Rape of the Locke is
perhaps Pope’s most popular poem. It is a mock- heroic epic, written to
make fun of a high society quarrel between Arabella Fermor and Lord
Petre, who had snipped a lock of hair from her head without her
permission.
The climax of Pope’s early career was the publication of his Works in
1717.
Pope had been fascinated by Homer since childhood. In 1713, he
announced plans to publish a translation of Homer’s Iliad. The
commercial success of his translation made Pope the first English
poet who could live off the sales f his work alone, ‘indebted to no
prince or peer alive’, as he put it. His translation of the Iliad duly
appeared between 1715 and 1720. It was later acclaimed by Doctor
Johnson as ‘a performance which no age or nation could hope to
equal’.
The money he made allowed Pope to move to a villa at Twickenham
in 1719, where he would create a famous grotto and gardens.
Encouraged by the very favourable reception of the Iliad, Pope
translated the Odyssey. The translation appeared in 1725-1726. In
this period Pope also brought out an edition of Shakespeare, which
silently ‘regularised’ his meter and rewrote his verse in several places.
Lewis Theobald and other scholars attacked Pope’s edition,
incurring Pope’s wrath and inspiring the first version of his satire The
Dunciad (1728).
In 1731, Pope published his ‘Epistle to Burlington’, on the subject
of architecture, the first of four poems which would later be grouped
under the title Moral Essays (1731-35). In the epistle, Pope
ridiculed the bad taste of the aristocrat ‘Timon’.
Inspired by Bolingbroke’s philosophical ideas, Pope wrote An
Essay on Man (1733-4). He published the first part anonymously,
in a cunning and successful ploy to win the praise from his fiercest
critics and enemies.
After 1738, Pope wrote little. His major work in these years was
revising and expanding his masterpiece The Dunciad. The complete
revision of the whole poem appeared in 1743. By this time Pope’s
health was failing and he died in his villa on May 30, 1744.
The Rape of the Locke
The Rape of the Locke is one of the most
famous English-language examples of the
mock-epic. Published in its first version in 1712,
when Pope was only 23 years old, the poem
served to forge his reputation as a poet and
remains his most frequently studied work. The
inspiration for the poem was an actual incident
among Pope's acquaintances in which Robert,
Lord Petre, cut off a lock of Arabella
Fermor's hair, and the young people's families
fell into strife as a result. John Caryll, another
member of this same circle of prominent Roman
Catholics, asked Pope to write a light poem
that would put the episode into a humorous
perspective and reconcile the two families. The
poem was originally published in a shorter
version, which Pope later revised. In this later
version he added the "machinery," the retinue
of supernaturals who influence the action as
well as the moral of the tale.
Plot
Belinda arises to prepare for the day's social activities after sleeping late. Her
guardian sylph, Ariel, warned her in a dream that some disaster will befall her, and
promises to protect her to the best of his abilities. Belinda takes little notice of
this oracle, however. After an elaborate ritual of dressing and primping, she
travels on the Thames River to Hampton Court Palace, an ancient royal
residence outside of London, where a group of wealthy young socialites are
gathering for a party. Among them is the Baron, who has already made up his
mind to steal a lock of Belinda's hair. He has risen early to perform and
elaborate set of prayers and sacrifices to promote success in this enterprise.
When the partygoers arrive at the palace, they enjoy a tense game of cards,
which Pope describes in mock-heroic terms as a battle. This is followed by a
round of coffee. Then the Baron takes up a pair of scissors and manages, on
the third try, to cut off the coveted lock of Belinda's hair. Belinda is furious.
Umbriel, a mischievous gnome, journeys down to the Cave of Spleen to procure
a sack of sighs and a flask of tears which he then bestows on the heroine to fan
the flames of her ire. Clarissa, who had aided the Baron in his crime, now urges
Belinda to give up her anger in favour of good humour and good sense, moral
qualities which will outlast her vanities. But Clarissa's moralizing falls on deaf
ears, and Belinda initiates a scuffle between the ladies and the gentlemen, in
which she attempts to recover the severed curl. The lock is lost in the confusion
of this mock battle, however; the poet consoles the bereft Belinda with the
suggestion that it has been taken up into the heavens and immortalized as a
constellation.
Analysis
The Rape of the Lock is a humorous indictment of the vanities and idleness of
18th-century high society. Basing his poem on a real incident among families of his
acquaintance, Pope intended his verses to cool hot tempers and to encourage his
friends to laugh at their own folly.
The poem is perhaps the most outstanding example in the English language of the
genre of mock-epic. The epic had long been considered one of the most serious of
literary forms; it had been applied, in the classical period, to the lofty subject matter
of love and war, and, more recently, by Milton, to the intricacies of the Christian
faith. The strategy of Pope's mock-epic is not to mock the form itself, but to mock
his society in its very failure to rise to epic standards, exposing its pettiness by
casting it against the grandeur of the traditional epic subjects and the bravery and
fortitude of epic heroes: Pope's mock-heroic treatment in The Rape of the Lock
underscores the ridiculousness of a society in which values have lost all proportion,
and the trivial is handled with the gravity and solemnity that ought to be accorded
to truly important issues. The society on display in this poem is one that fails to
distinguish between things that matter and things that do not. The poem mocks the
men it portrays by showing them as unworthy of a form that suited a more heroic
culture. Thus the mock-epic resembles the epic in that its central concerns are
serious and often moral, but the fact that the approach must now be satirical rather
than earnest is symptomatic of how far the culture has fallen.
Pope's use of the mock-epic genre is
intricate and exhaustive. The Rape of
the Lock is a poem in which every
element of the contemporary scene
conjures up some image from epic
tradition or the classical world view, and
the pieces are wrought together with a
cleverness and expertise that makes
the poem surprising and delightful.
Pope's transformations are numerous,
striking, and loaded with moral
implications. The great battles of epic
become bouts of gambling and
flirtatious tiffs. The great, if capricious,
Greek and Roman gods are converted
into a relatively undifferentiated army
of basically ineffectual sprites.
Cosmetics, clothing, and jewellery
substitute for armour and weapons,
and the rituals of religious sacrifice are
transplanted to the dressing room and
the altar of love.
An Essay on Man
An enormous emphasis was placed on the ability to think and reason during the
Enlightenment. People during this era thought and reasoned about a variety of
topics. Some people concerned themselves with the issue of God, which
consequently caused many to question the church. Others were concerned with the
organization of the Universe, and man’s place within that Universe. The first
epistle of Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man” can be considered an articulation of
the Enlightenment because it encompasses three major concerns of the people
during the Enlightenment. Pope addresses man’s ability to reason and think for
himself, he questions the church and the nature of Christianity, and he also
speculates about man’s place in the world, as apart of the great chain of life.
The ability to reason was the central focus of the Enlightenment also denoted
The Age of Reason. Pope begins epistle one by appealing to the reason of his
audience. He writes, “Together let us beat this ample field, / Try to open, what
the covert yield!” Pope encourages his audience to use the reason they have been
given, to examine those things that have been advised against. To reason about
those issues which have been kept in secrecy. He then goes on to write “say first,
of God above, or man below, / What can we reason, but from what we know?”
Pope again is addressing the ability of his audience to reason. He is trying to bring
them into the 18th century, asking them to look for evidence in the knowledge they
receive, rather then allowing the church to spoon-feed them all of their knowledge.
During the Enlightenment, people began to question the church for the first
time. Pope exemplifies this when he writes, “no Christians thirst for gold.” Pope
subtly questions the nature of Christianity and Christians by exposing their own
sinful desire for material goods. His words are simple, but they say a lot. By
acknowledging that these Christians sin, and “thirst for gold,” he asks then why a
man is looked down upon if they do not aspire to be Christian, since Christians
have a sinful nature just like that of every other man. Pope was not alone in
questioning Christianity and the church. David Hume writes, “the Truth of
Christian Religion is less than the Evidence for the Truth of our Senses…”
Many writers during the Enlightenment not only questioned Christianity, but
also the church in general. Epistle one of Pope’s “Essay on Man,” is merely one
of the pieces of literature during the 18th century, which voices its ideas on the
subject.
Another issue that Pope, as well as his readers concerned themselves with
during the Enlightenment, was man’s place within the Universe. Pope addresses
this issue when he writes, “vast chain of being! which from God began, / Natures
ethereal, human, angel, man…” Pope expresses his opinion that man’s place in the
Universe, is within “Nature’s chain.” Therefore, man is simply a link within that
chain. Pope’s idea that there is this chain or structure to the Universe, is
representative of the belief by many Enlightenment thinkers, that there is a
“best” way to structure things. During the Enlightenment everything was being
organized, and classified. From the structure of society, to the structure of the
Universe, there existed a common belief that organization was key to producing
the “best” of anything.
The Great Chain of Being
The Great Chain of Being or scala naturae is a classical and western medieval
conception of the order of the universe, whose chief characteristic is a strict
hierarchical system.
It is a conception of the world's structure that was accepted, and unquestioned, by
most educated men from the time of Lucretius until the Copernican revolution .
The Chain of Being is composed of a great number of hierarchal links, from the
most base and foundational elements up to the very highest perfection - in other
words, God, or the Prime Mover.
God, and beneath him the angels, both existing wholly in spirit form, sit at the top
of the ladder. Earthly flesh is fallible and ever-changing: mutable. Spirit, however,
is unchanging and permanent. This sense of permanence is crucial to
understanding this conception of reality. One does not abandon one's place in the
chain; it is not only unthinkable, but generally impossible. (One exception might be
in the realm of alchemy, where alchemists attempted to transmute base elements,
such as lead, into higher elements, either silver, or more often, gold- the highest
element.)
In the natural order, earth (rock) is at the bottom of the chain; these elements
possess only the attribute of existence. Moving on up the chain, each succeeding
link contains the positive attributes of the previous link, and adds (at least) one
other. Rocks, as above, possess only existence; the next link up, plants, possess life
and existence. Beasts add not only motion, but appetite as well.
Man is a special instance in
this conception. He is both
mortal flesh, as those below
him, and also spirit. In this
dichotomy, the struggle
between flesh and spirit
becomes a moral one. The way
of the spirit is higher, more
noble; it brings one closer to
God. The desires of the flesh
drag one down. The Christian
fall of Lucifer is especially
terrible, because that angel is
wholly spirit, who yet defies
God, the ultimate perfection.