Eighteenth-century imitations can be troublesome poems to read and evaluate, for they demand at least three kinds of related historical and critical knowledge: the meaning of the parent-poem as the modern author might have understood it; the modern author's intention and achievement in light of that understanding and his own contemporary purposes; and the immediate response to the imitation, its reception by readers likely to have known what we must acquire. I shall be concerned with the dangers of ignoring the third kind of knowledge, as exemplified in the controversy regarding the satirist's real or apparent triumph in Pope's First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated (1733).

One side argues that the conclusion, in which the lawyer Fortescue agrees that Pope can continue to write satire if Sir Robert approves, is a “virtual confession of defeat,” or is a “dangerous and unreliable alliance” that signals ominous things to come. The other side argues that the victorious Pope is exonerated by the pro-administration lawyer, whose acceptance of Pope's case involves “his simultaneous acceptance of” Pope's “larger world order,” that Pope's enemies “are vanquished, and [his] adversarius is metamorphosed into coadjutor”; and that the poem is a triumph in which Pope's “vision of the ideal community, epitomized by his grotto, is not a never-never-land, but rather a viable alternative.”

A full examination of the poem's manuscript and varied contexts is necessary to resolve these contradictory readings, and to determine which side is most nearly correct.