英美文学选读学习笔记 Alexander Pope

Pope (1688-1744) was born into a well-to-do merchant family of Roman Catholic faith in London. II1 health accompanied him almost from the cradle to the grave. Because of his constant sickness and the family religion, he was not able to go to university or hold any public office like many of his contemporaries.

Pope had wide associations with literary men of his time, though.  He made friends with both the Whig writers such as Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, William Congreve and William Walsh and the Tories like Jonathan Swift, John Gay and Thomas Parnell. In 1714 Pope and his friends formed a club which was to cooperate in a scheme to satirize all sorts of false learning and pedantry in literature, philosophy, science and other branches of knowledge. They created a figure Martinus Scriblerus (Martin the Scribbler) and used him as a butt of satire. The real importance of  the club, however, is that it fostered a satiric temper which was to find exssion in such works as Gulliver's Travels and The Dunciad.

Pope found among the men of letters both friends and enemies. He was loved and respected by many honorable, eminent and gifted men of his time, but was envied, derided and attacked by some less talented for his writings, his religion and even his physical deformity. Pope, a very sensitive man, would strike back hard, and in the constant verbal battles he developed a style of biting satire.

As a resentative of the Enlightenment, Pope was one of the first to introduce rationalism to England. He upheld the existing social system as an ideal one, but he was not entirely blind to the rapid moral, political and cultural deterioration. Commercialization and money-worship were invading all aspects of national life. He, therefore, assumed the role of champion of traditional civilization: of reason, classical learning, sound art, good taste and public virtue. For him the sume value was order -- cosmic order, political order, social order, aesthetic order, and this emphasis on order found exssion in all of his works.

Pope made his name as a great poet with the publication of An Essay on Criticism in 1711. The  year, he published The Rape of the Lock, a finest mock epic. The story is based on an actual episode in which a lord did really cut a lock of hair from the head of a young lady, thus breaking up the friendship between the two families. Pope was told to write something to restore peace but he chose to use the mock epic form to retell the cutting of the lock, to ridicule the trivial incident, to emphasize the pettiness of the quarrel and to satirize the foolish, meaningless life of the lords and ladies in the aristocratic bourgeois society of the eighteenth century England.

The Dunciad, generally considered Pope's best satiric work, took him over ten years for final completion. The poem goes deep in meaning and works at many levels. Its satire is directed at Dullness in general, and in the course of it all the literary men of the age, poets mainly, who had made Pope's enemies, are held up to ridicule. But the poem is not confined to personal attack. Dullness as reflected in the corruptness of government, social morals, education and even religion, is expertly exposed and satirized.

Pope was the greatest poet of his time. He strongly advocated neoclassicism, emphasizing that literary works should be judged by classical rules of order, reason, logic, restrained emotion, good taste and decorum. He worked painstakingly on his poems, developed a satiric, concise, smooth, graceful and well-balanced style and finally brought to its last perfection the heroic couplet Dryden had successfully used in his plays.

Pope's chief works are: An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (first version 1712), The Dunciad (1728), An Essay on Man (1733-1734), "Eloisa to Abelard"(1717) and "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" (1735). He also translated Homer's Iliad (1720) and Odyssey (1726) and edited some of Shakespeare's plays (1713-1726 ).

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