Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose

Can there be a hierarchy of subjects and kinds? Did Pope
suppress his imaginative side? Did he make an inferior choice in
concentrating upon the moral, the didactic and the satiric? Is
satire a lower and transient form?—these questions about Pope
have been much debated and raise in their turn fundamental
questions about the nature of poetry itself.
What then is Johnson’s estimate of Pope? He agrees with
Warton that good sense is a characteristic excellence though
he transcends him in his definition of it:

Of his intellectual character, the constituent and fundamental

principle was good sense, a prompt and intuitive perception

of consonance and propriety.... But good sense alone is a

sedate and quiescent quality...Pope likewise had genius.^8

Genius Johnson describes as a combination of qualities each
of which he defines with trenchant precision and each of
which he locates in particular works, having first suggested
that they are well adjusted to each other in Pope generally:

Pope had, in proportions very nicely adjusted to each other,

all the qualities that constitute genius. He had Invention, by

which new trains of events are formed, and new scenes of

imagery displayed, as in The Rape of the Lock, and by

which extrinsic and adventitious embellishments and

illustrations are connected with a known subject, as in the

Essay on Criticism. He had Imagination, which strongly

impresses on the writer’s mind, and enables him to convey

to the reader, the various forms of nature, incidents of life,

and energies of passion, as in his Eloisa, Windsor Forest and

the Ethic Epistles. He had Judgement which selects from life

or nature what the present purpose requires, and by

separating the essence of things from its concomitants, often

makes the representation more powerful than the reality:

and he had colours of language always before him, ready to

decorate his matter with every grace of elegant expression,

as when he accommodates his diction to the wonderful

multiplicity of Homer’s sentiments and descriptions.^9

The distinction between invention and imagination improves
upon Warton, and he asserts directly what Warton’s
comments on the ethical epistles (published after the Life)