The World Of Pope free essay sample

# 8217 ; s Satires Essay, Research Paper Despite the fact that Pope made most of his money from subscriptions to his Classical interlingual renditions, it is for his crisp and farinaceous sarcasms that he is best remembered and rightly revered. It is these that proved most entertaining and that, in literature, remained pertinent personal histories of societal history. During the Restoration and eighteenth Century sarcasm was a popular generic pick for those authors who wanted to go through remark on some issue of modern-day life whilst still practising their art. By definition sarcasm is # 338 ; the usage of ridicule, sarcasm, irony etc. in address or composing for the apparent intent of exposing and detering frailty or folly # 185 ; . Satire is so needfully didactic because its purpose is to realine its mark with a peculiar ideal from which the ironist believes it to hold strayed. This definition entirely though is non plenty to assist us specify and analyze why Pope delighted in this peculiar genre and why he used it as a vehicle for his political and moral beliefs. Satire is distinguishable from pure didacticism because of its ability to entertain ; Complaint and learning entirely # 8230 ; make non themselves make satire # 8230 ; sarcasm at all degrees must entertain every bit good as attempt to act upon behavior # 8230 ; ( by ) the joy of hearing a farce, a antic inversion of the existent universe. An inversion such as the kingdom of the Queen of Dullness in the Dunciad. Likewise Pope makes it clear that what he writes is non slander or parody, which is what litters the texts of the Grub Street authors, and which he attacks in The Dunciad with the lines, # 338 ; # 8221 ; Here strip, my kids! here at one time leap in, /Here turn out who best can dart through midst and thin, /And who the most in love of soil excel, # 185 ; ( II 275-7 ) . He makes his sentiment all the way on this in the lines ; There is non in the universe a greater Mistake than that which Fools are so disposed to fall into, and Knaves with good ground to promote, the mis interpretation of a Satyrist for a libeller ; wheras to a true satyrist nil is so abominable as a libeller, for the same ground as to a adult male genuinely Virtuous nil is so hateful as a dissembler. In 1725 Pope wrote to his eminent friend Swift, of his desire for his continuing poesy to be a, # 338 ; utile probe of my ain districts # 8230 ; .something domestic, tantrum for my ain state, and for my ain clip ; # 185 ; This definition could use to many types of plants and it is possible that he was mentioning to the heroic poem he had ever wanted to compose, merely as Virgil had written the Aeneid to transfuse a sense of nationalism in his people, or like Milton whose Paradise Lost explained the # 338 ; ways of God to work forces # 185 ; . However satires, in which he excelled, proved to be an first-class contemplation of the moral and societal climates of England in the 1730s. Rather than a purely historical history, a sarcasm is a good illustration of personal modern-day expe rience within any given historical period. It is evidently biased because it is imbued with sentiment, but it is this that gives us insight into a piece of modern-day life, so seeing how the larger societal and political intrigues turned the illumination cogs of the people.Pope was loath to go forth his place as a literary poet and bend to satire. In his Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot Pope claimed that he had resisted the aggravation of reacting to defame directed at him until the publication of the Dunciad, # 338 ; Full ten old ages slandered, did he once answer? # 185 ; ( l 374 ) . However throughout his full literary calling Pope was the topic of changeless literary onslaught. So much so that the organic structure of critical literature against him was sufficient to gain itself the name # 338 ; Popiana # 185 ; . These onslaughts were mostly in the signifier of booklets. Pamphleteering in the Eighteenth century was a inexpensive and effectual manner of making a big audience frequentl y with topical and controversial issues. Those apt Torahs that did be were seldom brought into drama over personal onslaughts and so the people who wrote them stood to gain financially without the hazard of legal action. Pamphleteering was one of the main employments of the Grub Street drudges. Grub Street was a topographic point, as Dr Johnson kindly put it # 338 ; much inhabited by authors of little histories, lexicons and impermanent poems. # 185 ; , and these dwellers were less sympathetically described by Richard Savage as # 338 ; of really low Parenthood, and without any Pretence of Merit, ( are ) draw a bead oning to the Rank of Gentlemen, # 185 ; . The possible causes for assailing Pope were many fold. Let us look at some of those grounds and some of Pope # 185 ; s satirical responses. Pope # 185 ; s early success and richness, in malice of malformations and irrespective of his irregular political and spiritual inclinations, was plenty in itself to gall those hack auth ors whose custodies were tied to the pens of their publishing houses. Pope had managed to crush the booksellers at their ain game, doing a luck from subscriptions to his Classical interlingual renditions, a thing which provided much fresh fish for the pamphleteers. Booklets dealt with inquiries from Pope # 185 ; s cognition of Greek, # 338 ; If I did non understand Greek, what of that ; I hope a Man may interpret a Grecian Writer without understanding Greek, # 185 ; , to criticisms over his continued fiscal return from revised editions in a line such as, # 338 ; And all your awards from Subscriptions grew: # 185 ; . All these kinds of onslaught were mostly fueled by the enviousness over the fact that Pope # 185 ; s interlingual renditions freed him from the kind of literary work that the drudges were destined to transport out. Their kind of support was brightly described by Richard Savage in his competently titled An Writer to be Lett of 1729. This is the narrative of a fabric ated Grub Street author Iscariot Hackney who works for the existent life bookseller Edmund Curll. His work under this adult male is described therefore ; # 338 ; Twas in his service that I wrote Obscenity and Profaneness, under the Names of Pope and Swift. Sometimes I was Mr.Joseph Gay, # 8230 ; ..I abridg # 185 ; vitamin D Histories and Travels, translated from the Gallic, what they neer wrote, and was expert at happening out new Titles for old Books # 8230 ; # 185 ; As the drudges saw it, Pope was an foreigner to this kind of indigence and was alternatively traveling in fecund political and literary circles backed by the support of many flush work forces such as Bolingbroke and Swift. The axiom that you had to be celebrated before you could be successful was one of which many drudges were cognizant and to them it would look that Pope was non roped in to this syrupy circle. As Johnson said in his Life of Richard Savage, the drudge Ate # 338 ; merely when he was invited to the tabular arraies of his familiarities, from which the beastliness of his frock frequently excluded him, # 185 ; . However what Johnson besides said of Savage # 185 ; s endowment did non needfully keep for all drudge authors, On a majority, in a basement, or in a glass-house among stealers and mendicants, was to be found the writer of The Wanderer, # 8230 ; the adult male whose comments on life might hold assisted the solon, # 8230 ; whose fluency might hold influenced senates # 8230 ; If this had been the instance Pope might hold been more sympathetic. Many drudges chose to believe that Pope was roasting poorness, with lines such as # 338 ; supperless # 185 ; hero, ( I 115 ) , and retorted, # 338 ; as if the privation of a Dinner made a adult male a Fool, or Riches and good Sence merely kept company. # 185 ; Alternatively it was his ain staunch rules sing the responsibility of the writer to distribute cultural tradition or to keep a critical mirror up to a pervert society a nd so on, that meant he abhorred the sort of inexpensive slander and titillation which characterized Grub Street news media. It was the fact that many of the authors in Grub Street should neer hold chosen a literary career in the first topographic point, and if we take the clip to look at how Colly Cibber, or Bayes in the Dunciad, became a supperless hero, we see that his pick of career is non made out of enthusiasm but out of necessity ; Swearing and supperless the Hero sate, Blasphem # 185 ; d the Gods, the Dice, and darn # 185 ; d his Fate. Then gnaw # 185 ; d his pen, so dart # 185 ; d it on the land, droping from thought to believe, a huge profound! Plung # 185 ; vitamin D for his sense, but found no underside at that place, Yet wrote and stagger # 185 ; vitamin D on, in mere desperation. ( I 115-20 ) Furthermore the drudges unfavorable judgment of Pope on this subject, and their failure to hold on his point, merely farther supports his belief that they had no construct o f good literature. The drudge author # 185 ; s inclination to plagiarise and to manufacture and his love of exaggeration were tactics that offended Pope # 185 ; s really raison vitamin D # 185 ; etre. The motivation for these tactics are nicely explained by the drudge author Ned Ward ; I borrowed my method from our Moorfield # 185 ; s magicians, who use their extreme art to set on a awful visage, that everybody that gazes on their exteriors may believe the Satan is in them ; and they doubtless find it a utile policy, for I have normally observed, that he thrives best, and has his door most crowded, that can look the most atrocious. The consequences were mostly empty promises of something antic and in themselves unsubstantial and weak. The formats in which these sorts of Hagiographas flourished saturated the literary universe doing it easy to vent personal colics in the imperativeness. All these things provided Pope with ample aggravation to compose antiphonal and frequently defe nsive sarcasm. The Dunciad is the best known and most comprehensive onslaught on these issues. The drudges cry # 338 ; The more we rail, the more bespatter, / # 185 ; Twill do our booklets sell the better. # 185 ; , was rightly answered by the clay catapulting scene in Book II of the Dunciad. Pope is likewise critical of the huge range of cheap pamphlets and periodicals that delighted in such scandal and gossip, which he again attacks in the Dunciad; Hence miscellanies spring, the weekly boast Of Curll?s chaste press, and Lintot?s rubric post: Hence hyming Tyburn?s elegaic lines, Hence Journals, Medleys, Merc?ries, Magazines: Sepulchrul lies, our holy walls to grace, (I 39-43) Pope further presses this point when, within the footnotes of the Dunciad he has his fictitious critic Martin Scriblerus comment on the word ?Magazines?; Miscellanies in prose and verse, in which at some times – new born nonsense is first taught to cry; at others, dead – born Dullness appears in a thousand shapes. These were thrown out weekly and monthly by every miserable scribbler; or picked up piece-meal and stolen from anybody, under the title of papers, essays, queries, verses, epigrams, riddles, etc. equally the disgrace of human wit, morality, and decency. The freque nt unauthorized use of an author?s name to sell literature in Grub Street was a charge answered by Pope in the line, ?Curll stretches after Gay, but Gay is gone,/He grasps an empty Joseph for a John:? (II 127-8), after Curll reportedly affixed the name J Gay to cheap texts in an attempt to pass them off as those of the respected John Gay. The preposterous antics of booksellers in this scene is a pertinent satirical attack on the immoral behavior of this financially driven occupation. A similar charge is answered in Pope?s A Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by poison, on the Body of Mr Edmund curll, Bookseller. In this Pope poisons Curll and then has him beg forgiveness for ?those indirect methods I have pursued in inventing new titles to old books, putting authors names to things they never saw,?. Pope?s attack of the hack writers in the Dunciad immortalized many otherwise unremarkable men, just as Swift had warned him it would. In his Life of Pope Johnson ask ed the critical question ?for whom did it concern to know that one or the other scribbler was a dunce. The fact was that although the naming names that went on was an integral part of the satirical machinations of the Dunciad, the names themselves were endlessly translatable because the criticism is not so much of individuals as of their principles and the types of writing to which those authors subscribe. The changes Pope made to the first edition of the Dunciad is testimony to this fact. For example book I line 256 of the Dunciad Variorum reads ?†God save King Tibbald!† Grubstreet allies roar†?, and focuses on Theobald, Popes real life enemy. The equivalent line in the final version of 1743 reads ?†God save King Colley!† Drury Lane replies:? (I 322). What we see then is that nearly fifteen years on Pope managed to alter the victim and setting of his satire without greatly changing the focus of his criticism – the Grub Street ideology. It is sig nificant to note that a writer such as Gissing in his New Grub Street in 1891 has dispensed with the procedure of alluding to real people because it supports the idea that Pope and Gissing, and any others who have addressed this same topic, were not solely interested in personal attack but in a critique of the Grub Street ethic. It is probably true to say that the source of these battles between Grub Street and Pope was an economic and classed based one. In the Dunciad Pope?s refers to ?that area?, (II 27). The place he means is the area surrounding St Mary le Strand, which was becoming known as a residency for people in the literary ?trade? such as Curll and Tonson. What Pope is actually alluding to is the gradual encroachment of poor quality literature, and what it stood for, into the bounds of Westminster, the seat of the aristocracy. As George Gissing was to say over two hundred years later, the problem that true literary artists had with hack writing was that it made ?a trade o f art!?. This is part of a bigger issue that fueled the fire of the pamphlet wars and Pope?s responsive satire: Pope?s political and religious bias and his social standing. As we have already discussed, the zeitgeist of Grub Street was commercial success. Given the sway of the government at this time, in many ways this was a political issue. From 1721 to 1742 Robert Walpole, as the First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, was effectively England?s first Prime Minister. As a Whig leader he opposed the succession of James Duke of York on the grounds that he was a Catholic. Moreover the Whigs represented the desires of the industrialists and resented the elitism of the aristocracy, represented by the Tories. Although we must avoid sweeping generalizations, it would be broadly true to say that most of Grub Street was Whig because of its practical and commercial nature, and that Pope was most definitely a Tory and a Catholic, (a fact for which his name provided much am usement). Pope was thus criticized again for making too much money, fraternizing with the aristocracy and the Tories and, to add insult to injury, took all this for granted. Pope?s Epistle to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington , for example outraged the critics because of Pope?s ostensible ingratitude to Duke Chandos, who many believed was the model for the tasteless Timon and his seat which Popes leaves, Treated, caressed, and tired, I take my leave, Sick of his civil pride from morn to eve; I curse such lavish cost, and little skill, And swear no day was ever passed so ill. (165-8)Pope denied the charge that Timon was infact Chandos, but the critics were adamant. One article tells the story of how Pope had asked Chandos for a subscription of one guinea and how, after Chandos had given him five hundred pounds ? †¦the Wretch, who is a Composition o f Peevishness, Spleen, and Envy, †¦.in a few Years after,..publishes a Satire, as he terms it, but in Reality it is an Infamous and Scandalous Libel,..? Pope earned himself the reputation for being precocious and self satisfied, ?Alexander Pope, keeper of the Profound, Vicar of the Dunciad; Blunder-Master-General of Dramatic Poetry, Lord Paramount wou?d-be of Mount Parnassus†¦?. As a result many attacks were reduced to base lampoon, focusing on his deformities. It would be difficult to ever ascertain how much of Pope?s satire was motivated by personal injury and how much was written in an effort to rectify moral degeneracy in general. However it would be naive to assume that attacks such as the one by Lady Mary Montague did not cut Pope?s self esteem; Like the first bold Assassin?s be thy Lot, Ne?er be thy Guilt forgiven, or forgot; But as thou hate?st, be hated by Mankind, And with the Emblem of thy crooked Mind, Mark?d on thy Back, like Cain, by God?s own Hand, Wander like him, accursed through the Land. We might find Pope?s true response to attacks such as these in the lines, ?The Muse but served to ease some friend, not wife,/To help me through this long disease, my life,? There are hints at what must have seemed like injustices in society to Pope throughout his texts. For example in the reference in An Epistle to Lord Bathurst to the Monument in London which was erected in memory of the Great Fire and inscribed with the assertion that it was begun by the Papists: Pope describes it standing ?Like a tall bully,? (340). In the Advertisement at the beginning of Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot Pope quite explictly states his irritation at these kinds of personal attack on, ?my person, morals, and family, whereof to those who know me not, a truer information may be requisite.? The lamentable state of contemporary English Society, which Pope felt had become morally degenerate as a result of the temptations of vice, was sufficient to prompt a response from Pope. At the end of his Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogue One, he comments on just this; In golden chains the willing world she draws,/A nd hers the gospel is, and hers the laws,/Mounts the tribunal, lifts her scarlet head,/And sees pale Virtue carted in her stead./Lo! at the wheels of her triumphal car,/Old England?s genius, rough with many a scar,/Dragged in the dust! his arms hang idly round/His flag inverted trails along the ground!/Our youth, all liveried o?er with foreign gold,/Before her dance: behind her, crawl the old!/See thronging millions to the pagod run,/And offer country, parent, wife or son!/Hear her black trumpet through the land proclaim,/That ?not to be corrupted is the shame?†¦. Yet may this verse (if such a verse remain)/Show, there was one who held it in disdain. (147-172) In short things conspired to prompt Pope to turn to satire, a genre in which he would endeavour ?to correct the taste of the town in wit and criticism.? Despite Swift?s warning that in exposing the follies of his enemies, Pope may cement their place in history saying, ?and as to the difference between good and bad fame, i t is a perfect trifle? , Pope?s response was one of defiance, ?I think a bright author should put an end to slanders only as the sun does to stinks – by shinning out exhale them to nothing.? Thus, quite apart from letting these matters go, it seemed almost an obligation to Pope to expose the vice and poor taste of his enemies, and in doing so treat them to an example of elegant rhetoric in the form of a satire.