Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose

To defend himself against attacks made upon his satire in
The Moral Essays, Pope turned directly to his Roman
predecessor in The Imitations of Horace: ‘An answer from
Horace was both more full and of more dignity than any I
could have made in my own person.’ The poems were printed
alongside the Latin, so that readers might appreciate the
parallels. In the defence of satire wittily made by Horace in
dialogue with the lawyer Trebatius (Satire II, i) and wittily
adapted by Pope addressing Fortescue, an old friend but
supporter of the government which Pope opposed, the poet
represents himself as a doughty champion of virtue against
vice: satire is distinguished from libel and thus the dignity and
probity of this time-honoured form are vigorously asserted.
As his contemporaries soon noted, Pope, in his imitation, is
sharper and more particular in his attack than his Latin
original. Though particular references are much more difficult
to decipher in Horace than in Pope, it seems that despite
asserting the intention to do so, Horace in fact does not very
often attack recognizable living individuals. Pope’s greater
particularization is not, however, the whole raison d’être of
the satire; it is merely part of the more general imaginative
process whereby the modern freely adapts to his own
circumstances and purposes the sentiments and images of his
ancient original. For example, in humorous selfdefence,
Horace argues that while each man has his pleasure, his
delight is to follow in the footsteps of the old Roman satirist
Lucilius, making verses and entrusting his secrets to his books
so that his whole life is open to view, and he further
associates his satirical independence jokingly with his
ancestry, coming as he does from the borders of Apulia or
Lucania, he does not know which, both frontier states that
had stubbornly held out against the might of Rome in time
past (ll. 29–39). Pope’s adaptation of the first part is more
pointedly defensive, and in the second, instead of trying a
comparable joke about his own origins (this might have been
difficult to parallel), from the hint of ambiguity in Horace’s
ancestry (Lucanian or Apulian) he goes his own way to the
famous lines in which he lays claim to moderation and
discretion, being all things to all men, sentiments quite
different from the implication of independent ferocity in