An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot

An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot

 

Introduction  :

Pope,Alexander

Pope ,Alexander ( 1688 -1744 ) ,English poet ,translator , and critic . A celebrity not only in fact but also by profession , Alexander Pope was the unmatched superstar of  English neoclassical literature and arguably the first author in England to make his living exclusively through literary talent .During a comparatively short life focused on literary and cultural activities , Pope alternately defined , improved ,invented , satirized , critiqued  and reformed the genres and conventions of early - eighteenth -century British verse .

Born in 1688 amidst a  " Glorious Revolution " that put an end to the absolutist claims of Stuart monarchs and set Britain on a course for a constitutional if not altogether  secular government , Pope's life was characterized by the contradictions of new gentility and chastised affluence . Despite their urban origins and their mercantile vocation ,pope and his forebears drifted in Tory, royalist circles ; despite physical deformity and entrenchment in the upper middle classes l,pope affected the stylish , rakish ways of high life ; despite profiting handsomely from his publications and living like a conforming country squire on his suburban Twickenham estate , pope persisted in Catholicism ( enduring heavy economic and political political sanctions ) and enjoyed provoking persecution from an officialdom the was also hi audience and customer . The story of pope's meteoric rise - from the publication of his (1709) at the age of twenty through the runaway success of his versified critical treatise , The Essay  on Criticism (1711) , at twenty - three through his best - selling translations of Homer (1715-1726) through his unlikely versified philosophical hit , an Essay on Man ( 1733 - 1734 ) , and on through his snarling but astonishingly successful Dunciad ( 1743 ) - may read  like the contrived biography of some twentieth -century movie idol , but  it also point up pope's lucky historical position at a moment when an enlarged readership and an expanding urban culture were transforming the " literary career " from a private preserve was this new idiom of  the public  writer that Pope could maintain influential  friends across the political and cultural spectrum,from the conservative Jonathan Swift to the snappy Joseph Addison and from Richard Boyle , the Whiggish earl of Burlington , to Tory movers -and -shakers such as Robert Harley ,earl of Oxford and Henry St .John ,Viscount Bolingbroke .

Pope routinely presents himself as a conservative spokesman (and satirist for sound common sense and as a sturdy pillar of English classicism. His works , however ,are emphatically neoclassical , They stress what the period called "imitation ," a speculative ,psychological ,and altogether modern attempt to write "as if " one were an ancient author who happened to be living and writing in Augustan London . " Wit " , ' genius ," "grace ," and other eighteenth - century literary values vie for hegemony with assorted classical " rules ." Pope's works advocate experimentation and adaptation, applying punitively classical norms to eighteen- century contexts ,topics ,and genres . Pope's early Pastorals (1709) apply Virgilian techniques to English  landscapes to produce a modern  Georgics . An Essay on Criticism (1711) fuses contemporary  mockery (as practiced by John Dryden , John Philips , Samuel Garth ,and John Gay ) with Homeric heroism to produce a ridiculous mock - heroic " epic " about domestic adventures in the boudoir . Not  unlike the Rape is Windsor forest (1713 ) , a more sober but not less historically mixed attempt to produced an epic story of the  British  Monarchy , an epic that some what  preposterously culminates in the coronation of Queen Anne .

Pope's later works preserve his commitment ot this unabashedly trans historical classicism while also negotiating between the differing  demands of moral .satiric ,and heroical writing ,three strands that intertwine  but never completely braid in Pope's increasingly tense later verse ,The Essay on Man       ( 1733 - 1734) flutters nervously if brilliantly between versified popularization of philosophical optimism (as preached by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and other s) and broad satiric indictments of human shortsightedness .several verse essays and epistles imitation of Horace , collectively known as the Moral Essays (1733 -1738 ) ,along with the companion An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot ( 1735) , tackle a range of philosophical topics ,from architectural aesthetics to the character of women , in a sometimes theatrical , sometimes compassionate, sometimes deliberative , generally satiric
 pope's last large work . The Dunciad (1743) , re - issue and extension of his earlier Dunciad variorum (1729) ,deploys crashingly gigantic heroic couplets to record ,judge , and satirize a  veritable encyclopedia of " dunces ," poetasters ,and seekers after literary fame who , who in Pope's mind ,have succeeded only in sucking the life out of neoclassicism .

In addition to his poetic offerings , pope made substantial contributions to literary criticism ( mostly through the seemingly simple but always subtle witticisms in An Essay on Criticism (1711) , to the these of bibliography and textual studies (through his not always competent production of an edition editors ,) and to the rise of the private epistle as a literary form ( through his audacious publication of his own correspondence (1735) , Pope was a Major figure in the history of the print  culture and of the publishing industry through his lively interactions with eighteenth - century publishing magnates such as Jacob tonson , Bernard Lin tot ,and the scandalous Edmund Curll . Pope's Opinions on naturalistic landscape gardening are definitive for their period . These and may other contribution mark him as a quintessential if not always representative figure in early eighteenth - century English culture .