Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: The Achievement of Dryden's “Discourse on Satyr”
- CONTEXTS
- TEXTS
- 4 The Swelling Volume: The Apocalyptic Satire of Rochester's Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country
- 5 The “Allusion to Horace”: Rochester's Imitative Mode
- 6 “Natures Holy Bands” in Absalom and Achitophel: Fathers and Sons, Satire and Change
- 7 The Rape of the Lock and the Contexts of Warfare
- 8 “Such as Sir Robert Would Approve”? Answers to Pope's Answer from Horace
- 9 The Conventions of Classical Satire and the Practice of Pope
- 10 Persius, the Opposition to Walpole, and Pope
- 11 Johnson's London and Juvenal's Third Satire: The Country as “Ironic” Norm
- 12 No “Mock Debate”: Questions and Answers in The Vanity of Human Wishes
- 13 Pope, his Successors, and the Dissociation of Satiric Sensibility: An Hypothesis
- Notes
- Index
13 - Pope, his Successors, and the Dissociation of Satiric Sensibility: An Hypothesis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: The Achievement of Dryden's “Discourse on Satyr”
- CONTEXTS
- TEXTS
- 4 The Swelling Volume: The Apocalyptic Satire of Rochester's Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country
- 5 The “Allusion to Horace”: Rochester's Imitative Mode
- 6 “Natures Holy Bands” in Absalom and Achitophel: Fathers and Sons, Satire and Change
- 7 The Rape of the Lock and the Contexts of Warfare
- 8 “Such as Sir Robert Would Approve”? Answers to Pope's Answer from Horace
- 9 The Conventions of Classical Satire and the Practice of Pope
- 10 Persius, the Opposition to Walpole, and Pope
- 11 Johnson's London and Juvenal's Third Satire: The Country as “Ironic” Norm
- 12 No “Mock Debate”: Questions and Answers in The Vanity of Human Wishes
- 13 Pope, his Successors, and the Dissociation of Satiric Sensibility: An Hypothesis
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The direction of Pope's career as a formal verse satirist is from an essentially Horatian ethic epistle like Burlington (1731), to mingled satire with a variety of Horatian, Juvenalian, and Persian emphases, to the over-whelmingly Juvenalian–Persian elevation and gloom of the Epilogue to the Satires (1738). Both Pope's poems and his contemporaries' reception of them indicate that his career was progressively less, not more, of “an Imitatio Horatii,” and that Horace's “place to stand” was progressively less, not more, attractive for him; it was sapped and then replaced by the conventions of Persius and Juvenal, which Pope himself welcomed.
One may, however, raise certain questions regarding the satiric method I have attributed to Pope. Why did he continue to imitate the satirist he was supposedly rejecting? Should he not have imitated poems of Juvenal and Persius as well? Some answers to these questions are implied in the poems imitated themselves – imitating Donne's Renaissance Horace, for example, is imitating a surrogate Juvenal. There are other answers as well, since in spite of Horace's several inadequacies, he and his special achievements were necessary for Pope's own purposes.
Why Horace?
Pope's imitations of Horace are part of his campaign to refine English verse. Early in his career he adapted the Ovidian epistle and the Virgilian country poem, and as he matured he looked to the third member of that distinguished group to continue his task.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Eighteenth-Century SatireEssays on Text and Context from Dryden to Peter Pindar, pp. 186 - 203Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988