Introduction the actuality of the course work

4. Quotes by Pope.

The most beautiful of poets. Lord Byron, Diary, 4 January 1821. I look upon a proper appreciation of Pope as a touchstone of taste. Lord Byron, letter to Octavius Gilchrist, in Byron: A Self-Portrait.The Iliad and the Odyssey, in his hands, have no more the air of antiquity than if he had himself invented them. William Cowper, "Critical Remarks on Pope's Homer". A young, squab, short gentleman, whose outward form, though it should be that of downright monkey, would not differ so much from human shape as his unthinking immaterial part does from human understanding. As there is no creature in nature so venomous, there is nothing so stupid and so impotent as a hunch-back'd toad. This little author may extol the ancients as much and as long as he pleases, but he has reason to thank the good gods that he was born a modern. For had he been born of Grecian parents, and his father by consequence had by law the absolute disposal of him, his life had been no longer than that of one of his poems, the life of half a day. John Dennis, Reflections Critical and Satyrical, upon a Late Rhapsody, Call'd, An Essay upon Criticism. The little gentleman with a most comical and unparalleled assurance, has undertaken to translate Homer from Greek, of which he does not know one word, into English, which he understands almost as little. John Dennis, Remarks upon Mr. Pope's Translation of Homer. Who is this Pope that I hear so much about? I cannot discover what is his merit. Why will not my subjects write in prose? King George II, as quoted in Sir James Prior's Life of Edmond Malone.⁷ Pope was not content to satisfy; he desired to excel, and therefore always endeavoured to do his best: he did not court the candour, but dared the judgement of his reader, and, expecting no indulgence from others, he shewed none to himself. He examined lines and words with minute and punctilious observation, and retouched every part with indefatigable diligence, till he had left nothing to be forgiven. Samuel Johnson, The Life of Pope. Pope had, in proportions very nicely adjusted to each other, all the qualities that constitute genius. He had Invention, by which new trains of events are formed and new scenes of imagery displayed, as in The Rape of the Lock, and by which extrinsick and adventitious embellishments and illustrations are connected with a known subject, as in the Essay on Criticism; he had Imagination, which strongly impresses on the writer's mind and enables him to convey to the reader the various forms of nature, incidents of life, and energies of passion, as in his Eloisa, Windsor Forest, and the Ethick Epistles; he had Judgement, which selects from life or nature what the present purpose requires, and, by separating the essence of things from its concomitants, often makes the representation more powerful than the reality; and he had colours of language always before him ready to decorate his matter with every grace of elegant expression, as when he accommodates his diction to the wonderful multiplicity of Homer's sentiments and descriptions. Samuel Johnson, The Life of Pope. The verses, when they were written, resemble nothing so much as spoonfuls of boiling oil, ladled out by a fiendish monkey at an upstairs window upon such passers-by whom the wretch had a grudge against. Lytton Strachey, Pope: The Leslie Stephen Lecture for 1925. In Pope, I cannot read a line, But with a sigh, I wish it mine: When he can in one couplet fix. More sense than I can do in six: It gives me such a jealous fit, I cry, Pox take him, and his wit. Jonathan Swift, Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift. He is in my opinion the most elegant, the most correct poet; and at the same time the most harmonious...that England ever gave birth to. Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation translated by John Lockman. Of all his works he was most proud of his garden. There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope. Oscar Wilde, as quoted in Harford Montgomery Hyde's The annotated Oscar Wilde. As far as Pope goes, he succeeds; but his Homer is not Homer, but Pope. William Wordsworth, in Memoirs of William Wordsworth by Christopher Wordsworth. Happy the man whose wish and care. A few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native air. In his own ground. "Ode on Solitude".⁸ For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight; His can't be wrong whose life is in the right. "An Essay on Man" Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; Thus unlamented let me die; Steal from the world, and not a stone Tell where I lie. "Ode on Solitude". A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring: There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. "An Essay on Criticism". They dream in Courtship, but in Wedlock wake. "The Wife of Bath her Prologue, from Chaucer". The mouse that always trusts to one poor hole. Can never be a mouse of any soul. "The Wife of Bath her Prologue, from Chaucer". Compare: "I hold a mouses wit not worth a leke, That hath but on hole for to sterten to", Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, "The Wif of Bathes Prologue". "The mouse that hath but one hole is quickly taken", George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum. Love seldom haunts the breast where learning lies, And Venus sets ere Mercury can rise. "The Wife of Bath her Prologue, from Chaucer" Histories are more full of Examples of the Fidelity of dogs than of Friends. Letter to Henry Cromwell. I am his Highness' dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you? "On the Collar of a Dog". Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, "Let Newton be!" and all was light. Epitaph intended for Sir Isaac Newton. How vast a memory has Love! "Sappho to Phaon". Nothing can be more shocking and horrid than one of our kitchens sprinkled with blood, and abounding with the cries of expiring victims, or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up here and there. It gives one the image of a giant's den in a romance, bestrewed with scattered heads and mangled limbs. Spence's Anecdotes and The Guardian; as quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating by Howard Williams. I find myself just in the same situation of mind you describe as your own, heartily wishing the good, that is the quiet of my country, and hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few. Letter to Edward Blount; a similar expression in "Thoughts on Various Subjects" in Swift's Miscellanies: Party is the madness of many, for the gain of a few. The stoic husband was the glorious thing. The man had courage, was a sage, 'tis true, And lov'd his country. Epilogue to Rowe's Jane Shore, Well, if our author in the wife offends. He has a husband that will make amends; He draws him gentle, tender, and forgiving, And sure such kind good creatures may be living. Epilogue to Rowe's Jane Shore.bLuxurious lobster-nights, farewell, For sober, studious days! "A Farewell to London". Dear, damned, distracting town, farewell! Thy fools no more I'll tease: This year in peace, critics, dwell, harlots, sleep at ease! "A Farewell to London". I am growing fit, I hope, for a better world, of which light of the sun is but a shadow: for I doubt not but God's works here, are what comes nearest to his works there; and that a true relish of the beauties of nature is the most easy preparation and gentlest transition to an enjoyment of those of heaven; as on the contrary a true town life of hurry, confusion, noise, slander, and dissension, is a fort of apprenticeship to hell and its furies. The separation of my soul and body is what I could think of with less pain; for I sm very sure he that made it will take care of it, and in whatever state he pleases it shall be, that state must be right; but I cannot think without tears of beingseparated from my friends, when their condition is so doubtful, that they may want even such assistance as mine In a 1715 letter, as found in Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope: And Several of His Friends.

CONCLUSION

Pope's reputation revived in the 20th century. His work was full of references to the people and places of his time, which aided people's understanding of the past. The post-war period stressed the power of Pope's poetry, recognising that Pope's immersion in Christian and Biblical culture lent depth to his poetry. For example, Maynard Mack, in the late 20th-century, argued that Pope's moral vision demanded as much respect as his technical excellence. Between 1953 and 1967 the definitive Twickenham edition of Pope's poems appeared in ten volumes, including an index volume. Characters and Observations is an anonymous 18th-century manuscript that was discovered and published in 1930. The American edition was published by Frederick A. Stokes Company. According to the foreword by Lord Gorrell, the handwritten manuscript was discovered in a piece of furniture by one John Murray in 1919, and ten years later shown to the editors of The Daily Mail, who suggested having it published. It was almost certainly owned by Alexander Pope, and is possibly his work. The title page of the manuscript had "A Pope. Twikeam." written on it. The well-deserved success of An Essay on Criticism brought Pope a wider circle of friends, notably Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, who were then collaborating on The Spectator. To this journal Pope contributed the most original of his pastorals, “The Messiah”, and perhaps other papers in prose. He was clearly influenced by The Spectator’s policy of correcting public morals by witty admonishment, and in this vein he wrote the first version of his mock epic, The Rape of the Lock, to reconcile two Catholic families. A young man in one family had stolen a lock of hair from a young lady in the other. Pope treated the dispute that followed as though it were comparable to the mighty quarrel between Greeks and Trojans, which had been Homer’s theme. Telling the story with all the pomp and circumstance of epic made not only the participants in the quarrel but also the society in which they lived seem ridiculous. Though it was a society where as if one occupation concerned them as much as the other, and though in such a society a young lady might do equally ill. Pope’s father, a wholesale linen merchant, retired from business in the year of his son’s birth and in 1700 went to live at Binfield in Windsor Forest. The Popes were Roman Catholics, and at Binfield they came to know several neighbouring Catholic families who were to play an important part in the poet’s life. Pope’s religion procured him some lifelong friends, notably the wealthy squire John Caryll who persuaded him to write The Rape of the Lock, on an incident involving Caryll’s relatives and Martha Blount, to whom Pope addressed some of the most memorable of his poems and to whom he bequeathed most of his property. But his religion also precluded him from a formal course of education, since Catholics were not admitted to the universities. He was trained at home by Catholic priests for a short time and attended Catholic schools at Twyford, near Winchester, and at Hyde Park Corner, London, but he was mainly self-educated. He was a precocious boy, eagerly reading Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, which he managed to teach himself, and an incessant scribbler, turning out verse upon verse in imitation of the poets he read. The best of these early writings are the “Ode on Solitude” and a paraphrase of St. Thomas à Kempis, both of which he claimed to have written at age 12. This early emergence of a man of letters may have been assisted by Pope’s poor physique. As a result of too much study, so he thought, he acquired a curvature of the spine and some tubercular infection, probably Pott’s disease, that limited his growth and seriously impaired his health. When the “Pastorals” were published, Pope was already at work on a poem on the art of writing. This was An Essay on Criticism, published in 1711. Its brilliantly polished epigrams which have become part of the proverbial heritage of the language, are readily traced to their sources in Horace, Quintilian, Boileau, and other critics, ancient and modern, in verse and prose; but the charge that the poem is derivative, so often made in the past, takes insufficient account of Pope’s success in harmonizing a century of conflict in critical thinking and in showing how nature may best be mirrored in art. The well-deserved success of An Essay on Criticism brought Pope a wider circle of friends, notably Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, who were then collaborating on The Spectator. To this journal Pope contributed the most original of his pastorals, “The Messiah” 1712 and perhaps other papers in prose. He was clearly influenced by The Spectator’s policy of correcting public morals by witty admonishment, and in this vein he wrote the first version of his mock epic, The Rape of the Lock two cantos, 1712; five cantos, 1714, to reconcile two Catholic families. A young man in one family had stolen a lock of hair from a young lady in the other. Pope treated the dispute that followed as though it were comparable to the mighty quarrel between Greeks and Trojans, which had been Homer’s theme. Telling the story with all the pomp and circumstance of epic made not only the participants in the quarrel but also the society in which they lived seem ridiculous. Though it was a society where Pope managed also to suggest what genuine attractions existed amid the foppery. It is a glittering poem about a glittering world. He acknowledged how false the sense of values was that paid so much attention to external appearance, but ridicule and rebuke slide imperceptibly into admiration and tender affection as the heroine, Belinda, is conveyed along the Thames to Hampton Court, the scene of the “rape” My discussion of the ways classicism was used in stardom has necessarily left many stones unturned, and there is much more to be said about wider representations of antiquity and its myths. While I have focused on Hollywood, and the Anglo-American reception of stardom, there are of course fascinating possibilities to pursue case studies in Greek and Roman classicism in other European and world cinemas, as well as the different antiquities and myths of these cultures. It would be too easy to say that by the end of the silent era the scales had fallen from the eyes of fans and they no longer looked to their stars as gods and idols.

GLOSSARY

Amiss- When things are out of their proper places or not happening the way they should, we say they are amiss. Sherlock Holmes, like many sharp detectives, would quickly notice when something was amiss at a crime scene.
Arduous- Use the adjective arduous to describe an activity that takes a lot of effort. Writing all those college essays and filling out the applications is an arduous process!
Cavil- If your only cavil to your family's trip to Disney World is that you don't like airline food, you're not representing the anti-Mickey side of the argument very well. A cavil is a small or petty objection.
Censure- Censure is a noun referring to very strong criticism; the verb means to criticize very strongly. If you take your dad's car without telling him, you can expect him to censure you severely, and maybe even ground you as well.
Deride- The verb deride means to speak to someone with contempt or show a low opinion of someone or something. A bully might constantly deride other kids in his class which might lead to many afternoons spent in the principal's office.