volume was not published until after the Life in 1782
(probably because of the hostile reception accorded to the first)
but although the first part treated only the early poetry up to
and including Eloisa to Abelard, in the dedicatory letter and in
the final remarks on Eloisa, Warton’s general view is made
very clear. His criticism is of interest not merely in establishing
the context of Johnson’s more valuable Life but also for its
own sake as it raises acutely for the first time questions about
Pope’s poetry that have been raised time and again since.
Warton genuinely admires Pope but finds the species of
poetry in which he excelled to be an inferior kind. In the
dedicatory epistle he distinguishes between a man of sense, a
man of wit, and a true poet. The true poet who writes ‘pure
poetry’ is distinguished by a ‘creative and glowing
imagination’. This is his translation of a phrase used by
Horace (‘acer spiritus et vis’) in a well-known passage from
one of his satires (I, iv, 38–62) in which he disclaims the name
of poetry for his ‘sermones’ or conversations as he called his
satires and ethical epistles. Horace had here devised a test for
poetry: take from the verses their metrical regularity and
transpose the order of the words (presumably to the regular
order of prose). If the original passage is truly poetical, it will
be possible to discern the essential lineaments of the poet,
‘disjecti membra poetae’, even in this disfigurement. Using
Horace as his authority, Warton proceeds to try the test on
the opening fourteen lines of Pope’s third Moral Essay, the
‘Epistle to Cobham’, and finds the result most excellent sense
but as unpoetical as the verses of Horace who recommends
the trial. The essential poetry of Homer or Milton, he argues,
cannot be so reduced to the tamest of prose. He then comes to
his central question, and proceeds to the verdict of Voltaire on
Boileau to characterize Pope:
The sublime and the pathetic are the two chief nerves of all
genuine poesy. What is there very sublime or very pathetic
in Pope?...‘Incapable, perhaps, of the sublime which lifts
the soul, and of the feeling which softens it, but made to
enlighten those upon whom nature bestowed the one and
the other, diligent, exacting, precise, pure, harmonious, he
becomes finally the poet of reason.’^2