Topic- The poetry of Pope, supported by Podmeswar
*Discuss
critically on Pope’s poetry.
Ans:-
In
the 18th century, there was the completion of the reaction against
Elizabethan Romanticism that had started in the 17th century with
Denham, Walter and Dryden. Pope and his contemporaries stood on the other
extreme to Elizabethan Romantists and ushered in the age of prose and region,
as Mathew Arnold characterizes in the 18th century, Dryden and Pope
were the greatest poets of the Augustan age who conscientiously looked to the
writers of Greek and Roman antiquity for guidance and inspiration.
Pope
was so strong as a poet that the 18th century is also known as the ‘Age
of Pope’. One of the earliest works of Pope was ‘Pastorals’. These poems
were published
in 1709. The characters and scenery, based as they are on classical
models, lack vigour and reality. Pope has already chosen his medium, the heroic
couplet which is handled with great metrical skill, variation of
special and tone, and delicacy of touch. In 1711 appeared ‘An Essay on Criticism’
which also written in heroic couplet. The poem professes to set
forth the gospel of ‘wit’ and ‘nature’ and it applies to the
literature of the age.
In 1712 was published the first
version of ‘The Rape of the Lock’, one of the most brilliant poems in the language.
In it, Pope tried to laugh back into good humour two families who had been
estranged when Lord Petrine off a lock of hair from the head of Miss Arabella Fermor. It is in the
mock-heroic strain and its effective was greatly increased when in 1714, added the machinery of the sylph to
the original version of the poem with his humourous epic-treatments of the
trivial theme. A delicate fancy and a good deal at satire on the weakness of
the fair sex and on society manners. For the most part of this satire is gentle
and good humour, though occasionally the last half line of a couplet gives us a
foretaste at the more incisive tones of the later poems of Pope.
Pope translated the ‘Iliad’
which was completed by 1720. The
Iliad is followed in 1725-26 by the ‘Odyssey’
which translated with the aid of
two classical scholars, Fenton and Broome. Both works were successful as to
make Pope a wealthy man, but brought upon him jealously and criticism.
Pope’s many mistakes and cavalier
treatment of the text were quickly saiged upon by his critics by particularly Theobol. Theobol’s criticism gained him the trone dullness in the ‘Dunciat’.
In this poem modeled of Dryden’s ‘Mac Flecknoe. Pope turns to rent the host of minor
writer whose attacks had been making his life a misery. But the poem is not
merely a settlement of old scores, but if shows his satirical powers at their
best and worst. It is changed with a stinging wit and has great vigour and
varity of paste, but it spiteful. Very often, Pope condemned the good with the
bad.
The year 1733-1737 marked Pope’s last important time of production. In
them appeared his ‘Imitation of Horace’ in which using the Latin sating as his
model, Pope launched his at last in a series of poetical epistles on the great
and corruption of his day. His famous poem ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot’ is a
brilliant work that contains the famous portrays of Lord Hervey and Addison. They are masterpieces of satirical portraiture.
Note:- You should know some poetry names besides this.