Alexander Pope A Poet On The Margins and

SLI
Studies in the Literary Imagination
ALEXANDER POPE: A POET ON THE

MARGINS AND IN THE CENTER
Volume 38, Number 1

Spring 2005
© Copyright 2005 Department of English, Georgia State University

Atlanta, Georgia 30303
A Unit of the University System of Georgia
Carl V. Patton, President
ALEXANDER POPE: A POET ON THE
MARGINS AND IN THE CENTER
CONTENTS
i Introduction: Pope on the Margins and in the Center

Flavio Gregori
1 Pope and the Paradoxical Centrality of the Satirist

Thomas Woodman
15 Living on the Margin: Alexander Pope and the Rural Ideal

Claudia Thomas Kairoff
39 Bust Story: Pope at Stowe, or the Politics and Myths of Landscape

Gardening
Francesca Orestano
63 Pope’s Recusancy
Peter Davidson
77 The Mercantile Bard: Commerce and Conflict in Pope

Colin Nicholson
95 Cato’s Ghosts: Pope, Addison, and Opposition Cultural Politics

Jorge Bastos da Silva
117 Taste and Temporality in An Epistle to Burlington

James Noggle
137 Bolingbroke’s Laugh: Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Bolingbroke

and the Rhetoric of Embodied Exemplarity
Helen Deutsch
163 “Mighty Mother”: Pope and the Maternal

Jane Spencer
179 Alexander Pope, the Ideal of the Hero, Ovid, and Menippean
Satire
Ulrich Broich
VOLUME 38, NO. 1 SPRING 2005

197 “Then Rose the Seed of Chaos”: Masque and Antimasque in The
Dunciad in Four Books
Laura Tosi
219 The Dunciad and the City: Pope and Heterotopia

Brean S. Hammond
233 Contributors
ABBREVIATIONS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Citations for quotations from Pope’s poems and letters are given in
parentheses in the text. Pope’s letters are quoted from The Correspondence
of Alexander Pope (George Sherburn, ed. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1956), with the abbreviation Corr. followed by book and page numbers.
When not signaled otherwise, all poems have been quoted from the
Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope (John Butt, gen. ed. 11
vols. London: Methuen, 1939–69), with the abbreviation TE followed by
book and page numbers.
I would like to thank Helen Deutsch, Claudia Thomas Kairoff, Laura
Tosi, Jane Stevenson, Peter Davidson, Hermann Real, and Thomas
Woodman for encouraging me to start and continue this project at various
stages of its development; Gregory Dowling at Ca’ Foscari University for
assisting me in the linguistic revision of the articles; Murray Brown, Lori
Howard, Heather Medlock, Yvonne Richter, and the SLI staff for their
invaluable editorial assistance; Thomas and Pearl McHaney for their sup-
port and, along with all the friends at the English Department at Georgia
State University, and Allan Ingram at the University of Northumbria,
for discussing a preliminary version of my introduction; the staff of the
British Library, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, Reading
University Library, Biblioteca Marciana di Venezia, and the library of the
Dipartimento di Studi Europei e Postcoloniali at Ca’ Foscari University for
their help. Last but not least, I would like to thank—il va sans dire—all the
contributors to this collection for their patient and active collaboration.
Flavio Gregori
Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia
Flavio Gregori
INTRODUCTION: POPE ON THE MARGINS

AND IN THE CENTER
My sole Ambition o’er myself to reign.

([James Miller?], Are these Things So?)
But why then publish?

(Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot)
I. POPE’S PARADOXICAL CENTRALITY

Pope held a singular position in the social, political, and cultural spheres
of his age. He was in many ways an outsider and a parvenu, Pat Rogers and
other scholars remark,1 as a cripple, as a Roman Catholic, a member of an
illegal religion, and as (perhaps) a crypto-Jacobite who “held deep sym-
pathy with the dying spirit of the Stuart cause as the dynasty faded into
the margins of history” (“Apocalypse Then” 112–13). Pope was not only
excluded from the ruling power, as many writers and artists are, but also
possessed an uncertain status in the cultural sphere. He did not become
the spokesman of the establishment, on the contrary, he fiercely opposed
it; moreover, his religious, social, and physical disabilities created “areas
of insecurity in his personality” (Hammond, Pope 9). Yet Pope pursued
a vocation as an artist who would dictate the rules that fashion society’s
taste and ethos and worked to intervene in the field of cultural production,
imposing his hierarchies and his ideas of the only legitimate definition
of art, passing judgment on the beliefs and dispositions of thought and
action of the reading public and the participants in the cultural debate.2 In
an age when the intertwined literary and political fields were just begin-
ning to separate, Pope’s position had enormous repercussions on how
literature was perceived politically. In this regard, Abigail Williams argues
in her recent book that Pope exerted enormous influence in molding
early eighteenth-century literary history as well as our very idée reçue of
that age. According to Williams, Pope defined himself as writer and critic
Studies in the Literary Imagination 38.1, iSpring 2005 © Georgia State University
Introduction: Pope on the Margins and in the Center
in order to assert his own centrality “within a specific Tory tradition” that
reiterated clichés about the connection of whiggism and enthusiasm, com-
mercialism, mediocrity, illiteracy, and poverty, and promoted the restora-
tion of conservative values that, in Pope’s implicit opinion, should have
his own poetics and works as its representative. The Dunciad was “the
epitome of this Scriblerian obsession with the demarcation and defini-
tion of culture,” locating Pope “as the supreme arbiter of poetic merit”
(Williams, Poetry and the Creation 49). On the other hand, Pope’s project
was anachronistic and missed the mark both politically and culturally
because it was informed by the same Restoration agenda supporting works
such as MacFlecknoe or Roscommon’s and Oldham’s satires. Pope was out
of tune with his times, Williams adds, and his analysis of modernity was
“profoundly problematic, since in many ways it was retrospective, a form
of satirical shorthand tailored to an opponent that no longer existed”
(Poetry and the Creation 55). Thus, Pope’s centrality was contradictory,
to say the least, and showed his de facto marginalization from the dis-
courses of sociopolitical power and hegemony. In other words, Pope was a
privileged witness of the further separation of the literary and the political
fields, in which separation the field of cultural production was becoming,
to use Bourdieu’s words, “the economic world reversed,” and, we may
add, “the political world reversed.” When judged from the economical-
political viewpoint, Pope was excluded from human commerce.3 In fact,
Pope’s detractors maintained that his cultural maneuvers, variously called
resentful, vain, arrogant, impious, filled with knavery and ingratitude, and
indicating “many other Crimes of the like kind” (The Poet Finish’d in Prose
75),4 ultimately excluded him from the principal discourses of commercial,
political, and cultural development and earned him the status of marginal
poet, if not that of marginal human being: “whatsoever is the Definition
[of man], He [Pope] still appears excluded from the Human Species, which
may in some Measure account for, as well as excuse his ill Will to our Race”
(Pope Alexander’s Supremacy 18).5
Was Pope marginalized or was he central? Undoubtedly, many consid-
ered him the most talented poet in the Neoclassical tradition, and thought
him the fittest to represent his society as the epitome of rococo refinement
and politesse. Using his satiric art to censure modern bad taste, lack of
social ethos, and political corruption, he was the poet moral of his age,
to paraphrase Byron’s famous pronouncement.6 Many of Pope’s contem-
poraries considered him, as did Giles Jacob, “an excellent Poet, whose
Fame exceeds not his Merit,” whose works “are universally applauded”
(“tho’ some few of them have been cavilled at by the Criticks”), and whose
ii
Flavio Gregori
“private Character is the best, being summ’d up in a good Companion

and a firm Friend” (145–46).7 One of Pope’s first biographers, the pseud-
onymous William Ayre, concluded his Memoirs of the Life and Writings of
Alexander Pope (1745) by saying that, “as no Objection can be rais’d against
Mr Pope as a Man, a Scholar, or a Critick, [he] above all must be rever’d and
venerated for his Muse, for it must be confess’d, that not only of this Age,
but speaking of all former Ages, in our Language, he was the greatest Poet”
(2: 389). Given that Ayre’s biography is neutral if not sometimes hostile
(“it being not my Business to write Panegyrick, but to illustrate Mr Pope’s
Works, and shew what manner of Man he was, as well as how great a Poet”;
1: vi), and if it is true that Ayre was the nom de plume of one of Pope’s
archenemies, the hack publisher Edmund Curll (Rogers, Alexander Pope
Encyclopaedia 16, 30), such a peremptorily positive assessment suggests
the great reverence with which Pope was held in his times. Voltaire thought
he was “the best poet in England, and at present in the world” (Barnard
153). In Italy, “l’industre Pope gentil” was second in popularity only to
Voltaire and was widely translated and imitated (Graf 266–75; O’Grady).8
Famously, Samuel Johnson, who was not blind to Pope’s imperfections,
asked, “If Pope be not a poet where is poetry to be found?” Pope had,
according to Johnson, all the qualities that constitute genius: invention,
imagination, judgment, and “colours of language always before him ready
to decorate his matter with every grace of elegant expression,” so that
“every other writer since Milton must give place to Pope” (750–52, 737).
More unreceptive critics who did not think of Pope as the best of poets,
such as Joseph Warton, still “respect[ed] and honour[ed] his abilities” (sig.
A2). Even those many who attacked him put him in the very center of the
cultural stage, so that “throughout his career Pope could rely on an extraor-
dinary degree of public interest” (Barnard 4). W. L. Macdonald provides a
roll call of those who were friendly and those who were hostile to Pope:
“out of 134 persons listed, the ‘friends’ outnumber the ‘enemies’” (56).
If Macdonald’s conclusion that “as a whole … Pope had a greater genius
for friendship” (57) seems overstated in view of the countless pamphlets
assaulting Pope that have been collected and described by J. V. Guerinot
(the number of their authors, forty-odd, is almost the double of the twenty-
four adverse writers counted by Macdonald), yet it demonstrates that Pope
was in many ways at the center of the cultural-social sphere and that James
Reeves is wrong, or at least excessive, when he claims that Pope “was the
paradigm of the deprived child clamouring for attention” (viii). On the
contrary, Pope was a person “of extraordinary social and public awareness”
(Erskine-Hill, Alexander Pope: World and Word 11) who, as he described
iii
himself to Swift, could see “no sunshine but in the face of a friend” (Corr.
2: 395; see also 1: 119, 2: 481, 3: 138, 4: 412).
Pope possessed a high sense of his own importance, seriousness, and
centrality for the culture of his age. He was clearly proud of himself.
He writes in the Second Dialogue of the Epilogue to the Satires of Horace,
Imitated,
So proud, I am no Slave:
So impudent, I own myself no Knave:
So odd, my Country’s Ruin makes me grave.
Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me.
(TE 4: 324)
When he was only twenty-nine, his “pride” prompted him to publish

a highly ambitious collection of his works with the title The Works of
Alexander Pope. The book’s frontispiece, a folding plate engraved by George
Vertue after Charles Jervas’s portrait of a dignified, austere, handsome
poet (no sign of his deformity), and the very first initial of the book, a
large capital “I,” almost emblematically proclaim “an act of self-promo-
tion that any celebrated 79-year-old contemporary would have blenched
at” (McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning 46). Despite an apparent nervous
lack of confidence in the Preface (which, Mack says, “shows Pope far less
on parade”; Alexander Pope 875 n.), Pope was building a monument to
himself and sought to elevate his status to that of a classical author. The
Works also showed his desire to become the sole and ultimate manager
of his work and his talent for controlling his text. It was a monument to
vanity, Mack adds (333), which, James McLaverty explains (pace Mack),
depended entirely upon Pope’s editorial decision rather than on his printer
Bernard Lintot’s entrepreneurial initiative: Pope “was giving his individual
response to a turning point in the history of authorship: a point at which
the author’s person, personality, and responsibility were becoming mat-
ters of public interest as never before” (Pope, Print, and Meaning 50). As
McLaverty’s and David Foxon’s studies make clear, from the publication of
the Iliad and throughout his career Pope increasingly sought to use pub-
lishers and booksellers of his own choosing, to control the printing process
of his books, and to be in command of the financial aspects of the book
production, uniting business and aesthetics. Thus Pope stood in the very
center of his own publication (he “was printing versions of himself,” says
McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning 12) and was one of the very first poets
iv
Flavio Gregori
to become an author; this, despite his aggressive criticism that the modern
book-trade produced “a deluge of authors” (TE 5: 49).
In 1735 he published a second edition of his Works in the same formats
and quality as the 1717 edition and of his Homeric translations, followed
by smaller, more affordable formats. In 1737 he published a beautifully
produced, “authorized” collection of his letters after another collection had
surreptitiously appeared in 1735, printed by Curll (with Pope maneuvering
the whole affair so as to be able then to publicize his 1737 volume as a sort
of “director’s cut”). Pope carefully revised and polished his correspondence
(with substantial alterations, and even replaced addressees, conflations,
and fabrications), through which he established himself as a respectable
author whose genius for sociability and amicability nobody could deny. In
January 1744, a few months before his death, he declared, “I must make a
perfect edition of my works, and then I shall have nothing to do but die”
(Spence 258). This “perfect” edition Pope received posthumously thanks
to the work of William Warburton. Pope, in fact, chose Warburton, the
scholar who had defended him from Jean Pierre de Crousaz’s attacks on the
Essay on Man, as the inheritor and editor of his collected works. Although
Pope’s choice of his editor and the edition itself were controversial (Nichol
xxxvii), the 1751 Works of Alexander Pope Esq. In Nine Volumes Complete
elevated Pope’s poetic status, as Donald W. Nichol explains:
A monument to book trade continuity, the 1751 Works embodied

some of the finest talents in the eighteenth-century publishing
world.… Pope’s and Warburton’s association as poet and editor must
have been the first of its kind in literary history: never before had a
poet made a successful living from the sale of his own books; and
never before had an editor directly inherited a literary estate of such
financial consequence. (li)
If the 1717 Works were a monument to Pope’s vanity, the 1751 Works
showed Warburton’s huffiness, arrogance, and unprincipled lack of schol-
arly accuracy (in his notes). Warburton’s edition was not well received and
perhaps this is one of the reasons for Pope’s fading popularity.9 Yet a monu-
ment they were, like the material one that Warburton had erected in Pope’s
memory in the Twickenham parish church contrasting as it does with the
more modest burial site Pope had chosen for himself.10 Paradoxically, the
very fact that Pope did not have a proper monument at Westminster—that
“he remain[ed] without a place in the sacred repository of the departed
Genius” where only “his Epitaph on Mr. Gay, will supply the defect, and
v
immortalise his honour within the precincts of that venerable pile,” as

writes the anonymous editor of the The Beauties of Pope (xii)—was an
eloquent indication of Pope’s actual eccentricity as well as his eccentric
reception within his society.
II. POPE’S SOCIAL MARGINALITY

Pope, more than other poets, was the victim of a general conventio ad
excludendum not only because he soon ceased to be the canonical poet of
his age, when Preromantic and Romantic reception found fault with what
William Cowper called Pope’s “mechanic art” (Barnard 474) and what
Coleridge referred to as “mechanical metre” (Bateson and Joukovsky 198),
with his supposed lack of imagination (Warton 477), with his “fop-finery”
(Robert Southey’s phrase; Bateson and Joukovsky 169), and with his
artificial, “effeminate” (Hazlitt’s words; Bateson and Joukovsky 194–95),
and prosaic style;11 but also because in his own time Pope was the con-
stant target of criticism and satirical abuse that condemned the “falsely
celebrated British Homer,” “whose only Merit [was] to slash in Rhyme”
(Characters: An Epistle 8). Pope had perverted the very essence of his own
poetics and ethics:
Low cunning is thy aim—thy lines dispense

Mean craft—but not Nobility of Sense;
Thy works a superficial gloss display,
Instruct Mankind, but how?—The backward way!
The prodigal may learn from thee, t’express
His fancy’s worth, in equipage and dress;
An harlot may improve the dex’trous flight
To set false beauty, in the fairest light;
Simplicity of nature is thy scorn,
Thy excellence is to pretend, t’adorn.
([Morrice] sig. B, 6)
“The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth,” Pope admitted already in the
Preface to his 1717 Works, when he had not yet become the favorite butt of
the scribblers and his detractors; this betrays his anxiety over his disputed
status as arbiter of the public’s taste and poet of his age. Pope’s achieve-
ments were marked by his handicaps and his marginalization.
Pope was handicapped by his birth: he was not a nobleman (his father
was a wealthy linen merchant), and, although throughout his life he tried
vi
Flavio Gregori
to put on the superior pose of a true aristocrat, his condition set him at
the margins of a social world dominated by the court, the nobility, and the
political establishment. The imaginary portrait of his father in the Epistle
to Dr Arbuthnot, in which the positive qualities of the man (honesty, expe-
rience, health) are preceded by a long series of negatives (“Born to no
Pride, inheriting no Strife,” “Nor marrying Discord,” “Stranger to Civil and
Religious Rage,” “No Courts he saw, no Suits would ever try,” “Nor dar’d an
Oath, nor hazarded a Lye,” “he knew no Schoolman’s subtle Art,” etc.; lines
392–99; TE 4: 126), shows Pope’s anxiety about moving his “humble” and
marginal origins from social status to an atemporal, asocial axiology (“The
good Man walk’d innoxious thro’ his Age”) that should shield him (and
Pope himself, by implication) from the accusations of being an unwelcome
interloper in English society. This anxiety is even clearer in the note Pope
appends to line 381, where he literally invents the existence of his father’s
quartering of nobility:
Mr. Pope’s Father was of a Gentleman’s Family in Oxfordshire, the

Head of which was the Earl of Downe, whose sole Heiress mar-
ried the Earl of Lindsay.—His Mother was the Daughter of William
Turnor, Esq; of York: She had three Brothers, one of whom was kill’d,
another died in the Service of King Charles, the eldest following
his Fortunes, and becoming a General Officer in Spain, left her
what Estate remain’d after the Sequestrations and Forfeitures of her
Family—Mr. Pope died in 1717, aged 75; She in 1733, aged 93, a very
few Weeks after this Poem was finished. (TE 4: 125)
Very little of this is true (see Sherburn 30). Yet, such a misleading account
of his family perhaps arises “not so much through a deliberate fictional-
ising, as through a genuine uncertainty over the distance [Pope’s] career
had taken him from his origins” (Hammond, Pope 18). Pope’s edgy rela-
tionship with the nobility and his endeavor to be on a par with aristocracy,
while also independent from it, belie his characterization of himself as
“[h]e who ne’er cared, and still cares not a Pin” that he wrote as his own
epitaph (TE 6: 386).12
When his flirtatiously extravagant relationship with Lady Mary Wortley
Montague deteriorated, Pope attacked her in the poem The Capon’s Tale:
To a Lady who father’d her Lampoons upon her Acquaintance (though he
did not acknowledge it; TE 6: 258), and, notoriously, portrayed her as the
“furious Sappho” who was “P-x’d by her Love, or libell’d by her Hate” in
The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated (lines 83–84; TE 4:
vii
13). Pope underestimated the noble woman’s capacity for retaliation from
a loftier aristocratic perspective. She (with the help of Lord Hervey) was
able to dismiss Pope’s poetry as vulgar abuse, the product of a “wretched
little Carcass” (Guerinot 226) who “can ne’er invent but to defame”
(Guerinot 240), showing the false taste of the nouveau riche (Guerinot
241). Pope’s miscalculation proceeded from his inability to come to grips
with his own social position and class: any given member of the aristocracy
must perceive a non-aristocrat like Pope as a plebeian whatever the refine-
ment of his artistic production. Lady Mary and Lord Hervey’s attacks were
very different from the usual Grub Street assaults Pope could reject with
nonchalant aloofness: theirs was the socially acknowledged aristocratic
loftiness that could condemn a middle-class poet to perpetual exclusion
from the domain of the elite. Pope was reminded that while he might be
a patrician among the literati, among the nobility he was still a plebeian
on a par with those scribblers he so much despised. Lady Mary and Lord
Hervey’s criticism of Pope might seem similar to that of the scribblers in
tone and substance, but it was something more: it flaunted their distance
from both the scribblers and from Pope himself (qua scribbler); above all,
it told Pope where to go—to his own cave of poverty (or avarice)13 and
poetry. Along with the pamphlets attacking Pope in the 1730s, many of
which were orchestrated by Walpole in an attempt to crush an oppositional
voice, the two aristocrats’ vilification of the poet is an instance of a power
dispositif, if I may adopt the Foucauldian notion. What particularly worried
Pope was that the ridicule to which the “two Top wits of the Court” (Corr.
3: 366) exposed him would lend authority to those who questioned the
morality of his poetry—those he held as inferior and unreliable because he
judged them as socially and culturally plebeian. If the nobility considered
Pope on the same level with Grub Street, what could distinguish his satire
from that of his censurers who were condemning him for his preferring
“Words” to “Manners” and being slave to “Craft and Avarice” (Characters:
An Epistle 7–8)?14 Accusations like this were buttressed by those aristo-
crats who disliked Pope’s sermonizing and concentrated on the difference
between Pope’s verbal and practical virtue—as runs one of Hervey’s libels
(Guerinot 299–301).
In a letter to Arbuthnot, who was trying to persuade his friend to be
more cautious and less direct in his attacks against the patricianship, Pope
proudly reaffirmed his right and duty to censure the world, including his
superiors precisely because of his lower social position: “in my low Station,
with no other Power than this [writing satire], I hope to deter, if not to
reform” (Corr. 3: 423). Linda Zionkowski observes that Lord Hervey was
viii
Flavio Gregori
a dilettante writer who “symbolized the structure of power that relegated

Pope, the writer by trade, to the margins of respectability,” and that Pope
responded on the one hand by admitting his own inferior social position,
and on the other by deftly attacking the nobleman for stooping beneath
his class in choosing to brandish a pen instead of a knife: “the switch from
violence to wit as a means of establishing dominance enable[d] the rise
of a new elite who, like Pope, exhibit[ed] their masculine superiority by
displaying their considerable talents” (110).15 In A Letter to a Noble Lord,16
Pope defended his origins (“my Father … was no Mechanic … but in
truth, of a very tolerable family; And my Mother of an ancient one, as well
born and educated as that Lady, whom your Lordship made choice of to
be the Mother of your own Children”; Cowler 450) and, above all, employed
his superior critical and literary abilities in a tour de force that annihilated
all of Hervey’s pretensions to writing and criticizing:
Were it the mere Excess of your Lordship’s Wit, that carried you
thus triumphantly over all the bounds of decency, I might consider
your Lordship on your Pegasus, as a sprightly hunter on a mettled
horse; and while you were trampling down all our works, patiently
suffer the injury, in pure admiration of the Noble Sport. But should
the case be quite otherwise, should your Lordship be only like a Boy
that is run away with; and run away by a Very Foal; really common
charity, as well as respect for a noble family, would oblige me to stop
your career, and to help you down from this Pegasus. (Cowler 443)
Pope respectful of hierarchy? Here Pope is indeed patronizing his better,

telling this spoilt and illiterate brat where to get off.17 Paradoxically, the
conservative Pope, who was striving to preserve the deteriorating hierar-
chical principles in poetry and culture, revolted against social hierarchies,
predicating the immorality of (some) nobility; thus he participated de facto
in the destabilization of social categories produced by progressive ideolo-
gies (see Michael McKeon 131–270).18 As Claudia Thomas Kairoff notes
in her essay in this collection, “Pope was understood by contemporaries to
address the aristocracy from a lower social position.… Pope was charged
repeatedly with lack of gratitude to his superiors and patrons” (30).19 If
the exclusive and excluding attitude of the aristocracy marginalized Pope,
he nursed his cultural (and class) pride by stressing the distance between
the ill-mannered nobility and his own more genuine sense of moral aris-
tocracy. Pope tried to translate his social exclusion as self-exclusion, Stoic
detachment, skeptical ataraxia (Noggle 136–47), or Horatian retirement,
ix
but always in terms of cultural sublimation. Pope opposed the aristocracy

of writing from the aristocracy of status in order to escape the marginal
position to which the aristocracy was relegating him. The Epistle to Dr
Arbuthnot was Pope’s public, official response to social attack, one in which
he declared his independence from both aristocratic patronage and finan-
cial need (in order to “Maintain a Poet’s Dignity and Ease,” line 263; TE 4:
114), and praised the “self-sufficient domesticity” (Zionkowski 122) of his
own literary professionalism. In this way and in regard to power structures
Pope contributed to the shift from the polis to the oikos. Pope would have
never admitted this, however, because his political creed rejected the eco-
nomic corollary of that shift.
Some critics find the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot a contradictory and inco-
herent poem because of the implicit ideology, or “political unconscious,”
configuring the construction of self that Pope exhibits in it. A poem that
should answer once and for all his opponents’ doubts about his morality
produces instead more questions than answers. Brean Hammond summa-
rizes as follows:
Is Pope’s independence really underpropped by Christian virtue? Is

it really because he was a virtuous man that he could afford to resist
the blandishments of the patronage system? How is it that he himself
did not starve, if, as he says, the age is one in which good writers
do not eat? What was the source of his income? Did he himself ever
confuse “money and poetry” …? (“And Hate for Arts” 162)
As a matter of fact, Pope had to confuse money with poetry. This was the
only way for him to remove himself from the risk of becoming “like a
poor Animal” sacrificed to “cement a lasting League” among his powerful
enemies (Cowler 446). His distaste for commercialism paradoxically trans-
lated into the equation: poverty = dullness (which, as Abigail Williams
notices, was a Tory cliché),20 and his poise as an amateur poet who wrote
“because it amused [him]” (as he stated in the Preface to his 1717 Works)
is equally paradoxical because his professionalism associated him with
Grub Street (see Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing 292–302).
This last paradox was emphasized by most of his contemporary enemies,
scribblers and aristocrats alike, who accused Pope of writing out of avarice
and self-aggrandizement:
You only scribble to be great and rich.

Yes, as the cast-off Strumpet in Disgrace
x
Flavio Gregori
Rails at the Harlot that supplies her Place;

So you, because your Friends are not in Play,
Snarl at the loyal Chiefs that bear the Sway.
(Characters: An Epistle 6)
Pope looke for, but ultimately (and inevitably) could not find his position
within the class-system of the age that made him a “neither/nor” person
(neither aristocratic nor plebeian, neither amateur nor specialist, neither
reliant on patrons nor fully independent, etc.). This is revelatory of the
ambiguous condition between marginalization and centralization, inclu-
sion and exclusion, that modernity would impose on individuals (because
individuals).
III. ERASMIAN TOLERANCE AND EMOTIONAL RECUSANCY

Another aspect of Pope’s marginalization, one that was often employed
by his libelers, was his Catholicism; this was a time when anti-papism was
one of the most potent national ideologies. Even a sampling of pamphlets
that were published during the period, pamphlets with eloquent titles
such as Reasons Humbly Offer’d for a Law to Enact the Castration of Popish
Ecclesiastics, as the Best Way to Prevent the Growth of Popery in England
(Hoppit 221), is a good indicator of English hatred and paranoia. His father
was a Catholic convert, and although Pope was far from being particularly
pious, he suffered from those limitations and restrictions that affected all
Catholics at that time, such as the exclusion from proper education and
the universities, from governmental positions and most professions, and,
in general, from public and political life. Being a member of the Catholic
minority (about 1.2% of the population) meant being relegated “to some-
thing like second-class citizenship” (Mack, Alexander Pope 61): Catholics
were banned from living within ten miles from Westminster; they were
the victims of fiscal ferocity (a double taxation, as Pope complained in
The Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated; TE 4: 67); they
could not inherit or purchase land and had in general more financial prob-
lems than their fellow citizens; and they could neither hunt nor possess
nor wear weapons (which was a mark of one’s gentility). “While mighty
William’s thund’ring Arms prevail’d,” the Pope family had to move from
Hammersmith to Binfield and had its fortune always under threat of confis-
cation (Sherburn 35–37). After the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, Pope’s father
hastily sold his Binfield estate and moved to Chiswick (Gabriner 30).
Yet none of this made Pope a subversive citizen: he kept a circle of
friends and acquaintances among the Catholic gentry, some of whom were
xi
suspected of being Jacobites, but he was never outspokenly Jacobite him-

self and had many Anglican associates to whom he protested his modera-
tion and equidistance (“I verily believe your Lordship and I are both of
the same religion,” he wrote to Bishop Atterbury on 20 November 1717;
Corr. 1: 454). For a variety of reasons ranging from lack of bravery or
opportunism to enlightened impartiality, Pope practiced forbearance and
criticized factional partisanship (even within his own Church, as witnesses
his letter to Caryll of 19 July 1711; Corr. 1: 126). When Nicholas Rowe
inserted some lines in his Prologue to Cibber’s Non Juror (1717), which
were aggressively critical of those Catholics who were buying “lands and
lordships at Urbino” (temporary site of the exiled Jacobite court), Pope did
not break his ties of friendship with the dramatist (Sherburn 70). From the
scanty evidence about Pope’s commitment to recusancy, Mack concludes
that “Pope was in essentials simply a Roman Catholic nonjuror … capable
of deep sympathy with friends more Jacobite than he … yet … stoutly
opposed to the kind of agitation that might bring on social unrest and
civil war” (Alexander Pope 265). Other scholars, such as Chester Chapin
and Thomas Woodman, support the view that Pope was an “Erasmian
Catholic,” the true representative of an English version of Catholicism,
which was more pluralist than on the Continent (Chapin; Woodman,
“Pope: The Papist and the Poet”). As Peter Davidson argues in this col-
lection, Pope was a recusant not so much in his religious ideals (he was
tolerant and moderate) as in “his ultimate refusal to conform, to abandon
the religion of his family” (63). There has been much debate, however, on
Pope’s more partisan commitment to Jacobitism. Pope’s association with
Roman autocracy was suggested by his detractors as early as 1711, when
John Dennis inaugurated the attacks on Pope (Guerinot 3), and then in
the malevolent assaults by John Oldmixon (Guerinot 38–40), Dennis
(Guerinot 51–58), Cibber (Guerinot 69–70), and several anonymous and
pseudonymous libelers. These charges Pope always rejected, claiming that
he was “no enemy to the present constitution … nay even to the church
establish’d, as any minister in, or out of employment” (letter to Swift, 28
November 1729; Corr. 3: 81).
On more dispassionate and scholarly levels, contemporary critics have
investigated Pope’s political agenda and found many points of contact
between him and Jacobitism, from John Aden’s study of Pope’s “once
and future kings” (i.e., his loyalty to the House of Stuart), through John
Erskine-Hill’s reading of Pope’s Jacobite context, rhetoric, and meta-
phorology (The Social Milieu, “Literature and the Jacobite Cause,” and
“Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in his Time”); Douglas Brooks-Davies’s
xii
Flavio Gregori
allegoresis of Pope’s “emotional Jacobitism” in its most alchemical and

esoteric forms, a sort of “umbilical cord linking him to religion and father
[and] mother” (167); Erskine-Hill’s recent study of Pope’s allusive antago-
nistic Jacobitism that made him “almost the first and probably the finest
poet of political opposition in English literature” (Poetry of Opposition
and Revolution 94–95); Ronald Paulson’s reading of Pope’s oxymoronically
Jacobite (i.e., non-deist, non-classical, non-Shaftesburean) aesthetics; and
finally, Pat Rogers’s ample analysis of Windsor Forest as the orchestration
of several pro-Stuart forms and motives (The Symbolic Design).21 Other
scholars, especially Christine Gerrard, J. A. Downie, and H. T Dickinson
(and, implicitly, Thomas Woodman in the above-quoted article), contest
“the tendency to detect a ‘rhetoric of Jacobitism’ in Pope’s poetry [that]
reject[s] the apparent meaning of his poems in favour of a hidden meaning
lurking beneath the surface of the text” (Downie 11), and stress instead
the non-partisan nature of Pope’s friendships and political ideas, his being
“‘My Countrys poet’ in his own right—not on the Patriots’ terms, but his
own” (Gerrard 38). As Paul Baines observes, the divergence among the
various interpretations of Pope’s poetry as religious and political statement
“is a sign of the elusiveness and ambivalence of the poems themselves: it is
possible to argue them into a variety of allegiances” (169).
Be that as it may, more important to our discourse is that the most
dishonorable charges were brought against Pope by way of his religion in
an attempt to dismiss him from the public debate. Those among his most
vociferous enemies accused him of Jacobitism and of religious depravity;
they wrote, for example, that “[t]his Popish Dog … had translated Homer
for the use of the Pretender” (Guerinot 40), and punned on his name (Pope
Alexander; he was often pictured as a monkey topped with a papal tiara).
These charges were no laughing matter: Pope knew that he could risk dire
consequences if legal action were taken against him for treason. We cannot
underestimate the serious risks of punishment Pope ran. He was rightly
afraid that he might be denied basic civil rights, especially when the hacks
formed a league with the potentates, and he quietly reacted:
It would … be difficult even for your Lordship’s [Hervey] penetra-

tion to tell, to what, or from what Principles, Parties, or Sentiments,
Moral, Political, or Theological, I may have been converted, or
perverted, in all that time. I beseech your Lordship to consider, the
Injury a Man of your high Rank and Credit may do to a private Person,
under Penal Laws and many other disadvantages, not for want of
honesty or conscience, but merely perhaps for having too weak a head,
xiii
or too tender a heart. It is by these alone I have hitherto liv’d excluded

from all posts of Profit or Trust. (Cowler 454)
Likewise, we should not underestimate the sense of martyrdom with which

his poetry is permeated, although often in humorous form. Whatever our
judgment of Pope’s religious or political consistency may be, it cannot be
denied that he was serious in defending his Erasmian ideals, or that “[h]is
early religious idealism and his righteous indignation about persecution
bec[a]me part of his image of himself as a true poet, and this contribute[d]
to the powerful sense of poignancy he create[d]” (Woodman, “Pope: The
Papist and the Poet” 232; also, with political connotations, Erskine-Hill,
Poetry of Opposition 96). The life of a wit was a warfare on earth in more
than one sense: Pope’s enemies’ verbal abuse could easily become physical
threat, as when the author of the notorious A Popp on Pope took pleasure
in a fantasy of chastisement in which Pope is beaten “upon his naked
Posteriors” by two “Gentlemen” “with great violence and unmerciful
Hand,” so much “that he voided large Quantities of Blood” mixed with gall
until a “Mrs. B[loun]t, a good charitable Woman, and near Neighbour of
Master Pope at Twickenham … took him in her Apron, and … convey[ed]
him home.” “[W]e cannot too much admire the Wisdom of Providence,”
the pamphleteer concludes, “which brings this Man to the Lash, whose
wanton Wit has been lashing of others” (Guerinot 116). With much
empathy, Maynard Mack comments:
… now all the old canards came circling back to light upon his head
and hang about his neck. He was a Jacobite, a traitor, a plagiary,
a defrauder of the public, a would-be despot … the long-hack-
neyed plays upon his name could be revived, as in Pope Alexander’s
Supremacy and Infallibility Examin’d (1729), whose engraved fron-
tispiece shows the poet crouched over a stack of his own works
and wearing a papal tiara. He was also, to be sure, a lump, a toad, a
venomous spider, and a monkey dropping filth.… his names could
be tortured into A-P-E; and, in the engraving above mentioned,
his tiara-crowned head rests on a monkey’s shape. (Alexander Pope
491)
IV. PHYSICAL DEFORMITY: POPE’S PERCEPTION

AND SUBLIMATION OF THE OTHER
Pope, a second “Athanasius contra Mundum,” as Lord Oxford called

him in a letter to Swift (qtd. in Mack, Alexander Pope 490), was especially
xiv
Flavio Gregori
targeted for his physical disabilities, the result of a tubercular disease of

the spine (Pott’s disease), triggered by a fall from a horse when he was
four years old (or perhaps by infected milk). He was a diminutive cripple,
the perpetual victim of migraines, inflammatory fits, and pneumonias (he
himself talked of “this long disease, my life” in The Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot;
TE 4: 105). His enemies relentlessly harped on the theme of the deformity
of the “little Creature, scarce four Foot high, whose very sight makes one
laugh” (Thomas Bentley, qtd. in Guerinot 254). John Dennis, who was
particularly fond of insulting Pope for being what Rochester would have
called “a Lump Deform’d and Shapeless,” wrote: “the Deformity of this
Libeller, is Visible, Present, Lasting, Unalterable, and Peculiar to himself.
’Tis the mark of God and Nature upon him, to give us warning that we
should hold no Society with him, as a Creature not of our Original, nor
of our Species” (10). Pope’s unpromising figure (Guerinot 231) earned
him a hail of insults and abuse, from monster to monkey, pygmy, dog,
frog, crooked carcass, stinging nettle, (Jesuit) serpent, Cain (“Marked on
the back … by God’s own hand”; Lady Mary Montague, qtd. in Guerinot
226), in short, an animal, an ignorant and stupid animalculum (A Compleat
Collection 51). J. V. Guerinot is right in calling to mind Ortega y Gasset’s
phrase that hate seeks the annihilation of its object (xxx). Although the-
riomorphism was a literary and rhetorical topos, and although Pope had
his share in the game of belittling literary enemies (from his light-hearted
article in the Guardian of 26 June 1713 on the society of homunculi, to the
devastating satire of The Dunciad), there is no doubt that his deformity
was the main focus of the exclusionary rite his enemies performed against
him, proclaiming that he was “of a quite different Race of Beings” (Pope
Alexander’s Supremacy 18).22
To some extent, Pope tried to come to terms with the marginal status
that his physical handicaps forced upon him. Scholars have studied, for
instance, the proximity of Pope’s position to that of eighteenth-century
women who were considered “defective bodies” with regard to masculine
vigor and virility. Pope’s physical (and social) handicaps marginalized
him in ways that resembled the ancillary status women were confined to
by discourses of male dominance. This made him sympathetic to their
subaltern position, although he still enjoyed more advantages and greater
independence than most women of his age (see Rumbold and Thomas
Kairoff). Yet, as Ellen Pollak has shown, instead of investigating the dis-
sonance produced by his own and by women’s marginality, Pope accepted
the myth of “passive womanhood” (22, see also 23–76) and accommo-
dated the contradictions inherent in society’s dominant sexual codes to his
xv
understanding of woman as “the not man that by opposition gives identity

(gives ‘character’) to man” (111), within a phallocentric theodicy that kept
woman on the margins of society and civilization. Pope’s interpretation
of the Other was not respectful of otherness, but became at best a weaker
version of normality, or a marginal part of it, with no intrinsic identity and
rights (“character”) qua other. This otherness had to be tamed, conquered,
and subjected to the lawgiving power of the harmonious (male) center,
otherwise Pope would be hampered by the eccentricity of the proper fea-
tures of femininity (and deformity) that he felt as excessive and contradic-
tory, incapable of constituting an effective center for propagating the light
of knowledge and morality (see Knellworth, Nussbaum).
Pope’s idiosyncratic way of perceiving women is analogous to his way of
perceiving his own body (and the body) as distinct from self (Damrosch
21) and not integral or constitutive of self. He could not focus on his
marginalized physical disabilities because he was fully concerned with
reasserting the centrality of a classical, male-oriented mind-body para-
digm. This is particularly visible in his Iliad translation, where all allu-
sions to the heroes’ more feminine aspects (such as Achilles’s weeping, or
Patroclus’s “gentleness”) are suppressed in favor of a modernized version
of the heroes’ “manly Mind” (a recurring phrase) and the various bodily
and psychological deficiencies of the heroes are sublimated into an almost
metaphysical glorification of rational and patriotic heroism (Williams,
Pope, Homer 57–115). Nor did Pope usually confront the problem of his
outer physical self as an impotent “Tom-Tit” (Sawney and Colley 14) and,
instead, continued to provide versions of his masculinity and cavalier
escapades, as if the important issues of his own marginality were just a
matter of sarcastic repartees without truth or merit. But once again, Pope’s
repressed ambiguity resurfaces in his poetry and in his letters where his
consistently masculinist version of reason and civilization reveals his
“great psychosexual angst … in the space between his deformed physical
body and perceived poetic might: the one a contorted dwarf, the other a
proclaimed titan” (Rousseau 61). Instead of looking for the meeting point
between his deformity and titanism (a painful task, it must be admitted),
Pope labored to keep them separate.
Helen Deutsch considers that, for Pope, deformity was a biographical
fact and a literary method, which he effectively employed to shape his
career, through the appropriation of classical models. Deformity was also
the sign of “the limits of form … for his cultural field” and “the marks of
his monumental cultural entrepreneurship and self-possession [as] illicit
ambiguity” (Deutsch 12). Yet, Pope’s struggle for control over his authorial
xvi
Flavio Gregori
image and for ownership of meaning (i.e., his struggle with the literary
world to keep the control of the true meaning of his work against the
malevolent interpretations of his enemies) conflicted with the fact that his
“originality” could be understood as “oddity” or “monstrosity.” According
to Deutsch, Pope found a way of taming this frightful uniqueness of being
in his imitation of the ancient classics:
Pope’s figure is a text both ineffably original—that which, like the

mark of deformity, stands only for itself, rarely seen and therefore a
sight to see—and recognizably derivative; the poet whose literary
career was one long exercise in imitation of the classics himself
embodies translation.… Yet deformity enable[d] Pope’s particular
brand of imitation to go originality one better: his poetry marks itself
not as original but impossible to duplicate. (21–22, 27)
This special poetics of deformity was a perilous attempt to find form for
deformity, this by incorporating the loss of form into the frame of repre-
sentation (217) and by sublimating the grotesque into radiant classical
forms, which would mark, as said a Newcastle visitor to Twickenham “the
Taste of the finest Genius that this or any other Age has produced” (qtd. in
Deutsch 128); and yet it was also the metonymic reminder of the fetishist
phantasmagoria from which it originated (128–30).
Therefore, while coming to terms with the issues of his deformity, Pope
actually split the beautiful-ugly dichotomy apart; in doing so he violated
the unity of Neoclassical poetics and its equation of form, poetry, morality,
and theodicy—a modernized version of the classical kalos kagathos. Pope
incorporated the ugly and the deformed in his poetry, following Boileau’s
dictum that “[t]here’s not a Monster bred beneath the Sky / But, well
dispos’d by Art, may please the Eye” (Canto III, lines 1–2; Boileau 29); but
then Pope also strove to demonstrate that his own deformed body housed
a beautiful mind (his aequum animum; see Corr. 1: 275). This stood in
contrast to his enemies who were inwardly deformed and corrupt and,
therefore, must be portrayed as ugly—although this ugliness was often
concealed beneath a beautiful shape (as in the case of Hervey-Sporus).
Paradoxically, the “deformed” Pope would be able to redeem all that ugli-
ness with the perfection of his rhyme and reason. Nonetheless, the result
was not the production of classically beautiful poetry; rather, Pope’s poetry
seemed perpetually attracted by the vortex of centrifugal anarchy, where
the (absent) centripetal force of the beautiful was replaced by an interesting
mind (as Friedrich Schlegel thought modern poetry was doing; Schlegel
221–23).
xvii
V. POET FOR POETRY’S SAKE: POPE’S COMPROMISE WITH

NEOCLASSICAL AESTHETICS AND THE COMMERCIAL ETHOS
It has been argued by many scholars, especially of the Christian-New
Critical school, that Pope’s idea of the beautiful form that organizes a cha-
otic reality, sifting the exquisite forms of providential wit from the chaff of
the populace’s and Trivialliteratur’s fiat nox, reiterated the good, “ancient,”
Renaissance notion of concordia discors (Battestin 79–118; see also Mack,
The Garden and the City, and Alexander Pope). Yet, Pope’s ideals are also less
ancient and far more ambiguous and modern. In his own (perhaps uncon-
scious) way, Pope involuntarily found himself aligned with the rationalist,
Cartesian project of purifying man’s reason from external accidents and
making one’s cogito the very center of experience and the world, and thus
contributed to modern dissociation of sensibility. It is true that Pope would
not be happy to be placed among the Cartesians, like the characters of John
Gay’s (and partly his) Three Hours after Marriage, when Dr. Fossile distin-
guishes the members of his family among the Platonists and Cartesians
(Gay 39).23 But Pope’s self-sufficient individualism, his penchant for
understanding his own self as abstract subjectivity (which is Pope’s “ruling
passion”? his own definitions of himself seem written with the purpose
of eluding that question),24 combined with his poetic classicism, which is
based on a principle of exclusion of non-classical forms (Hunter 322), and
his incipient high-bourgeois sense of social relationships coalesced in an
ideology that had much to do with the Cartesian project of creating one’s
own world from within (see Gellner in Reason and Culture, ch. 1).
There is perhaps one more reason for considering Pope as part of a
modernizing project: because of the widening split between his desire to
be the center of cultural life and his factual marginalization, his poetry
eventually comes to distrust the world of present experience and this
widens the gap between acknowledgment of the present and expecta-
tion of a better world in the future. As the historian Reinhart Koselleck
explains, the rise of modernity is marked by the tension between the
space of experience (Erfahrungsraum) and the horizon of one’s expecta-
tions (Erwartungshorizont); and the former is in no way adequate to fulfill
the requirements of the latter (Kosellek 359). At a biographical level, the
fracture between experience and expectation is visible when Pope elides
those outward aspects that would not fit the high standards of his self-
monumentalization. Pope was clearly building a utopian projection of
himself as a mens sana in corpore sano. However, he did it without entirely
acknowledging his body and world; and in order to build a monument aëre
xviii
Flavio Gregori
perennius, one needs to accept the raw material of one’s actual experience,
the marble, stone, or clay of life. Pope perceived that material as dan-
gerous, unmanageable, and heterogeneous. He invented a protective aura
of classicism for himself that was hardly based on reality, and confided in
the expectation that the public would accept an elevated image of himself
and of his relation to the world, though, in his satire, this world was ugly
and utterly corrupt. Not only did Pope’s distance from the actual realm of
facts and events increase in his later works, when he satirically dissociated
himself from an immoral and corrupt world, but also the contradiction
between the omnipresence of his moralizing poetic persona and the lack
of any positive, concrete definition of this vocal presence: we do not know
much of the poet beyond his poetic voice. The result is that, in his poetry,
Pope can be seen only for what he is not (not like the world’s scribblers
and dunces; not like the the dishonest politicians; not like the vicious aris-
tocrats, etc.), thus becoming a kind of loquacious dieu caché.
Despite his reliance on traditionalism,25 Pope was modern in his refusal
of the way of the world. For example, Pope was able to capture the unpre-
dictable volatility and at the same time the political will-power of the mob,
the Hobbesian multitudo dissoluta which, threatened by its own disorder,
closes its ranks and, with a gesture worthy of the Baron of Münchausen,
extricates itself from its disorder by imposing rule and law (Cavalletti 60).
In other words, Pope was able to capture the intersection of anomy and
nomos that complement each other in the formation of a new, more pow-
erful nomos. As Pope reproduced it, dullness is a political phenomenon
aiming at the conquest of the world through the substitution of nomos with
a new nomos; it is anomy possessing the power of lawmaking through a
perpetual state of emergency that incessantly transforms itself and does not
allow us to capture its center; it is an apparently lawless power structure
that imperceptibly imposes itself as the law in such a way that it is diffi-
cult to interpret it as totalitarian (or paving the way for totalitarianism).26
In his capacity as mock-portraitist of a shifting reality that confirmed the
political status quo, Pope was an attentively observing outsider in the
center of modern reality. However, in addition to the pars destruens of his
satire, he was not able to capture the implicit demand coming from the
reshuffling of marginality/centrality of his age and transform it into a pars
construens. Instead of condemning the mob simply qua recipient of power,
and instead of trying to liberate the genuine claim for recognition of the
marginalized ones against the nomenklatura, Pope’s classicism appropri-
ated the relationship of exclusion/inclusion, incorporating the ugly only to
make it disappear (“for though a scribler exists by being … incorporated,”
xix
commented Warburton, “yet he exists intombed”; Works 4: 15). Pope’s was

ancient régime poetics that tried to ban those very forms by which it was
attracted, as if that separation could then substantiate itself in some kind of
experience (in Kosellek’s sense of gegenwärtige Vergangenheit, “past made
present”), which, on the contrary, was not there.27 Thus Pope was poised
between his denunciation of the present that possessed no expectation of a
better future and his vain expectation of an experience (that of the classical
harmony of self and world) that had no chance to exist. The former found
expression in his satiric mode, the latter in his classicism.
As J. Paul Hunter has shown, Pope’s Neoclassical theory became obsessed
with defining “the insignificant, the inappropriate, and the inadequate out
of literature,” with refining it and making it “less miscellaneous and messy,
so that one of theory’s functions—and one role of poets—came to be exclu-
sionary: to name hacks, dunces, and fools, to kill writers left and right,
and to give readers a rationale for ignoring, and in effect destroying a good
deal of what was being written” (322; my emphasis). Hunter reads Pope’s
mock-heroic texts as “discrepancy between theory and practice rather than
as failed practice” (335); Pope was at one with his contemporaries in not
practicing what he was preaching (he was “a poet vigorously representing
the fallen present, bearing like the ass in the frontispiece of The Dunciad
Variorum his burden dutifully and with style” [332]). Yet, he was far from
feeling comfortable in his capacity as stylish writer of the present moment:
the heterogeneous present retaliated against the polite poet and, as Peter
Stallybrass and Allon White write, the “mitigating fact of Pope’s superior
poetic ability could not save him from being immersed in the very process
of grotesque debasement which he scorned in others” (218). Again, we
find Pope at the junction of inclusion and exclusion, the very junction he
condemned in his grotesque portrayal of modern times. The cult of rhyme
and reason was not sufficient to fend off the assaults of the world, body,
self, and Other; cutting the Gordian knot of reason and unreason with
the formal knife was not the appropriate way to come to terms with its
complexity.
The same can be said for the nexus between his exclusion from socio-
political life and his pretensions to chastise the mores of his times. Pope
transformed his exclusion from the court into his Horatian stance of cul-
tural independence and economic self-sufficiency: his retirement to his
villa at Twickenham was made the symbol of his political self-sufficiency
and social success, and this enabled him to “keep [his] old Walk, and
deviate from it to no Court” (letter to Swift of 17–19 May 1739; Corr. 3:
178).28 In contrast to a Christian-humanist interpretation, recent scholars
xx
Flavio Gregori
see Pope’s retirement and “moral, political and cultural combat” (these are
the words of Carole Fabricant) as a form of narcissism, and “overriding
obsession with self,” which transforms contemporary issues “into a stage
for [Pope’s] performance[s], an arena in which he can display his intel-
lectual dexterity and verbal wit” (Fabricant 46), a place for self-tribute
and self-preoccupations devoid of any larger and more objective issues
and scope. In other words, Pope tried to transform the ongoing social and
political marginalization of his position (not being a poet at court), and
inject it into the center of the political and moral discourses of the age.
There may be doubts about Pope’s actual combativity and effectiveness,
corroborated by his recurrent gloom. Apart from the occasional “sad-
dog pose” that he affected in order to appear a man of the world (Mack,
Alexander Pope 152), Pope often felt a sense of inanity, if not a contemptus
mundi, in contemplating the “Incongruous Animal … Man, … [who is]
enough to make one remain stupefied in a poise of inaction, void of all
desires, of all designs, of all friendships,” as he wrote in a famous letter
to John Caryll (Corr. 1: 185–86). In his copy of Montaigne’s essays, Pope
glossed the following lines: “[My manners] had not other vice but Sloth
and want of Mettal. There is no fear that I would do ill, but that I would do
nothing…” with the words: “Alter Ego” (Mack, Collected 427). His melan-
choly (Corr. 2: 337; 3: 5) and sadness before the “glory, jest, and riddle of
the world” (TE 3–1: 56) was however less the result of a calculated, self-
conscious Entsagung before the way of the world, than a reaction to his not
finding a place in it and not having his voice heard.29
Pope’s way of getting over his psychological and social despondency
was his dedication to the cult of poetry and his literary career. Claude
Rawson, and Thomas Woodman in this collection, rightly draw attention
to the fact that some kind of hauteur is present in the process of becoming
a spokesman for a conservative ideology without ever being part of the
establishment (Rawson 252–58). As Thomas Woodman has shown in his
Politeness and Poetry in the Age of Pope, Pope’s attempt to mediate between
the values of the old gentry, based on status and blood, and the modern
notion of virtue and politeness (that “worth makes the man”) reflected
the decline of the old aristocratic ideology he wanted to represent, and
became a myth devoid of an objective correlative (30–54). The model of
poetry in which Pope believed was that of the Renaissance court poet who
provided the prince and the country with moral and political ideals that
the prince should then put into practice. As we have seen, the oligarchy
that Pope confronted was far from being interested in being instructed and
patronized by him, and, generally speaking, by any poet. The new Whig
xxi
aristocracy of the Hanoverian court considered the poets simply as hire-

lings, pawns of the government’s propaganda. To Pope, they were literary
prostitutes who should not have acquired such a centrality to the point
of being appointed poets laureate, thus usurping a position that he alone
deserved and never got. Through satirizing bad poetry and bad politics,
and showing off his literary abilities at the same time, Pope claimed his
own moral centrality in the field of English literature. Yet, we have seen
that the centrality Pope claimed for his poetry had no application to objec-
tive reality and was, therefore, applicable only to poetry per se. He was a
good poet, that was all—and in a few decades he would be demoted to just
a good rhymester.
Pope thus may be considered the first artist for art’s sake, though he
might not have liked this definition.30 The fundamental, although secreted,
trope of most of Pope’s poetry is that of the bard who sings for his country’s
advantage yet sings “in vain.” This trope is clearly visible as in his reading
of the episode of the bard Demodocus in his Odyssey translation, who was
banished by the king Aegistus to a desert island, so that his poetry would
not interfere with Aegistus’s maneuvers to gain power and riches:
The bard they banish’d from his native soil,

And left all helpless in a desart Isle:
There he, the sweetest of the sacred train,
Sung dying to the rocks, but sung in vain.
(Book 3, lines 339–43; TE 9: 103; my emphasis)
According to Pope’s view of poetry, modern society needs the bard who
with his moralizing song should help it to free itself from the fetters of
corruption and helps it achieve a renewed balance between the court and
the country, the nobility and the people, and ethics and realpolitik. Yet, the
bare facts of reality dissolved Pope’s dream and made him emerge as the
only possible hero of his poetry (Gregori 252–53). Pope’s hero, however,
as those verses suggest, is neither an epic nor utopian/idealistic one; rather,
it is an elegiac hero.31
Pope tried vigorously to defend a humanist conception of literature
and poetry, at the same time elegant, learned, and moral, as a reminder
of a moral society that has disappeared but that should not be forgotten.
George, Baron Lyttelton, one of the main opponents to Walpole’s adminis-
tration, and staunch supporter of the opposition hero Frederick, Prince of
Wales, wrote to Pope (to encourage him to continue with his project of an
epic on Brutus, which was eventually abandoned):
xxii
Flavio Gregori
even granting an impossibility of Reforming the Publick, your

Writings may be of Use to private society; The Moral Song may
steal into our Hearts, and teach us to be as good Sons, and as good
Friends, as Beneficent, as Charitable as Mr Pope, and is sure That
will be Serving your Country, though you canst Raise her up such
Ministers, or such Senators as you desire. (Corr. 4: 369)
However, that public poetry (“serving [one’s] Country”) should become

poetry for private use (“steal[ing] into our hearts”) is a paradox that
reveals the level of confusion between what is marginal and what is central
in Pope’s times. According to Lyttelton, poetry’s political relevance and
application is allowed only insofar as it is confined to the realm of private
speculation and, ultimately, to the nourishment of an optative myth such
as that of the patriot king, or the good old times of genuine country gen-
tility. In Pope’s poetry, this paradox resulted in his unique combination of
pungent, desperate satire, and blithe, accepting elegy.
Writing at a decisive moment in the history of England, when the
Renaissance ideal of the courtier “was being transformed … into that of
the gentleman of civic virtue, but when that transformation was being hin-
dered just because that gentleman was still required to carry around with
him so much of his old courtly baggage” (Barrell 38), Pope tried to main-
tain his privilege of writing about politics as ethos in a context that did not
allow him to do so. Which meant for him that he had to incorporate the
most peculiar aspects of commercial literature in his works, thus blurring
the same cultural and social distinction he so much strove to draw (as we
have seen, his very moral poetry contributed to switch attention from the
polis to the oikos: “I was not born for Courts or great Affairs, / I pay my
Debts, believe, and say my Pray’rs”; Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, lines 267–68;
TE 4: 114). As John Barrell and Harriet Guest explain, Pope’s poems (in
particular, the Epistle to Bathurst) present contradicting discourses that
are tied together to mask the contradictions they must show: “[e]ach
individual discourse privileges some issues and marginalizes or conceals
others, and no discourse is therefore capable of enunciating the contradic-
tory components of a complex conception of the world” (118). The two
main conflicting discourses in the Epistle to Bathurst are the discourse
of the economic theodicy, i.e., that the world is a gigantic self-regulating
market in which all components tend to a providential end and individuals
are the unconscious agents of those providential plans; and, that the dis-
course of moral agency in which the satire or praise of the individuals’
xxiii
behavior and decisions stresses human intentions over metaphysical plan-

ning. Yet, as Barrell and Guest observe,
this contradiction need not be seen as an embarrassment to the dis-

course of economic theodicy.… It can be seen, indeed, as immensely
convenient to it, a further stage in the knotting together of dis-
courses by which hegemony is confirmed. Both the contradictory
statements … can perfectly well find their place within the ideology
of laissez faire capitalism. (126)
Pope’s attempt to recentralize the marginalization of his poetry through

his satirical chastisement of the oligarchy was but a further step in the
“knotting together” of the discourses of the ejection of poetry from the
public fore, of privatizing the experience of poetry, and of publicizing the
rhetorical abilities of the writer. This “knotting together” was prepared by
a preliminary absorption of another contradiction, that between the com-
modification of writing and the denunciation of this very commodifica-
tion. Also Pope’s lofty idea of political poetry as a private tool and his very
idea of retirement go hand in hand with his exploitation and denunciation
of poetry’s commodification. Pope’s poetry could continue to be political
only in terms of personal, ineffectual resistance to the modifications of the
mores produced by the new commercial and pragmatic realm, which he
would exploit (he was the “proprietor” of his poems; Staves 35). His atti-
tude toward the world of commerce was much mystified and ambivalent.
Pope’s handling of the commercial arrangements of the Odyssey profits
between himself and his assistants, William Broome and Elijah Fenton,
was notoriously dishonest and hypocritical, “a shabby business all round,”
Mack admits, that “cannot be judged other than a dishonest cover-up for
the sake of gain” (Alexander Pope 414; see Corr. 2: 489; 499–500). Thus,
Pope aligned himself with those hacks he so much criticized for having
prostituted their muse to commercial requirements. We have seen how
often Pope was accused of Machiavellian avarice and greed. Pope the busi-
nessman was in some ways as much a Machiavellian character as any of the
rapacious or miserly villains he portrayed in his satires. In this perspective,
Pope’s (economic) theodicy in the final section of his Essay on Man, where
“true Self-love and Social are the same” (Ep. IV, line 396; TE 3–1: 166), is
at the same time reinforced and contradicted. Honest marginality (Pope’s
exclusion from the grand monde) stops playing a role when it enters center
stage. Alternatively, this supposed marginality ceases to be marginal but
is instead a false, or phony marginality when it dons a hypocritical mask
xxiv
Flavio Gregori
and poses as moral superiority. This is also true of the ways in which Pope
articulated his discourse of the true poet as it contrasts with the Grub
Street hack. He wanted to affirm the centrality of Renaissance aesthetics
and values but did so only by implication, through the usage of a virtual
litotes that the reader should perceive in the overpowering presence of
scribblers and bad critics appearing in his notes and other textual para-
phernalia. Unconsciously and unwillingly, Pope transformed his villains,
whom he would like to marginalize (“intombe,” Warburton would say)
forever and ever, as the heroes (for us) of the only viable modern epic
poetry, an epic that cannot take itself too seriously. However, Pope would
not want us to take his heroes as such: the true hero should be his dis-
dainful verse, his art of creating out of the destruction of civilization: “Yet
may this Verse (if such a Verse remain) / Show there was one who held it
in disdain” (Epilogue to the Satires Dia. 1, lines 171–72; TE 4: 309).
A mythographer of his own self and a diviner of a lost social personality,
a censor and exploiter of the world, a scribe of chaos and a chiseller of
harmonious forms, a transgressor and a right-minded person, a bourgeois
professional and a would-be aristocratic amateur, a defender of outsiders
and their stifle—indeed “a contradiction still”—Pope could not be the
sole faber fortunae suae, let alone the arbiter of his age.32 Though “disdain”
never rhymes with “in vain” in his poetry, his life, battles, works, pains,
ambiguities, status, all show that he could not always master self as much
as he would have liked. Sometimes, in his most Montaignesque moments,
he addressed the profound reasons for his marginality, shedding doubts
on all pretensions to wholeness, concord, and self-consistency; at other
times he cultivated his dream and myth of his worthiness to mount the
Parnassus of his or any other age, and firmly asserts his self-sufficiency
and self-confidence. To us, it is of the highest importance that Pope found
himself involved in the game of inclusion and exclusion that is typical of
the modern public sphere: the continuous interplay between marginality
and centrality that is visible in Pope’s poetry and career sheds light on the
ways in which the eighteenth-century public sphere developed and func-
tioned. This was not the field of rational agents producing and confronting
each other with fully self-conscious, transparent, self-reflexive discourses,
where reason was universal and ideal speech attainable; its agents, in fact,
were conditioned by inequalities, differences, handicaps, and lacked aware-
ness of their position in the field (Bourdieu, Pascal Meditations 67).33 The
position Pope struggled to attain, one which he claimed but his enemies
called into question, resulted from a battle of books and the cultural field
was a contested battlefield. Brean Hammond, in his article in this collec-
xxv
tion, shows how both the physical and the imaginative space of production
of values was, in Pope’s poems, a contested space. Pope was an organizer
of that space but also a pawn in the larger play on the cultural field and in
the public sphere—central and marginal at the same time in producing his
texts and in being produced by the contexts that originated, structured and
determined his texts and life.
VI. POPE AND THE DYNAMISM OF MARGINALIZED CENTRALITY

The essays gathered in this collection deal with the various aspects of
Pope’s marginality and centrality: the relationship between poetry and poli-
tics, religion, commodification of taste, politics of landscape, deformity,
attitude to maternity, questions of genre, and concepts of space. Thomas
Woodman’s “Pope and the Paradoxical Centrality of the Satirist” considers
Pope as the last great Renaissance poet who exerted his authority and truly
believed in the ideal of the poet laureate that attends to the mores of the
nation, but also as a highly marginalized poet, unable to put his ideals into
practice. Pursuing his analysis of Pope as the troubled representative of the
transition from aristocratic to bourgeois politeness in Politeness and Poetry
in the Age of Pope (1989), Woodman argues that Pope not only found in
poetry a compensation for his marginalization but also participated in
“the climate of accommodation and negotiation” (9) typical of the English
Enlightenment, defending both conservatism and modern commercialism.
This propensity to compromise meant that his satire less disheartened than
Swift’s and still rooted in the conviction of its healing power. Even in the
gloomier Dunciad, “his indignation shows at the same time that he refused
to take satiric isolation as the norm, and this differentiates him from his
successors” (12).
In “Living on the Margin: Alexander Pope and the Rural Ideal,” Claudia
Thomas Kairoff confronts another of Pope’s powerful myths. She suggests
that Pope “spoke quite deliberately as an inhabitant of neither country
nor city, but from the margins of both” (16). Pope intentionally chose a
marginal position for himself in all social and cultural situations as part
of his identity-making process, which opposed conventionality, including
“the conventional assumptions of the rural superiority that [he] appar-
ently celebrate[d]” (16). In the never-ending dislocation and relocation of
his condition, Pope developed and accepted a tragic image of himself as
equally “thrust outside the woods [and] denied the rewards of urban pur-
suits” (18). Signaling the proximity of Pope’s needs and attitude to those
merchants who chose Twickenham for their residence, Thomas Kairoff
xxvi
some pages may be
missing
Flavio Gregori
reveal some kind of community, one that encircles the poet and his poem:
that is, a world which is larger than the word that would want to embrace
all. If, according to Foucault, the ship is the heterotopia par excellence,
The Dunciad could be this “floating piece of space, a place without a place,
that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given
over to the infinity … [going] as far as the colonies in search of the most
precious treasures they conceal in their gardens … [a] great instrument
of economic development … [and] simultaneously the greatest reserve of
the imagination” (185). It could be also a Narrenschiff arriving nowhere,
its passengers enchanted by the illusionary magic of a self-induced trance
that makes them believe that somewhere, perhaps on the boat itself, there
exists a wonderland. Perhaps it could be both, and the fact that Pope left
this question open, after all and despite of himself, is the fascinating aspect
of this centrally marginal poet.
Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice
NOTES
1 E.g., Howard Erskine-Hill: “Pope was a phenomenon. Born into the marginal Roman
Catholic community when it had lost its chance of power, he won his way by talent, friend-
ship, patronage, and industry to the center of his country’s civilization” (Poetry of Opposition
111); Helen Deutsch: “Pope made his mark at once in the center and on the margins of a
historical moment he both celebrated and deplored” (3); Pat Rogers analyzes the ways in
which Pope overcame his being “a parvenu and an outsider” asserting “the power and value
of his art in a society which offered him reduced citizenship” in “Pope and the Social Scene”
(131, 133).
2 In other words, Pope tried to intervene in what Bourdieu calls the habitus (“principles
which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted
to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of
the operations necessary in order to attain them” [qtd. in Johnson, “Editor’s Introduction” 5–
6]). Since the habitus is rather a generative than a predetermined system, one cannot choose
one’s habitus although one can move within it and make some (relative) choices. The habitus
is partly unknown to individuals (it is “embodied history, internalized as second nature and
so forgotten as history”; Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice 56); therefore any individual attempt
to radically modify it is ineffectual. This impossibility is unperceived, for instance, by satire,
which misunderstands the habitus as character, ethos, i.e., one’s individual adherence to (and
capacity to fully comprehend and project) those principles organizing social and cultural
practices. Here, I do not mean to hypostatize the notion of habitus to the point of reducing
Pope to a set of habiti, and I am aware of criticism of Bourdieu’s insufficient recognition of
volitional reflexivity (Bohman); I just want to underscore Pope’s difficulty in gaining access
to his and his age’s habitus. John Barrell provides an analysis of the complex relationship
between the eighteenth-century description of society as a “machine” and more traditional
ideas of personal virtue (17–49).
xxxv
3 The literary and artistic fields have relative autonomy but, according to Bourdieu, are
still contained within the field of power (The Field 37–38). Significantly, the literary field
possesses a relative autonomy with respect to its own economic and political principles of
hierarchization. When he speaks of the autonomy of the literary field (“the economic world
reversed”) within the field of power, and of the artist having an ambivalent relation to the
economic values of the field of power, Bourdieu has in mind the late nineteenth-century
French literary field that was founded upon the principle of art for art’s sake and the rejec-
tion of bourgeois philistinism and whose position, nonetheless, was allowed by financial
strength (Flaubert is his example). The eighteenth-century literary field was not yet able to
distinguish itself from the power field. If I am allowed to make a little twist on Bourdieu’s
concept of field, Pope’s position in the rising separation of the symbolic and power fields was
emblematic of what was to happen in future ages, for his distancing (independence) from
the politics and policies of his age (corrupted commercialism) and yet partaking, within that
system of hierarchies, of the commercial success provided by a (good) work of art, which
however was not yet so socially acknowledged as it would be in the next centuries. In his
personal separation of the two fields, Pope could be inside and outside of a commercial axi-
ology, which he accepted when it accommodated itself to the hierarchies of his artistic world,
and which he did not accept when it corresponded to the hierarchies of the field of power.
In other words, through his understanding of the separate condition of the cultural field he
was able to appreciate the power of cultural capital, at the same time rejecting the forms
(commercial society) through which the field of commercial relationship was restructuring
itself in his age. This rejection, in turn, allowed him to silence the paradox of his ability to
capitalize (also economically) on his cultural power and his rejection of commercialism.
Pope could survive the paradox of being in and out, included in, and excluded from society
at the same time. Yet, he could not perceive the fact that “his” cultural, autonomous field was
always inscribed in the other, larger field that he rejected (and by which he was rejected); he
also did not acknowledge that that interplay of exclusions/inclusions was part of a conflict
for the acquisition of primacy in the literary field, for the acquisition of cultural capital.
4 These terms of abuse occur in almost all the pamphlets attacking Pope.
5 This is a pamphlet viciously attacking Pope’s deformity, among other things, written per-
haps by John Dennis (Guerinot 166).

6 “He is the moral poet of all civilization and as such, let us hope that he will one day be
the national poet of mankind,” Byron said (qtd. in Bateson and Joukovsky 206). Byron was
one of very few Romantics to take sides with Pope.
7 Jacob’s entry on Pope might have been seen and improved by Pope himself, as Jacob
himself would confess after his relationship with Pope became strained, because of an
unpleasant remark about him in The Dunciad (see McLaverty, “Pope and Giles Jacob”).
8 “Industrious, civil Pope” is the phrase of Saverio Bettinelli, Jesuit father, polymath, and
author of the Lettere inglesi (English Letters, 1766). Bettinelli considered Pope the most per-
fect of all poets in all ages (“io non conosco il più perfetto, tra tutti gli antichi e i moderni
poeti, di Pope”; Lettere 708).
9 This edition presented many controversial aspects, all depending on the interventions of
Warburton, who was authorized by Pope’s will to edit his works without altering the texts,
but who provided a set of new notes, in addition to Pope’s, that were criticized for being
centered on the vested interests of the “militant divine” (as Mark Akenside called him; qtd.
in Macdonald 226; see also Nichol xxxiii–iv). Joseph Warton, in the “Advertisement” to his
1797 edition of Pope’s works, says that “the reason for undertaking it, was the universal
complaint, that Dr. Warburton had disfigured and disgraced his Edition, with many forced
and far-sought interpretations, totally unsupported by the passages they were brought to elu-
xxxvi
Flavio Gregori
cidate” (The Works of Alexander Pope … With Notes and Illustrations by Joseph Warton 1: v).
Commenting on a letter in which Pope entrusts Warburton with his works, Warton writes,
“Without incurring, I hope, the censure of being a short-sighted and malevolent critic, I
venture to say, that our author’s fond expectation of his commentator’s setting his works in
the best light, was extremely ill-founded” (9: 377). Macdonald however notices that Warton
made things worse, in effect adopting his predecessor’s method, adding notes of his own and
digressive materials, and too often quarrelling with Warburton (320–21).
10 Warburton’s inelegant inscription,
Heroes and Kings your distance keep

In Peace let one poor Poet sleep:
Who never flatter’d folks like you,
Let Horace blush and Virgil too
sounds more papist than the Pope. See Deutsch 171–73.
11 Paradoxically, the Romantic marginalization of Pope transformed the poet into a ghost
that was perceptible everywhere, that is, in his very exclusion from the canon and in the
substitution of his poetics with anti-Popean poetics (Griffin).
12 The attribution is doubtful, as the TE editors, Norman Ault and John Butt, write in a
note to the poem (TE 6: 387).

13 Hervey harped on Pope’s venality and vanity (Guerinot 296–97, 300–01).
14 “Not Words, but Manners must reclaim Mankind … Good Actions are the Test of vir-
tuous Men; / And not the Dashes of a Madman’s Pen” (7) were verses whose substance Pope
would have subscribed to, yet this is a pamphlet attacking him (eventually for allegedly
supporting Prince Frederick and the Patriots).
15 Zionkowski analyzes the implications of this new version of masculinity that allows Pope
to attack Hervey’s sexuality as “Lord Fanny” (in The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace)
and as “Sporus” (in The Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot).
16 In his note, Warburton says that
This Letter bears the same place in our Author’s prose that the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
does in its poetry. They are both Apologetical, repelling the libelous slanders on his
Reputation: with this difference, that the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, his friend, was chiefly
directed against Grub-street Writers, and this Letter to the Noble Lord, his enemy, against
Court-Scribblers. For the rest, they are both Master-pieces in their kinds; That in verse
more grave, moral, and sublime; This in prose, more lively, critical, and pointed; but
equally conductive to what he had most at heart, the Vindication of his Moral Character.
(The Works of Alexander Pope 8: 253)
17 And yet, Rosemary Cowler notices how Pope, “[s]uperior and aloof as [he] may seek
to appear in this work, he is from time to time betrayed by his feelings” and tries to elicit
distress from the reader, when instead the general tone of the letter is and should remain
ironic (438). Cowler’s introduction and notes to the Letter to a Noble Lord are of extreme
importance to the understanding of Pope’s relationship with nobility at the time he decided
to stoop to truth and moralize his song (433–83).
18 McKeon would probably rubricate Pope’s attitude under the heading “conservative
ideology,” which defended noble lineage “not for its intrinsic value but for what Swift calls
its ‘imaginary value’” (170). Pope certainly did share the conservative opinion that the
progressive ideology was “money and power without merit”; however, his taking part in
the commercialization of literature and his unparalleled assault on aristocratic amateurish-
ness complicated his conservative vision, despite his adherence to Bolingbroke’s “romantic”
ideology (McKeon 210).
xxxvii
19 For instance the Duke of Chandos, the object of a vitriolic assault in Pope’s Epistle to
Burlington; see Guerinot xxiv, 206, 208, 211–13, 216, 225, 227, 245–46, 302–03, 312–13.
20 Grub Street retorted:
We are told, that, Men are not Bunglers because they are Poor, but they are Poor because they
are Bunglers. I only ask, How false is this in Fact? It is not well known, and has it not been
as justly observed, “That the great Lord Bacon was suffered to die Poor and Miserable;
and the great Spenser to Starve? Ben Johnson was more than once sacrificed to his worth-
less Rivals. Milton who was an Honour to Great Britain, and an Ornament to Human
Kind, continued long neglected and obscure.” (And could get but fifteen Pounds for his
Bungling Poem called Paradise Lost, tho’ Mr. Pope has some Thousands for his surprizing
Translation of Homer). (The Curliad 2)
21 Pat Rogers has written a recent, excellent study of Pope and Stuart ideology, Pope and
the Destiny of the Stuarts (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), which appeared too recently for me to
discuss here.
22 According to Kristina Straub, Pope’s fears of attacks on his sexuality were strictly linked
to his fears about his Catholicism (189–90).

23 Dr. Fossile’s partition between Platonists and Cartesians depends on the fact that
Descartes was considered a materialist philosopher (because of his theory of vortexes and
the pineal gland; see Kerby-Miller 286–87).
24 Colly Cibber thought he knew how to explain Pope’s supposed malevolence. In his Letter
from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope he wrote:

I could wish … that whatever Faults I find with the Morals of Mr. Pope, I charge none to
his Poetical Capacity, but chiefly to his Ruling Passion, which is so much his Master, that
we must allow, his inimitable Verse is generally warmest, where his too fond Indulgence
of that Passion inspires it. How much brighter still might that Genius shine, could it be
equally inspired by Good-nature! (25)
25 Thomas Woodman disagrees with Leo Damrosch’s insistence that Pope is the “first
modern poet.” In my opinion, Woodman is right in contesting Damrosch’s idea that Pope
“left the Renaissance behind and knew that he was doing so” and embraced the age of the
novel (qtd. in “Wanting Nothing but the Laurel,” 56). Yet, I agree with Damrosch that
Pope’s very refusal of modernity (of the world as it is) makes him a modern poet, modern
by half, since he could not accept any notion of progress or of utopia. Pope actually left the
Renaissance behind but did not know that he was doing so.
26 Hobbes’ key sentence, which establishes the priority of the salus populi, is: “The obliga-
tion of subjects to the sovereign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power
lasteth, by which is able to protect them” (Leviathan, pt. 2, ch. 21; 147). Its mirror reverse is
the following sentence: “If the sovereign banish his subject; during the banishment, he is not
subject” (pt. 2, ch. 24; 148). Andrea Cavalletti’s interpretation, like my own, is inspired by
the ideas of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who studied a special form of the paradoxical
relationship of inclusion/exclusion that he finds prototypical of Western thought (see Homo
Sacer). According to Agamben, the legislating power captures the flux of life and regulates
it (i.e., makes it its own) in the paradoxical relationship of the sovereign power. This is
possible only through a relation that both includes and excludes what it rules: if it did not
exclude the ruled (i.e., what it is absolved of, freed from, absolutum) it would not be abso-
lute, yet there would be no object of exclusion if, beforehand, this had not been included
in the series of the objects virtually excluded. The norm becomes such only through an act
of exceptionality that cuts the rule from out of the indistinct flux of life, separating (and
declaring) the normal from the abnormal. It is as if indistinctness took itself out of itself,
like the Baron of Münchausen lifting himself with his own hand, and transforms itself into
xxxviii
Flavio Gregori
distinction. Sovereign power maintains itself in its capacity to suspend the law in a state of
exception that constitutes itself as a rule. The sovereign ban is the fundamental form of the
relationship of inclusion through exclusion (18) and finds its specimen in the figure of the
homo sacer who, under ancient Roman law, was included in the juridical order only on the
basis of his utter exclusion—his capacity to be killed but not sacrificed (82–83). On the
other hand, in The Dunciad, the behavior of this multitudo dissoluta might also be interpreted
in terms of interpassivity, activity that does not imply agency and that, instead, reinforces the
social device acting de facto in lieu of the agents (who therefore cannot aspire to any form
of utopia). On interpassivity see Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 117–19.
27 The Dunciad, for instance, is a clear example of the burden of the present that reclaims a
future for itself without acknowledging a past. Such recognition should be a prerequisite for
experience to become meaningful, in Pope’s opinion, so that The Dunciad’s world of experi-
ence is pure actuality with much pretension to future but with no future. It would, however,
be interesting to investigate the value Pope gives to imagination to bridge the gap between
experience and expectation, between satire and utopia. This would also entail a reconsidera-
tion of Koselleck’s ideas, so as to admit the possibility of a convergence between experience
and expectation, such as the one proposed by Anders Schinkel (42–54). David Fairer pro-
vides the most interesting discussion of Pope’s imagination (Pope’s Imagination).
28 “Courts I see not, Courtiers I know not, Kings I adore not, Queens I compliment not;
so I am never like to be in fashion, nor in dependance,” he wrote to Swift (20 April 1733;
Corr. 3: 367).
29 Entsagung, the act of giving up one’s juvenile dreams that the world can be made better
by the artist’s consciousness and works, would be typical of the late eighteenth-century and
Romantic Bildungsroman. Pope wrote: “Happy they! who are banish’d from us; but happier
they, who can banish themselves, or more properly banish the world from them! Alas! I live
at Twickenham!” (letter to Edward Blount, 27 June 1723; Corr. 2: 176).
30 In his poetry and correspondence, Pope became the mythographer of himself, to the
point that he anticipated the Preromantic and Romantic myth of the artist that is larger than
his heroes because “in addition to his ability to see in them their capacity for great moral
and spiritual actions, he has in himself the divine art to invent them … if an excellent writer
wants to portray a hero, he creates it from within himself; therefore he finds it in his own
soul,” as the late eighteenth-century Italian writer Vittorio Alfieri wrote (1: 157–58; my
trans.).
31 Pope’s oscillating between satiric and elegiac modes (his two governing modes) makes
him a fit specimen of Schiller’s sentimental poet, who, not being spontaneously natural
(naïve), looks for nature through morality and the representation of the ideal (in Pope’s
case, a lost ideal).
32 Howard Erskine-Hills rightly calls attention to Pope’s antipathy toward slavery (“Pope
and Slavery”). For a thoroughly opposed view, see Laura Brown’s accusatory interpretation
of Pope as supporter of imperialist stances (especially 6–45). John Richardson links Pope’s
discourses on slavery to the discourses of his own personal liberty (“So Proud, I am no
Slave”) (101 and passim).
33 I do not mean to reject Habermas’s notion of public sphere; on the contrary, I think
it is a useful tool to describe the competitive acquisition of knowledge and power. Yet,
Habermas’s description of the English eighteenth-century public sphere, as has been noted
by several commentators, Bourdieu included, is too abstract, idealized, and factually flawed.
For instance, it does not account for art’s capacity to assess its autonomy not only in agree-
ment but also in contradiction with, sometimes opposition to, the public (i.e., political)
sphere (Thorne 540). I agree with George Justice that if the “idealized public sphere offered
xxxix
by Habermas did not exist in eighteenth-century Britain … [the] idea of the public sphere,
nevertheless, lay behind the practices of eighteenth-century writers, publishers, and readers
… in rhetorical strategies, the marketing of books, and shifts in generic choices” (19). To
counterbalance the excessive (“whiggish”) idealism of Habermas’s theory, Lee Morrissey
proposes to read the eighteenth-century rise of the public sphere in Žižekian terms as the
struggle among competing subjects to be admitted in the debate, “including the debate about
the structure of the debate” (160), so that the emerging public sphere is not the public sphere
but one among the possible public spheres excluding other spheres and subjects.
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xliv

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SLI

Studies in the Literary Imagination

ALEXANDER POPE: A POET ON THE

Volume 38, Number 1

© Copyright 2005 Department of English, Georgia State University

i Introduction: Pope on the Margins and in the Center

1 Pope and the Paradoxical Centrality of the Satirist

15 Living on the Margin: Alexander Pope and the Rural Ideal

39 Bust Story: Pope at Stowe, or the Politics and Myths of Landscape

77 The Mercantile Bard: Commerce and Conflict in Pope

95 Cato’s Ghosts: Pope, Addison, and Opposition Cultural Politics

117 Taste and Temporality in An Epistle to Burlington

137 Bolingbroke’s Laugh: Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Bolingbroke

163 “Mighty Mother”: Pope and the Maternal

VOLUME 38, NO. 1 SPRING 2005

219 The Dunciad and the City: Pope and Heterotopia

INTRODUCTION: POPE ON THE MARGINS

My sole Ambition o’er myself to reign.

But why then publish?

I. POPE’S PARADOXICAL CENTRALITY

“private Character is the best, being summ’d up in a good Companion

When he was only twenty-nine, his “pride” prompted him to publish

A monument to book trade continuity, the 1751 Works embodied

immortalise his honour within the precincts of that venerable pile,” as

II. POPE’S SOCIAL MARGINALITY

Low cunning is thy aim—thy lines dispense

Mr. Pope’s Father was of a Gentleman’s Family in Oxfordshire, the

a dilettante writer who “symbolized the structure of power that relegated

Pope respectful of hierarchy? Here Pope is indeed patronizing his better,

but always in terms of cultural sublimation. Pope opposed the aristocracy

Is Pope’s independence really underpropped by Christian virtue? Is

You only scribble to be great and rich.

Rails at the Harlot that supplies her Place;

III. ERASMIAN TOLERANCE AND EMOTIONAL RECUSANCY

suspected of being Jacobites, but he was never outspokenly Jacobite him-

allegoresis of Pope’s “emotional Jacobitism” in its most alchemical and

It would … be difficult even for your Lordship’s [Hervey] penetra-

or too tender a heart. It is by these alone I have hitherto liv’d excluded

Likewise, we should not underestimate the sense of martyrdom with which

IV. PHYSICAL DEFORMITY: POPE’S PERCEPTION

Pope, a second “Athanasius contra Mundum,” as Lord Oxford called

targeted for his physical disabilities, the result of a tubercular disease of

understanding of woman as “the not man that by opposition gives identity

Pope’s figure is a text both ineffably original—that which, like the

V. POET FOR POETRY’S SAKE: POPE’S COMPROMISE WITH

commented Warburton, “yet he exists intombed”; Works 4: 15). Pope’s was

aristocracy of the Hanoverian court considered the poets simply as hire-

The bard they banish’d from his native soil,

even granting an impossibility of Reforming the Publick, your

However, that public poetry (“serving [one’s] Country”) should become

behavior and decisions stresses human intentions over metaphysical plan-

this contradiction need not be seen as an embarrassment to the dis-

Pope’s attempt to recentralize the marginalization of his poetry through

VI. POPE AND THE DYNAMISM OF MARGINALIZED CENTRALITY

Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice

haps by John Dennis (Guerinot 166).

Heroes and Kings your distance keep

note to the poem (TE 6: 387).

to his fears about his Catholicism (189–90).