"Alexander Pope: A Literary Life" by Felicity Rosslyn

Alexander Pope was a hugely successful poet, the second most quoted author after Shakespeare (“A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing."; “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread”; “To Err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine”.) Despite a humble background and a childhood disease which left him a hunchbacked dwarf, rarely in good health, he became a leading member of London's literary society in a world where one's pedigree was hugely important. His translations of Homer and his witty satires earned him a fortune. And yet today he seems overlooked. There a few biographies; this one was originally published in 1990.

The current edition, from Odyssey Press, was poorly presented and had all the appearance of being independently published, with minimal care, perhaps from a PhD thesis.

I was a little disappointed that Rosslyn quoted so much from Pope's work. I had hoped to understand more about the interaction between Pope's life and his work. But where she analyses what Pope did, Rosslyn is very good. She shows that he viewed the poetry of Homer and the classical Roman poets as the pinnacle of achievement and suggests that he sought to emulate them (even to the extent of 'improving' Shakespeare by “regularising the scansion, improving the punctuation, and dividing the scenes.” (Ch 4). His forensic analysis of classical poetry enabled him to craft elegant and witty verses: “It was Pope who uncovered the real secret of epic ‘machinery’: the gods must both be involved in, and detached from, the world of men - detached by force of their immortality, but involved by their identification with human greatness.” (Ch 2) As Pope himself said: “True Ease in Writing comes from Art not Chance,/ As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.”

The problem is that this can produce the appearance of manufactured verse. Pope's work consists almost entirely of end-stopped heroic couplets which, for all its polished perfection, becomes tedious. It may be great for satire and to express insightful maxims but it seems desperately unsuitable for conveying emotion. It feels over-controlled and lacks passion.

I suspect that Pope, a sickly child and disabled adult, without family connections, who needed to make his living through his pen, living in a Georgian world where life was precarious, in unpoliced cities or in rural areas always vulnerable to crop failure and famine, where life could be snuffed out in a few days through an infection, needed and longed for the suggestion of security found in order and elegance and harmony. This biography might have been better had I not been lieft to infer this for myself.

Pope's poetry:

• “Some judge of Authors’ Names, not Works, and then/ Nor praise nor blame the Writings, but the Men.”
• “Some praise at Morning what they blame at Night;/ But always think the last Opinion right.”
• “We think our Fathers Fools, so wise we grow;/ Our wiser Sons, no doubt, will think us so.”

Selected quotes:

• “Pope’s Pastorals, then, are exquisitely musical celebrations of the lives of shepherds, whose pious, candid minds have never been touched by the anxiety of ringworm.” (Ch 1)
• “What the hero earns by action, the contemporary heroine must earn by inaction, under the most tempting possible circumstances. She must withhold herself from all the opportunities presented by the bills and masquerades at which her beauty is placed on show, and resist not only the tempter without, but the tempter within.” (Ch 2)
• “The passionate desire of suffering to articulate its pain.” (Ch 2)
• “It was Homer who peopled western literature with its stock characters, its eloquent heroes, vulnerable old men, loyal servants, flirts, and faithful or unfaithful wives; and gave it its major themes: the conflict between love and duty, war and peace, innocence and knowledge, meaning and meaninglessness.” (Ch 3)
• “The body is poignant proof that man is not a god, after the spirit, the proof that neither is he an animal, has fled.” (Ch 3)
• “Dignity in in language and station fetter Pope’s imagination as they never fettered Shakespeare’s.” (Ch 4)
• “Truths (however shining) do not automatically make poetry, and generalisations (however central) do not reach the mind save through closely-related particulars.” (Ch 5)
• “The philosopher only puts his salt on the tail of a disappearing argument.” (Ch 5)
• “The strength of the Romantic backlash against him is a tribute to how deeply his works did penetrate the eighteenth-century mind, leaving a younger generation no way to find its own voice save by wholesale repudiation.” (Conclusion)
• “Keats thought the end-stopped heroic couplet puerile.” (Appendix)

January 2023; 160 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God