Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
The ease of phrase and movement here justify Pope’s claim that, like Horace, he
‘lisped in numbers [verse], for the numbers came’.
Oliver Goldsmith’s Account of the Augustan Age in England (1759) placed this age
in Queen Anne’s reign, when parallels were drawn with arts and letters under
Augustus. The order of Virgil’s poems – pastoral in youth, then didactic, then epic –
had been followed by Spenser and Milton. Dryden had taken the more social path of
another Augustan poet, Horace, writing epistles, elegies and occasional poems; he
then translated Virgil. Pope wrote pastorals, then a didactic Essay on Criticism (an
update of Horace’s Ars Poetica); a mock-epic in The Rape of the Lock; translations of
Homer’s epics; then moral essays and Horatian epistles; and the anti-epic Dunciad.
Pope had the humanist’s faith in the educative role of poetry, and prized neo-classi-
cal clarity, concision and elegance. He used the profession of literature to exemplify
and defend values which made humanity saner, finer and more complete. He never
stopped: editing Shakespeare, annotating the Dunciad, and publishing a polished
version of his own letters.
Pope refined every couplet, for
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
An Essay on Criticism
Style matters, for the purpose of art is to show reality in so clear a light that its
truth comes home:
True wit is Nature to advantage dressed
What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.
‘Wit’ here means poetic insight, not the cleverness which makes Pope so quotable.
His polish may suggest that he was unoriginal. But his Pastorals and Windsor Forest
introduced a new and picturesque landscape poetry, paving the way for the190 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790
Alexander Pope (1688–1744)1709 Pastorals
1711 An Essay on Criticism
1712 The Rape of the Lock(in two Cantos)
1713 Windsor Forest
1715–20 The Iliad(trans.)
1725 The Works of Shakespeare(ed.)
1726 The Odyssey(trans.)
1728 The Dunciad
1733 Essay on Man
1735 Epistle to Arbuthnot
1734– Horatian translations, imitations, satires, Moral Epistles