Epistle I, i (imitated by Pope and included here) he dedicates
himself late in life to the task of achieving wisdom, but
recognizes in himself all the changeability and restlessness that
he can satirize in more obvious forms in others. It is a poem in
which the quest is made to seem no less urgent in spite of the
implied recognition in the end that the goal may never be
reached. The vital start is to orientate existence towards the
desired end. In adapting Horace, Pope intensifies both the
urgency of withdrawal from false goals (of which poetry may
be one) in favour of ‘Life’s instant business’ (l. 42) and the
contrasting evils of the world from which he withdraws:
While with the silent growth of ten per cent,
In dirt and darkness, hundreds stink content.
(ll. 132–3)Equally striking is the powerful confession of his own error at
the end:
...each opinion with the next at strife,
One ebb and flow of follies all my life.
(ll. 167–8)The fruits of Pope’s self-knowledge achieved by way of
Horatian self-questioning are not paralleled anywhere else in
his works. In the intensity of his re-creation, we can see that
Pope’s affinity with Horace is not really a matter of
temperament, manner, or style, but goes deeper to the
philosophical core of the poems.
Pope’s satire was the product and cause of much
controversy. His first reaction to attack was The Dunciad of
- Thereafter, though many of his portraits were
composites drawn from a variety of sources, he was
increasingly drawn into personal satire in a crusade of defence
and counter-attack that occupied most of the last years of his
life. His defence through Horace provoked one of his victims,
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (‘Sappho’), in conjunction with
Lord Hervey (later ‘Sporus’) to reply that his satire was
nothing better than warped malignancy, the impotent hatred
of a misanthropic soul imprisoned in a deformed body:
Who but must laugh, this bully when he sees
A little insect shivering at a breeze.^26