Poetry and punishment in the early works

Punishment was more physical, and more visible, in Pope's day than it is in ours. The pillory was still in use at various locations around London, as were public whippings. Eight times a year those condemned to death were taken from Newgate Prison to Tyburn to be hanged: crowds lined the route and gathered for the show. Crime and punishment spawned their own literature, and Pope's lifetime coincided with an explosion in crime-related writing of all kinds. “Proceedings” at the Old Bailey were published regularly from the 1680s. Trials and punishments were widely reported in the newspapers; criminal biography (in both documentary and fictional forms) flourished. On the other side, as it were, there was considerable professional crossover between law and writing: many writers were educated at the Inns of Court, including such notable friends of Pope as Congreve, Rowe, and Warburton. Pope was friendly with several lawyers; one of them was celebrated in “Presentation Verses to Nathaniel Pigott,” and another, William Murray, later the Earl of Mansfield, was the addressee of the Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated.

Owen Ruffhead, Pope's first official biographer and himself a barrister, declared that Pope intended his work as a “supplement to the public laws,” and the metaphorical “lash” of satire was regularly invoked as his model. But Pope's attitude to crime and the law was actually much more complex than this. In an early letter to Henry Cromwell (1 November 1708 [Corr, i, pp. 51-2]), Pope jokingly compared his entry into print to a public execution, and likened Tonson's Miscellanies to the regular collections of malefactors' lives put out by the Ordinary (Chaplain) of Newgate.

During much of the nineteenth century, readers viewed Pope as an incorrigibly “social” poet, the laureate of tea cups and trivial gossip. For a critic of the Romantic age, William Lisle Bowles, he ranked no higher than “the painter of external circumstances in artificial life; as Cowper paints a morning walk, and Pope a game of cards!” Today we see him as one who exposed the crass commercialism of the age, who anatomized political corruption by depicting figures of vice like the reptilian Sporus in the Epistle to Arbuthnot, and who gave us an early vision of a squalid Nighttown in The Dunciad. To the Victorians, the primarily urban focus of Pope's later works seemed an evasion of the poet's true duty, while to modern readers it appears a badge of his modernity. What neither position fully allows for is the depth of Pope's involvement in the natural world, a direct outcome of his boyhood and youth spent in the Berkshire countryside.

In this essay I shall try, first, to describe the literary and biographic elements which helped to form the “pastoral” basis of his early works. Only if we appreciate what was going on in the years he spent “in Fancy's Maze” can we understand the nature of his later achievement once he “stoop'd to Truth, and moraliz'd his song” (TE, iv, p. 120). The account Pope gave in his Epistle to Arbuthnot drips with irony:

Alexander Pope, eighteenth-century England's most prominent poet and his generation's most frequently portrayed celebrity, dominated the emergent literary marketplace as the first self-supporting, non-playwriting professional author (shrewd enough to rely on an aristocratic coterie of subscribers to get his start, yet savvy enough to supervise almost every aspect of the publication process), while fascinating his audience as a spectacle of deformity. Characterizing the life of a wit in the preface to the first published volume of his Works (1717) as “a warfare upon earth,” and complaining as a well-established poet and celebrity in his 1735 Epistle to Arbuthnot of “this long disease, my life,” which poetry and friendship served to ease, this protean master of the heroic couplet suffered a war between an exceptional mind and a body lambasted as “at once resemblance and disgrace” of humanity's “noble race.” Barely four and a half feet tall when grown, in Voltaire's words “protuberant before and behind” (current medical science attributes his deformity to childhood tuberculosis of the spine, otherwise known as Pott's disease, contracted from a wet nurse, while his contemporaries also considered trampling by a cow and excessive study as potential causes), socially disenfranchized for his Catholicism, Pope transformed his marginality into a source of creative self-reflection, self-possession, and self-legitimation. His life's work was the ultimate couplet of deformity and poetic form.

The “other” has become a prominent theme in literary critical analysis. At the social and political level, its currency has been the result of two significant social and political events in the twentieth century: the clashes between colonizer and colonized in the 1940s and 50s, and the development of the new feminist movement in the 1970s. The rise of post-colonial studies and of feminist theory - the intellectual counterparts of these events - have profoundly influenced Anglo-American literary criticism of the late twentieth century. The “other” is the calling card of these critical paradigms. In relation to Western European literature, the concern with the “other” leads primarily to an attention to the representation of women or of indigenous or non-European peoples in literary texts. For instance, the passage on the “poor Indian” in the first epistle of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man stands out as an example of the status of native Americans in the early-eighteenth century imagination:

It would not be quite true to say that Pope has proved a poet for all the ages, if only because some late Victorians thought him safely dead and buried in terms of any active presence in the poetry of their day. Even then, however, Pope refused to lie down, and for the past three hundred years he has shown surprising resilience in the face of condescension, assumed indifference, or outright hostility. Recent generations of poets and critics have joined the scholars in helping to recover some of the ground he had lost. A look at his reputation as it stood 100, 200, and 300 years ago may help to make the point.

In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Pope had seen his career take off with a series of major poems: An Essay on Criticism, Windsor-Forest, The Rape of the Lock, and Eloisa to Abelard, which would all be packaged in the sumptuous collection of the poet's Works in 1717. Scarcely anyone without a personal grudge then doubted that a poet of the highest excellence had arrived on the scene - in the view of most dispassionate observers, the greatest English writer since Milton and Dryden in the late seventeenth century. A hundred years later, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, his position had undergone serious challenge, but he remained a potent influence for Wordsworth, and earned the vehement support of Byron:

Introduction

Pope's absorption in the book trade is remarkable. Always fascinated by typography, he was commenting on trade practices and condemning some of them by the time he was thirty. But paradoxically the tricks he observed, particularly author and bookseller anonymity, serialization, reissues, and manipulation of formats, all fed positively into the second half of his career, in which he was, in the modern sense, his own publisher, financing and designing his own books, and supervising their distribution. Pope made a lot of money from the publication of his own work - around £10,000.00 from his translations of Homer alone - but he also made the book trade his subject and its resources a means of self-expression. In ways that are characteristic of him, he seems at times the most unequivocal of insiders, with a detailed knowledge of contracting, designing, advertising, and distribution, while at other times, he is merely the bibliographer or book historian, wryly recording curious practices and displaying them for our disapproval. Complex social pressures lie behind these stances - a growing public sphere in which reputations were to be earned and maintained, the possibilities of large financial rewards for writing, the slow replacement of patronage by the market - and Pope undoubtedly regarded his own times and their changes as hostile to his success. Ironically, this very awareness became integral to his achievement.

When Alexander Pope recounts the onslaught of impecunious writers who seek him out at Twickenham, he describes their typical “modest wish” for “My Friendship, and a Prologue, and ten Pound” (TE, iv, p. 99). That triad of desires captures the basic types of currency in which Pope regularly traded: professional friendship, literary commodities or words, and, of course, money. Pope dwells on these currencies in Epistle to Arbuthnot (1735) because they define the symbolic system of investment and exchange that shapes his personal and professional relationships, his poetic career, and his financial activities. These three currencies are deeply imbricated and mutually reinforcing: as Pope's professional success increased, aided in part by an ad hoc system of patronage and his savvy determination to control the publication of his texts, his financial gains outstripped those of most of his poetic contemporaries. From the earliest stages of his career, Pope realized the value of ongoing relationships (sometimes collaborative, sometime adversarial) with his colleagues in the print trade: “A mutual commerce makes Poetry flourish” (Corr, i, p. 20). By skillfully deploying printed rejoinders, financial assistance, or well-placed advice, he contributed to his consistent “fame” in the marketplace and enhanced his ability to control the production and distribution of his own texts (and the attendant socio-poetic image). That control - which ranged from holding the copyrights to his poems to determining the quality of ink and paper and the appearance of the text on the page - simultaneously enriched Pope's poetic persona and his financial accounts.

Pope had a key role in the development and the interpretation of the landscape garden and the country-house estate in the eighteenth century. He has been seen as one of the last Renaissance humanists for whom both the garden and all Nature were speaking pictures, emblems which the humanist used to convey moral meanings. He has been interpreted also as one of the first Romantics, a fundamental influence on the development of the late eighteenth-century picturesque garden. His association with the landed aristocracy led him to co-operate with them in the planning of their demesnes and he made of his own villa and garden at Twickenham, near London, an emblem of his personal principles, horticultural, ethical, and political. His expression of these principles in his writings, when read empathetically, set the highest standards of taste and morality for his society. On the other hand, the whole landscape movement with which he is associated, when read unsympathetically, has been criticized as exploitative and a mystification of power. Seen from this viewpoint, Pope was a lackey of the rich and an apologist for the dark side of British imperialism.

Such diversity of interpretation is indicative of the complexity of the subject and the variation which comes from changing one's viewpoint. The tensions between these readings suggest, perhaps, that there may have been similar tensions (ambiguities, even contradictions) in Pope's personal positions in relation to his society. This is a possibility which will be developed in this essay. It will be claimed, ultimately, that there emerges from these tensions an element of visionary radicalism in Pope's iconology which transcends the limitations of the historical moment.

Attending closely to how Alexander Pope's versification - how he makes verses - lets us hear the distinctive voices of his poems. Careful listening pays rich rewards. Without it we may have a hard time getting beyond a first impression, like that of Thomas Berger's young protagonist in Little Big Man, Jack Crabb. Having spent his childhood among the Cheyenne Indians, Jack is adopted by a clergyman whose high-minded wife decides to civilize him by reading Pope to or perhaps at him:

This essay attempts to help readers new to Pope hear in his work something more than mechanical monotony and dogmatic pronouncements.

The first step to appreciating Pope's voice is to think of the word as plural: Pope wrote in many voices. He shared with his age a sense of decorum, which does not necessarily mean politeness but rather the idea that different occasions call for different kinds of behavior. Literary decorum means that various styles are appropriate for various kinds of poetry, just as dress differs according to setting:

The question of Pope's relationship to the Greek and Roman classics once was thought clear: he was deeply indebted to them, generally reflected their values, and often imitated them to show modern inadequacy. He was variously called “neoclassical” and “Augustan” in order to suggest that indebtedness. He exemplified and moved within a world of polished, polite poetry and civilized discourse among other civilized neoclassical Augustans. To be “Augustan” was a sign of approbation.

Much of this vision was seen through spectacles regularly prescribed from about the later nineteenth to the later twentieth century. One distinguished American scholar argues that the “true Augustans” saw in “Horace's [65 BC-8 BC] poetry a concentrated image of a life and civilization to which they more or less consciously aspired.” A subsequent distinguished British scholar adds that Pope's imitations recommend “the Augustan ideal in its civilized splendour.” More recently, Pope has begun to be seen surely as indebted to admired classical sources, but also skeptical regarding many of their values and selective in what he chose to respect. So far from being politely “Augustan,” he often was intentionally rude, crude, vulgar, and angry. For example, in what was called “This filthy Simile, this beastly Line” he characterized court politicians as Westphalian hogs feeding off one another's excrement (TE, iv, p. 323; Epilogue to the Satires [1738], ii, 181). He also portrayed corrupt exhibitionist London booksellers engaged in a public urinating contest, in which a well-endowed syphilitic victor carries off a female writer of pornography as his prize so that they can produce infectious books (TE, v, pp. 303-4). In many cases, Pope and his contemporaries berated Augustus Caesar (63 BC-AD 14) and denigrated his supportive poets. The clichés no longer work as a reasonable version of eighteenth-century literary history.

Alexander Pope's body, as most readers know, was severely deformed. Although he was trampled by a cow as a child of eight in a Berkshire field, as his sister reported (Anecdotes, i, pp. 3-4), his deformity sprang from an incurable tuberculosis of the spine, later called Pott's Disease, which produces curvature of the spine and a markedly humped back. By the time he entered puberty, he began to shrink rather than grow tall, eventually dwindling to no more than four and a half feet tall as an adult, and the fact that one leg was significantly shorter than the other caused him to develop his hump back. The protrusion was painful as well as noticeable, and in time forced him to walk with a stick (cane) and to wear specially fitted shoes. The accident he sustained as a child may also have contributed to genital difficulties he suffered from throughout his life: difficulty in urinating, painful testicles, and urethral pain so bad that he begged the surgeons for frequent operations to ease it. He also suffered from chronically poor eyesight, occasionally so acute that his parents and early doctors erroneously attributed his curved spine and humped back to excessive reading that wrecked his eyes. Voltaire epitomized him as “protuberant before and behind” and Pope himself later claimed that his “Crazy Constitution ” had amounted to “this long Disease, my Life.” He was prone to quipping, often disparagingly, about his miserable body which he likened to vermin and other small animals (especially to spiders and toads), and on one such occasion he referred to himself anonymously as “a lively little Creature, with long Arms and Legs: a Spider is no ill Emblem of him.”

We should not underestimate the effect on Pope's original poetry of the poet's translating virtually all of Homer. Pope had been thinking about the problems involved in translating Homer since at least his early twenties. Writing in 1708 to his friend Ralph Bridges, he mentions Homer's seemingly paradoxical combination of copious diction and noble simplicity. “The Episode of Sarpedon,” translated from Iliadxii and xvi, was published the following year. Four years later he proposed to translate the entire poem, which Lintot began to publish in 1715, when the first volume of the projected complete translation, containing Books i-iv, appeared. The final volume of the first edition was published in 1720. The Odyssey translation began appearing in 1725 and was completed the following year. This represents some sixteen years of a young poet's life - from the ages of twenty-one through thirty-seven - spent with Homer, as Pope repeatedly turned over the Greek lines in his head, struggled with how to translate them into readable and elegant English, and lived with the Homeric commentators and the Homeric characters.

Inroduction

It is long since Pope has been seen as reclining in the bosom of a complacent eighteenth-century establishment. In the middle and later decades of the last century a particular focus was directed on to the Pope of 1729-43 as a poet of political opposition. Pope's target was here seen as the long premiership of Sir Robert Walpole and the generally unenlightened attitudes of King George I and King George II. Then, towards the end of the last century, a sharper focus was directed on to the less overtly political implications of some of Pope's earlier works, notably Windsor-Forest and The Rape of the Lock, with the result that a concern with, probably a sympathy with, Jacobite attitudes was detected. (Jacobites were those who held that the exiled royal line of the Stuarts, rather than the incumbent line of the Hanoverians, were the true kings of Britain.) One consequence of this later work was to suggest an ideological substructure for Pope's more salient poetry of political opposition in the period 1729-43.

We have abundant discussion of the earlier phase in Pope's career. Whilst it is wrong to impute direct involvement in the Jacobite movement by association, it cannot be without significance that so many of the poet's closest friends among the Catholic gentry and nobility had extensive links to the leaders of the Rising in 1715/16, and several members of their families took an active part in the rebellion. More complex issues arise in the case of the Atterbury Plot, a decade later, and in the later phase when Pope became associated with the Patriot opposition to Robert Walpole in the 1730s.

That practice, truth and freedom are inseparable is axiomatic for liberationtheology.

The defining characteristic of liberation theology is that it is a lived praxis insolidarity with the poor and oppressed. It is defined as theology, and not simplyas an ethical or pragmatic stance, in that the key question concerns the living ofa specifically Christian life, and the story of the Bible isbrought into dialogue with the story of life, the story of the world. Freedom isthe goal towards which practice is oriented. In this committed and value-ladenpractice, truth will be made manifest; the true character of the ideologicallydistorted structures of this world will be unmasked; and, for the truth ofGod’s fullness of life for all humanity, men and women will live anddie.

The commitment and practice of liberation theology requires three moments: themoment of praxis, the moment of reflection on praxis, and the moment of return toa renewed praxis. It begins and ends in praxis. Given this primacy, and the claimto a new way of doing theology founded in it, the question arises whether praxisis in itself epistemologically significant. Can we know through praxis? And if so,what can we know?

This question is significant not only for liberation theology, but for a widevariety of theologies of practice. The epistemological significance of practice isa question raised by the extensive contemporary use of the Pastoral Cycle, a modelof doing theology which begins in concrete experience and practice.