Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose

In English the three great poets of the sublime and the
pathetic are Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. The attitudes
in the dedication are given practical expression in comment
on the poems in the Essay itself and lead to the conclusion of
its final paragraph:

This epistle [Eloisa to Abelard] is, on the whole, one of the

most highly finished and certainly the most interesting, of

the pieces of our author: and, together with The Elegy to

the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, is the only instance

of the pathetic Pope has given us. I think one may venture

to remark, that the reputation of Pope, as a poet, among

posterity, will be principally owing to his Windsor Forest,

his Rape of the Lock and his Eloisa to Abelard; whilst the

facts and characters alluded to and exposed, in his later

writings, will be forgotten and unknown, and their

poignancy and propriety little relished. For wit and satire

are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are

eternal.^3

In the course of time Warton modified his position or at least
the expression of it. Transcribing in the second volume a
passage from An Essay on Man he feels himself ‘almost
tempted to retract and assertion at the beginning of this work
that there is nothing transcendently sublime in Pope’. In
comment on The Moral Essays, he is highly appreciative of
the poetic quality of individual passages. Nevertheless in a
judicious summing-up he remained true to his earlier position:

it will appear that the largest portion of them is of the

didactic, moral and satiric kind; and consequently, not of

the most poetic species of poetry; whence it is manifest that

good sense and judgement were his characteristical

excellencies, rather than fancy and invention; not that the

author of the Rape of the Lock and Eloisa, can be thought

to want imagination, but because his imagination was not

his predominant talent, because he indulged it not and

because he gave not so many proofs of this talent as of the

other.... Whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually

possessed, he with-held and stifled.... Surely it is no narrow