Romantic poetry of nature. In the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth
attacked the artificial diction of Pope, claiming that the poet ‘is a man speaking to
men’. But poets, strictly speaking, are writers who have learned to make written
words speak.
Matthew Arnold said that Dryden and Pope were classics not of our poetry but
of our prose. Pope’s verse has the clarity and judgement of prose – in his Essays on
Criticism and on Man, and in his Moral Essays. But his Elegy to the Memory of an
Unfortunate Lady and Eloisa to Abelard are emotional, and his Epistles, like that To
Miss Blount, on her Leaving the Town, after the Coronation (of George I), have a fine
modulation of feeling and a poet’s apprehension of particulars.
This little poem is a key to Pope’s work. Teresa Blount and her sister Martha were
close friends of Pope. Writing to her in the country, he begins with a Roman simile:
‘As some fond virgin, whom her mother’s care ...’. This promises the dutiful deco-
rum which gave 18th-century verse a bad name, but the second line of the couplet –
‘Drags from the town to wholesome country air’ – wrong-foots the reader. We feel
Teresa’s reaction and hear the mother’s words. The boredom of country life – for a
girl who has been presented at Court – is given in miniature:
She went,to plain-work, and to purling brooks, needlework
Old-fashioned halls, dull aunts and croaking rooks:
She went from opera, park, assembly, play,
To morning walks, and prayers three hours a day;
To part her time ‘twixt reading and bohea, a costly kind of tea
To muse and spill her solitary tea, pronounced ‘tay’
Or o’er cold coffee trifle with the spoon,
Count the slow clock and dine exact at noon; an unfashionable hour
Divert her eyes with pictures in the fire,
Hum halfa tune, tell stories to the squire;
Up to her godly garret after seven,
There starve and pray, for that’s the way to heaven.
After the excitements of Town, the old familiar things are different, and worse.
The admirer signs off in the last couplet: ‘Vexed to be still in town, I knit my brow,
/ Look sour, and hum a tune – as you may now.’ She wants to be in town, he wants
to be with her in the country. The vanity of human wishes is an Augustan theme.
This Epistle anticipates The Rape of the Lock,The Dunciad and the Moral Essays.
Translation as tradition
In his Life of Pope, Johnson gave much attention to Pope’s translation of Homer,
judging the Iliad ‘the noblest version of poetry the world has ever seen’ and ‘a
performance which no age or nation can pretend to equal’. Homer was the basis of
classical education, both the standard author in Aristotle’s Poetics and Virgil’s model
for the Aeneid. English education was Latin-based, but better Greek had brought
Homer within reach. Pope wrote of Virgil in the Essay on Criticism that ‘Homer and
Nature were, he found, the same.’ This was true of Pope too, whose favourite read-
ing as a boy was Ogilby’s 1660 version of the Iliad. He spent his best ten years trans-
lating Homer – and earned a financial independence.
At 21 he had translated the speech in which Sarpedon encourages Glaucus into
battle,arguing that the first in peace should be the first in war. The idea that heroic
status entails responsibility was adapted to an 18th-century society also based on
rank. Public schoolboys learned Sarpedon’s speech in Greek. Pope’s version is:
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 191