Line Structure and Sentence Form in Pope's Couplet
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LINE STRUCTURE AND SENTENCE FORM IN POPE’S COUPLET By JOHN A. JONES A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA August, 1961 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful for the aid given me in this study by the members of my committee. Professors Ants Oras, R* H* Bowers, E. S. Holden and W* T. Blackstone. I am indebted in various ways to Professor Aubrey L. Williams of Rice University under whom this study was begun. I am glad to acknowledge my special indebtedness to the chairman of my committee, Professor T. Walter Herbert, who has been unsparing of his time, energy and kindness; who has been hard upon the weaknesses of this dissertation; and who has improved and clarified everything he touched. I wish also to acknowledge the aid given me by my sister, Hazel Jones Eidson. Without her timely and generous support, the writing of this dissertation would lie in the future rather than in the past. ii TABLE! OP CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . ii Chapter I, INTRODUCTION . * . 1 II. POPE’S FORERUNNERS t WALLER, DENHAM AND DRYDEN 16 III. THE PASTORALS J THE YOUNG VIRTUOSO 48 IV. THE ESSAY ON CRITICISM 71 V. VINDSOR-FOREST (1713) . 96 VI. THE RAPE OF THE LOCK (1714) 117 VII. ELOISA TO ABELARD (1717) 150 VIII. THE COUPLET NORM OF THE DUNCIADi THE DUNCIAD, VARIORUM (of 1729). 168 IX. AN ESSAY ON MAN (1735-54) 197 X. AN EPISTLE TO DR. ARBUTHNOT 219 XI. THE FIRST EPISTLE OF THE SECOND BOOK OF HORACE (TO AUGUSTUS) 242 BIBLIOGRAPHY 263 iii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Pope's reputation as a writer has been simultaneously enhanced and damaged because he wrote in heroic couplets. Ever since the late eighteenth century, critics have been impressed by Pope's brilliance in couplets which employ balance and antithesis. At the same time, however, they have thought this very characteristic made Pope too witty, too drily intellectual to be considered a major English poet in anything but satire or "witty" poetry like that of the Rape of the Lock . But since the Romantic Revival many have felt that "real" poetry should not be witty. Wordsworth, for example, regarded Pope as an extremely gifted poet who lacked either the force of character to write real poetry or who perversely refused to write the 1 kind of poetry Wordsworth believed in . Not too many years after Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold crowned Pope, as well as Dryden, "classics of our prose." 1 "Essay Supplementary to the Preface" to Lyrical Ballads . 1815, in Discussions of Alexander Pope , ed. llufus A. Blanchard (Boston: D.’TJ. Heath and 6 o . , I960), pp. 28-29. 1 2 It is a tribute to Pope's power as a writer that he has always had a solid if fluctuating reputation from age to age, just as Donne or Wordsworth. Pope's fame in the nineteenth century was slighter than at present; but when the Victorian Age wrote itself out in poetry and passed into the twentieth century, the re-discovery of John Donne's poetry by Sir Herbert Grierson (1912) helped seriously witty poetry to become popular once again. Although Donne and Pope are different kinds of poets, of course, there is no doubt that in the twentieth century the whole general re-emphasis upon the intellectual quality of poetry and of technique as a dynamic factor in poetry has contributed to the increased awareness of the value of Pope's poetry. At the same time, scholars and critics as well as sophisticated general readers have become interested in the heroic couplet because its form imposes limitations upon the poet who uses it; and Pope's skill within the limitations of his measure constitutes one of the most interesting factors of his art. During the last twenty-five years several studies of Pope's poetry have appeared, and some of the most important ones have dealt with Pope's use of the couplet. Each of these studies has had something valid and useful to say about Pope's couplets and his poetry, but each is a partial study. Taken altogether they suggest the need for ^ 3 a systematic examination of Pope's couplet structures nnfl designs in the light of their discoveries. They suggest also that it is time for a more comprehensive study of Pope's couplet structure not as a static hut brilliant form on which he strings a series of poems, but as an individual, dynamic principle within each poem. What is needed also, as one can gather from the incompleteness of these studies, is an examination of Pope's couplet styles and designs from his early poems to his last. The development of the Neo-classic couplet has been clearly traced, and the culmination of its brilliant possibilities of balance and antithesis in Pope has become a fundamental truism about the Neo-classic period. Ruth Wallerstein has shown how the Neo-classic couplet developed from the unrelated or accidental balance between meter and sense of the half-lines of Michael Drayton, through the refinements in the balancing of half-lines by Ben Jons on, George Sandys and Falkland, to the more integrated verse structures of the later seventeenth century poets. George Williamson emphasized the rhetorical patterning of the developing couplet rather than its ? Ruth C. Wallerstein, "The Development of the Rhetoric and Metre of the Heroic Couplet, Especially in 1625-1645, " PMLA, L(1935), 166-209. 4 4 metrics. He saw its development as the fulfillment of the sententious figures of Neo-classical wit, especially of inversion (antimetabole), antithesis (antitheton), and parallelism and balance (parison). Williamson discovered the main line of the couplet's rhetorical development in Jonson, in Waller, and especially in Dryden who brought the rhetoric of the couplet to a higher concision and discipline than others.^ Of this general development he wrote: As the Elizabethan quibble on words passed into the Metaphysical quibble on sense, so the latter passed into a new style of wit which depended less upon the ambiguity than upon the antithesis of ideas, or less upon startling reconciliations and more upon surprising oppositions. Prom the surprising oppo- sition of ideas wit passed into verse as opposition of structure. In short, according to both Wallerstein and Williamson, the couplet seems to have moved inevitably toward closure, and toward the rhetorical as well as structural balance of half-lines and of syntactic units, all of which are characteristic of Dryden and Pope. Geoffrey Tillotson's study of Pope's poetry displays clearly Pope's facility in all the techniques of balance, ^George Williamson, "The Rhetorical Pattern of Neo- classical Wit," MP, 33 (1935), 55-81. 4 Ibid . pp. 74-75. • o 5 especially those that turn upon zeugma and chiasmus. In general, he shows how Pope achieves subtler balances in his later poetry, how swiftly his poetry moves when it needs to, and how conversational Pope can be in the Satires while holding the couplet norm.'’ Tillotson observes, but does not emphasize, the fact that Pope sought in his later poems a more unobtrusive way of gaining economical effects. The value of Tillotson* s observations on Pope’s couplets is useful but his whole treatment is necessarily general, and he does not observe closely enough Pope*s techniques of design in open passages and his use of couplets en masse . R. K. Root examines more closely than Tillotson Pope's use of masses of couplets. He wrote of Pope's verse paragraphs: When Pope's metrical art is at its best, his couplets do not merely follow one upon another's heels. They group themselves into the larger unit of the verse- paragraph, the group being held together both by the logic of the sense and by the cadence of the modulation. This is particularly true of his more impassioned poetry—the elevated eloquence of the Essay on Man or the intense scorn of his great satire. ^Geoffrey Tillotson, On the Poetry of Pope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, T93&) » pp. 1 25-59 g Robert Kilburn Root, The Poetical Career of Alexander Pope (Princeton: Princeton University Press anT’London: Oxford University Press, 1938), pp. 46-4-7* 6 The closed, end—stopped couplet is not Pope’s only couplet, Root observed; and he points out the open constructions frequently found in Pope’s verse paragraphs and how in 8 many of them the sense is suspended for different effects through several couplets. ^ One should add that Pope’s frequent use of open passages and the structural modifi- cations of them are vital to the development of his poetry. Root's sensitive treatment of Pope's methods of vary- ing his pauses emphasizes indirectly another problem of couplet structure. He shows how Pope uses many different kinds of pauses for many different effects. If this is true (and it seems to be), it follows that the many dif- ferent kinds of pauses are simply reflections of the variety of couplet structures. Root's insight into some of Pope's skills is reflec- ted in his prescriptions for reading Pope. He writes: It [the verse of Dryden and Pope] must be read first of aH, with a certain stateliness and deliberation of utterance; it is not to be hurpied. Its prevailing tempo is andante; its steps are those of the minuet. It must.be read, also, with single-eyed attention to the logical value of its words and phrases; each syllable must be given the weight, and no more than the weight, appropriate to it from the logic of the context, with totalqunconcern for the rhythmic pattern of the iambic line.