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1 - Pope, self, and world

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2008

Pat Rogers
Affiliation:
University of South Florida
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Summary

Behold it is my desire, that my adversary had written a book. Surely I would take it on my shoulder and bind it as a crown unto me.

(Job, xxxi, 35)

I have heard Mr. Richardson relate that he attended his father the painter on a visit, when one of Cibber's pamphlets came into the hands of Pope, who said, “These things are my diversion.” They sat by him while he perused it, and saw his features writhen with anguish; and young Richardson said to his father, when they returned, that he hoped to be preserved from such diversion as had been that day the lot of Pope.

(Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, III, 188)

Alexander Pope, eighteenth-century England's most prominent poet and his generation's most frequently portrayed celebrity, dominated the emergent literary marketplace as the first self-supporting, non-playwriting professional author (shrewd enough to rely on an aristocratic coterie of subscribers to get his start, yet savvy enough to supervise almost every aspect of the publication process), while fascinating his audience as a spectacle of deformity. Characterizing the life of a wit in the preface to the first published volume of his Works (1717) as “a warfare upon earth,” and complaining as a well-established poet and celebrity in his 1735 Epistle to Arbuthnot of “this long disease, my life,” which poetry and friendship served to ease, this protean master of the heroic couplet suffered a war between an exceptional mind and a body lambasted as “at once resemblance and disgrace” of humanity's “noble race.” Barely four and a half feet tall when grown, in Voltaire's words “protuberant before and behind” (current medical science attributes his deformity to childhood tuberculosis of the spine, otherwise known as Pott's disease, contracted from a wet nurse, while his contemporaries also considered trampling by a cow and excessive study as potential causes), socially disenfranchized for his Catholicism, Pope transformed his marginality into a source of creative self-reflection, self-possession, and self-legitimation. His life's work was the ultimate couplet of deformity and poetic form.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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  • Pope, self, and world
  • Edited by Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope
  • Online publication: 28 April 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521840132.002
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  • Pope, self, and world
  • Edited by Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope
  • Online publication: 28 April 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521840132.002
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Pope, self, and world
  • Edited by Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope
  • Online publication: 28 April 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521840132.002
Available formats
×