and niggardly encomium to say he is the great poet of
reason, the first of ethical authors in verse?^4The final thought with which he leaves the reader is that Pope
never wrote anything ‘in a strain so truly sublime as “The
Bard” of Gray’ (a poem that had been severely castigated by
Johnson in his Life of Gray^5 ).
In applying the Horatian test to Pope, Warton could be
said to be working within the mainstream of the ancient
classical inheritance in which literature is classified into kinds
or genres where the greatest prestige is attached to those with
lofty subjects and elevated styles, notably epic tragedy and the
Pindaric ode. Warton did not allow that Pope excelled in any
of these kinds since he discounted the Homer translation on
the grounds that it was not original. He does not give it a
mention in either volume of the Essay. But in his criticism of
Pope he is also reflecting and to some extent foreshadowing
radical changes of taste and sensibility that began in the
middle and continued through the later years of the
eighteenth century. He looks favourably upon a developing
new school of poetry based not so much like that of Dryden
and Pope upon re-creation of the classics as upon cultivation
of ‘original genius’. The terms in which he praises The Rape
of the Lock make it clear what he means by original genius:
It is in this composition that Pope principally appears a
poet; in which he has displayed more imagination than in
all his other works taken together. It should however be
remembered, that he was not the FIRST and former creator
of those beautiful machines, the sylphs, on which his claim
to imagination is chiefly founded. He found them existing
ready to his hand; but has, indeed, employed them with
singular judgement and artifice.^6Warton does not therefore deny Pope the name of poet
altogether (this was to come later with Matthew Arnold^7 ) as he
had virtually denied the name of poet to Donne and Swift in his
dedicatory epistle, but through the Horatian test he implies that
Pope works for the most part in genres essentially unpoetic and
is more a man of sense and wit than a true poet. Nevertheless the
questions he asked—How are we to rank Pope among the poets?