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Xerox University Microfilms INFORMATION TO USERS This material was produced from a microfilm copy of the original document. While the most advanced technological means to photograph arid reproduce this document have been used, the quality is heavily dependent upon the quality of the original submitted. The following explanation of techniques is provided to help you understand markings or patterns which may appear on this reproduction. 1. The sign or "target" for pages apparently lacking from the document photographed is "Missing Page(s)". if it was possible to obtain the missing page(s) or section, they are spliced into the film along with adjacent pages. This may have necessitated cutting thru an image and duplicating adjacent pages to insure you complete continuity. 2. When an image on the film is obliterated with a large round black mark, it is an indication that the photographer suspected that the copy may have moved during exposure and thus cause a blurred image. 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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 76-3515 OLSON, Charles Roll in, 1933- ALEXANDER POPE'S RESOLUTION OF CONTRADICTORY PREMISES IN AN ESSAY ON MAN* The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1975 Literature, general Xerox University Microfilms,Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 © Copyright by Charles Rollin Olson 1975 THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. ALEXANDER POPE' S RESOLUTION OP CONTRADICTORY PREMISES IN AN ESSAY ON MAN DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Charles Rollin Olson, B.A., B.S., M.A. * * * * * The Ohio S tate U niversity 1975 Reading Committee: Approved By A. E. Wallace Maurer Edwin Robbins . 1 • tJLhu**' Betty Sutton Adviser Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My adviser, Wallace Maurer, has been indispensable to me during this project. He gave focus and direction to my inchoate ideas when I most needed assistance, and he read my pages with sympathetic interest and detailed commentary, saving me numerous wrong turnings and useless pursuits. He was always ready with assurance and percep­ tive advice, even during midnight phone calls. For all his help I am deeply grateful. My family has been heroically patient, curbing their own activities to accommodate my demands for silence and solitude and lovingly forgetful of my one thousand and one broken promises. I have benefitted from discussions with several colleagues, and during the dissertation oral examination the members of my committee opened up for me a number of issues relevant to subsequent study of my subject. The faults in this dissertation are all mine to bear, but the largest measure of thanks I extend to Prof. Maurer. * VLTA October 31, 1933. ..... Born - Moorhead, Minnesota 1957 ................................................. B. A. and B. S. Moorhead State College Moorhead, Minnesota 1957-1960 .................................... Assistant Instructor, Robert College, Istanbul, Turkey 1960-1968 .................................... Teaching Assistant, Department of English, The Ohio S tate U niversity, Columbus, Ohio 1962. .................................... M. A. English, Ohio State U niversity 1968-1972 .................................... Assistant Professor of English, Northwestern State University of Louisiana, Natchitoches, Louisiana 1972-1975 .................................... Instructor of English, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................................... ii VITA .................................................. iii Chapter................................................ I. PROBLEMS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL POEM........... 1 F o o t n o t e s ..................................... 33 II. CRITICAL DISAGREEMENTS AND THE CASE FOR ROOT METAPHORS................................ 38 F o o t n o t e s ..................................... 65 III. TRANSCENDENT FORMISM AND DISCRETE MECHANISM IN THE ESSAY........................ 68 F o o t n o t e s ..................................... 132 IV, THE PHILOSOPHICAL RATIONALE FOR CONTRADICTORY PREMISES........................ 136 F o o t n o t e s ............................ 184 V. THE MASTERY OF T O N E .......................... 191 F o o t n o t e s ..................................... 213 CONCLUSION ........................................... 218 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................... 224 CHAPTER ONE PROBLEMS OP THE PHILOSOPHICAL POEM I 1 Critical assessments of Pope's Essay on Man have often implied that there is a disjunction between the thought and the language in the poem. The predominant critical view has been that Pope's ideas, whatever their historical interest and significance, are philosophically inconsistent, though melifluously expressed. According to this view, what we have in the Essay is a body of general assumptions, occasionally mere truisms, that do not and cannot hold together as a coherent philosophic statem ent, though they charm the ea r w ith mnemonic re so ­ nance and impart an urbane and w ittily paradoxical, but overly o p tim istic , explanation of man's dilemma and fa te . A corollary to such a view—sometimes stated, sometimes implied—is that poetry and philosophy are inimical to each other, that to succeed competently at either one is to sully the spirit of the other. 1 2 At the least here, two questions confront a student of An Essay on Man. Does philosophizing demand some kind of logical rigorousness that is unamenable to the poetic muse? Second, what features or predicates of the poem induce critics to dismiss the "ideas" but applaud the eloquence? The most perceptive modern critic of Pope, Maynard Mack, has stated that "of all Pope's poems, the 2 Essay on Man is the one most profoundly misunderstood." Thirty years and some astute criticism have marked the time since that statement was made, but the Judgment has not lost its relevance. Hence this dissertation. This study seeks to reinterpret the Essay by a root-metaphor analysis, thereby delineating the essential philosophical and poetical predicates of the poem and demonstrating why the Essay has been alternately or simultaneously criti­ cized for logical inconsistency and praised for poetic eloquence. My thesis—closely put—is that Pope's Essay rests on two contradictory metaphysical hypotheses that are (l) assumptions inevitably central to the age, (2) fundamental determinants in the argument of the poem, and (3) the auspicious occasions for Pope's happy marriage of philosophy and poetry. That there are two such hypotheses has not been dem­ onstrated in previous criticism, and their functioning has been obscured by circumstances not unusual in literary 3 history: first, an understandable readiness among Pope’s contemporaries to concur in the poet's succinct expression of preoccupations of the agej later, in succeeding gener­ ations, the disdain for what were considered the facile assumptions of the past; later again, a sharp and re­ stricted assessment on announced philosophical grounds; eventually, efforts to evaluate the poem on aesthetic grounds, by-passing philosophical Issues because they were construed to be irresolvable wrangles. These four points can be briefly illustrated without at this time undertaking extensive review of the criti­ cism. By publishing Epistle I anonymously, Pope secured unprejudiced reviews, and the contemporary reaction to his 3 poem was widely e n th u s ia s tic . A lita n y of comment, of course, had to set in. Some critics spied grounds to dissent from applause. Samuel Johnson pronounced on the poem tersely, indelibly: "Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised."^ John­ son admired the poem's eloquence but dismissed the ideas as e ith e r commonplace o r, in some in stan ces perhaps, as misconceived or inadequately grasped by the poet himself. Johnson's note of strident assurance has rarely been struck in our time. A critic unsympathetic to the Essay, John Laird, has, indeed, dismissed any claim of philosophic m erit fo r the poem, w ith remarks not a l i t t l e ornery and obtuse.-* It is, however, more usual among modem critics to ground their objections on specific and thoughtfully considered points. Thus J. M. Cameron, for example, cites what he considers "incoherences of argu­ ment"; he does, however, find evidence to exclaim how "Pope shows a fine sense of the connexion that must exist for poetry between the experience of living as a concrete process, Wild Nature’s vigor working at the root ( I I ,
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