Alexander PopeAlexander Pope (1688-1744) was the greatest poet of theeighteenth century, and one of the greatest of all the poetswho have written in the English language. Poets and criticssince Pope’s own day have recognized just how spectacularlytalented he was as a crafter of verse, and how ambitious hewas, how fully he willed himself into becoming a great poet.From his early twenties, when poems like An Essay on Criticismand The Rape of the Lock established him as the most vibrantand interesting young poet in London, Pope has been consideredto be a great writer and the most representative poet of theentire literary period between the works of John Milton andthe emergence of the movement called Romanticism at the end ofthe eighteenth century.

But what, exactly, does it mean to say that Pope was great andsignificant? What is “greatness,” anyway? This is not an easyquestion to answer–what is “great” in one era or context mayseem trite in another, and it’s fair to say that the kind ofpoetry that Pope, with its tightly-controlled heroic couplets,has not been in fashion with readers or critics for a coupleof hundred years. And because of that fact, Pope and thepoetry of this entire period is less accessible to us than itought to be; modern readers read less poetry than dideighteenth-century readers and, even those who read poetry aresimply not used to verse like this. The end result is that itis hard for us to see what contemporaries recognized in Pope,what they found so striking, and what caused them to admirehis works.

Alexander Pope, painted by Charles Jervas in the 1710s, thedecade when he emerged as the most prominent poet of hisgeneration.

But eighteenth-century readers were used to reading lots ofpoetry in heroic couplets–it was the dominant form of poetryin English throughout the century. And no writer in English

was better at writing heroic couplets than Pope. Again andagain, he startles the reader by coming up with a whollyoriginal way of composing his lines, of setting up his rhymes,of ordering his words perfectly such that the crucial wordsseem to fall into place as if there were no other way thatthey could be arranged. For all that Pope’s heroic coupletsare artificial–no one speaks this way, after all–Popeconsistently makes it feel as though the words could only bearranged in this way; sound follows sense to an extent thatvery poets of the period are able to achieve. We know from thesurviving manuscripts of his poems that this effect–of makinga very artificial form seem entirely natural, as if you’relistening to conversation rather than declamation–took a greatdeal of work. Pope revised his poems again and again, oftenkeeping them in manuscript form, circulating among friends whooffered advice, rewriting and recasting over and over, untilhe was satisfied enough to have them printed. And even then,Pope continued to revise almost all of his poems once they hadbeen issued in print; most of his works were never “finished”in the sense of reaching a final, definitive state. Pope sawcomposing poetry as a process that never had an end, anongoing dialogue in poetry between himself, his readers, andthe age that they both lived in.

Pope with a crown of laurel leaves, painted by Godfrey Knellerin around 1721. The idea here is that Pope is being depictedas the poet “laureate,” something he could not be in real lifebecause of his Catholicism. [Wikimedia Commons]

Finally, what also made Pope great in the eyes ofcontemporaries and critics ever since was that he so fervently

desired to be great. Pope was enormously ambitious–he soughtfame, recognition, and the wealth that would give a man likehim–middle-class, without a wealthy family to fall back on–theindependence that he needed for his art. It rankled Pope thathe could not be the official poet laureate because, as a RomanCatholic, he was barred from holding that kind of state-sponsored post. (And, as a Roman Catholic in a period whenEnglish people were in general prejudiced against Catholics,he had to put up with many writers who could not help but makejokes about the fact that this Catholic writer happened to benamed “Pope.”) But he saw himself as becoming in effect,the real poet laureate of his age, tailoring his careeraccording to the careers of classical writers. He started, asthe Roman poet Virgil did, writing pastoral poetry, then movedon to translating epics: Pope’s versions of Homer’s Iliadand Odyssey were his most popular works in his own lifetimeand were the standard translations of both poems for the restof the century. Pope is the rare case of a person whose skillsand ambition matched up; he made himself into being a poet whodominated the verse of his own era, and who would beremembered long after that era was over.