Reading Pope's Poems

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Reading Pope's Poems University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, British Isles English Language and Literature 1986 Quests of Difference: Reading Pope's Poems G. Douglas Atkins University of Kansas Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at uknowledge@lsv.uky.edu. Recommended Citation Atkins, G. Douglas, "Quests of Difference: Reading Pope's Poems" (1986). Literature in English, British Isles. 27. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/27 Quests ofDifference This page intentionally left blank ~~~~~~~~~~~ t ~ t ~ t ~ ~ t ~ ~ Quests of Difference: ~ t Reading Pope's Poems ~ t ~ t G. Douglas Atkins ~ t ~ t ~ t ~ t ~ t ~ t ~ t ~ t THE UNIVERSIlY PRESS OF KENTUCKY ~ t ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~ Copyright © 1986 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State Uni­ versity, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louis­ ville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 4°506-0024 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Atkins, G. Douglas (George Douglas), 1943­ Quests of difference. Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Deconstruction. I. Title. PR3634·A85 1986 821'.5 85-20228 ISBN 978-0-8131-5090-1 For my relatives This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface, ix One Double Reading Pope, 1 Two Fair Art's "Treach'rous Colours" The Fate of "Gen'rous Converse" in An Essay on Criticism, 16 Three "Some Strange Comfort" Construction and Deconstruction in An Essay on Man, 39 Four Shooting at Flying Game Reading and the Quest of Truth in the Moral Essays, 66 Five Becoming Woman Writing, Self, and the Quest of Difference in the Imitations ofHorace, 99 Six ''All Relation Scorn" Duncery, Deconstruction, and The Dunciad, 147 Notes, 169 Index, 185 This page intentionally left blank Preface This study of Pope's poems, an exercise in what I call reader-responsibility criticism, consists of readings of in­ dividual texts, rather than a single argument concerning them. Before the latter can be done (assuming that it is desirable), the texts must be read, and reading entails the complex and demanding work that I try to describe in my first chapter. What I offer here is a series of essays planned as a book. The essays are frankly exploratory and tenta­ tive' and they make no pretense of definitiveness. Nor have I tried in any sense to be complete in my treat­ ment of Pope's poems. I do not, for example, claim to read all the major poems. In this regard, the most glaring omis­ sion is probably The Rape ofthe Lock. One important rea­ son for not including an essay on it is that I have preferred to treat Pope's own essayistic and more intellectual poems. Accordingly, in reading The Dunciad I concentrate on the fourth book, and though I consider many of the Horatian satires, I focus on the essays and epistles. This procedure results in a certain lack of balance, since I write about one poem in each of three chapters, several poems in each of two others. The differential treatment given the various poems is, I believe, consonant with their nature and their respective importance. IX x~Preface The essayistic nature of my efforts, it is only fair to point out, entails a certain amount of repetition, at least some of which signals the lack of any straight-line development or progression in Pope's writing. His texts frequently re­ peat points, as he swerves back, covering ground already explored. Not only does he completely overhaul The Dun- ciad, but the later version is itself an inversion ofAn Essay on Man, the concerns and strategies of which also appear in the Moral Essays. A less essayistic, and more argumen­ tative, mode would risk both obscuring the similarities and flattening out the differences involved in these re­ turns, perhaps positing a progression that in Pope is fitful at best. Pope's poems do display many important recurring concerns, some ofwhich I focus on, but we should be wary of too easily assuming that, "correctly understood," they form a clear and definite progression. I do not mean to breathe new life into the notion that Pope is, despite brilliant flashes, an uneven writer or an inconsistent and naively contradictory thinker. An Essay on Man, in particular, has proved to be fertile ground for those bent on discrediting "the wasp of Twickenham" by holding up for condemnation the apparent self­ contradictions. Blunders there may well be, in this poem as well as others. I have no interest in either excusing Pope or trying to rescue him from his detractors by denying the force of their criticism. My interest is different: I stress the heterogeneity of Pope's (and all other) discourse, accept­ ing it and regarding at least much of it as a signifying structure that we will do well to attend to. Though interested in the relations among Pope's poems, the relation of poem to poem (a point that he himself stresses), I resist the perhaps natural impulse to look for and expect a neat and coherent whole, whether reading a single text or a group of texts, such as the Moral Essays. Along with Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and oth- Preface ~ xi ers, I prefer to open rather than to close poems-another reason for choosing the essay form for these studies. The whole we almost inevitably seek turns out to have a hole in it. My procedure throughout involves bringing together Pope's poems and the interests of contemporary critical theory, especially deconstruction, and exploring their re­ lations, without positing the latter as the long-sought key that will unlock the secrets of Pope's artistry. As a matter of fact, I suggest that as a mode of close reading decon­ struction lacks responsibility unless it includes, as a first "phase," attention to authorial declarations, which it pro­ ceeds to situate. Such double reading as I describe in the first chapter by no means excludes ,traditional questions concerning critical tact, it is not exempt from Pope's surely right injunction to read sympathetically and generously, and it certainly does nothing to minimize the reader's ob­ ligations to be informed, rigorous, and scrupulous. Moreover, in Chapters Two through Six, I do not so much apply deconstruction as a method for reading texts as read Pope in light of deconstruction. As it happens, I wrote the first chapter, explaining the principles of double reading, only after completing the readings of Pope's poems. In at least one sense, therefore, the readings pre­ cede the theory. The relation of strategy to reading, theory to practice, is, then, not a simple one. To describe the re­ lation of deconstructive strategy to the readings that fol­ low, I can think (appropriately enough) of no better ac­ count than Pope's own in writing of the relation of An Essay on Man to the remainder of the projected "ethic" poems. That is, adapting Pope's terms from "The Design" of his theodicy, I might say that the principles of what I call double reading provide a general map, marking out the territory, offering a sense of direction, but leaving the particulars to be "delineated" as we attend closely to the xii c1\. Preface topography that is Pope's poems. What Pope adds, 1 re­ peat: in the first chapter "I am ... only opening the foun- tains, and clearing the passage. To deduce the rivers, to follow them in their course, and to observe their effects" is the task of the succeeding chapters. One other point concerning my strategies and proce­ dures here, "vhich has to do with the essayistic nature of the chapters: 1 regard the critical essay as more than a medium for the elucidation of other texts. It has, or should have, value in its own right as an art form (I esteem the possibilities of the form, not my execution of them). At the same time, elucidation of the texts that have occasioned it remains a crucial function of the critical essay, and I have tried both to shed some light on Pope's poems and to di­ rect attention to a way of reading and responding that will prove productive (rather than authoritative). I should comment, finally, on the tone and style of these essays. As the relatively small number of references to the rich and illuminating commentary on Pope may imply, I have written not just for the "professional Popean." 1 have written as well for that elusive (and perhaps illusive) gen­ eral reader that all commentators hope to interest. Whether or not either type of reader will approve, 1 have tried not to take my treatment of the subject too seriously (I like to think that Pope would approve). Thus the tone is sometimes light and playflli. Th.at difference from most of the scholarship on Pope* may suggest that the quests in my title allude to nlY own desires as well as refer to Pope's. In any case, the question of the "proper" is raised: What is the reader's "proper" stance before poems encountered? *My discussion is related to-different from but certainly indebted to-May­ nard Mack's "On Reading Pope" (College English, 7 [1946], 263-73) and George S.
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