The Columbia History of British Poetry (64 page)

Read The Columbia History of British Poetry Online

Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

Tags: #test

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
4.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 274
Dryden and Pope
Richard Feingold
The most original poetry written after Milton and before Blake was the work of John Dryden (16311700) and Alexander Pope (16881744). In the vigor of their engagement with the public life of their agethe intellectual, political, religious, and literary controversies in which the culture of the Enlightenment was revealing and creating itselfDryden and Pope articulated the modern sound of that culture; and in the almost ninety years spanned by their two careers, theirs were the voices in which others either found or lost their own.
Their modern sound is a complex creation; its local features include, as in this couplet from Pope's
The Rape of the Lock
, a colloquial ease that we might associate with urban savvy:
Snuff
, or the
Fan
, supply each Pause of Chat,
With singing, laughing, ogling, and all that.
But urban savvy can be sounded in many registers:
Echoes from 
Pissing-Alley, Sh
[adwell] call,
And 
Sh
[adwell] they resound from 
A
[ston] Hall.
About thy boat the little Fishes throng,
As at the Morning Toast [i.e., excrement]
                                     that Floats along.
These lines from
MacFlecknoe
, both obscene and polite, could be uttered only by one entirely intimate with the city, yet their urbanity also declares a plain disapproval of the urban, a disapproval rooted in
 
Page 275
realms of imagined experience utterly beyond the bounds of the squalor Dryden's poem fantasizes, exposes, revels in, and mocks. Certainly one aspect of the modernity of such writing is its very disdain for a present moment whose chief recommendation is only the energy by which it generates its filth.
The colloquial ease is a local sign of what we more generally recognize as the major characteristic of Dryden's and Pope's verseits sociability. This is something more than their occasional celebrations of "the feast of reason and the flow of soul," something of wider import obvious in the eagerness of their interest in the secular record of human accomplishment and human failurein politics, in church government, in business, in the arts. It can be an aggressive interest, often tied to a readiness for controversy, and therefore the sociability revealed in Dryden's and Pope's writing is never merely amiable and is very often harsh. It everywhere reflects the worldliness of an age tagged by its chief wits as "knowing and judicious," a phrase sometimes intended as praise, sometimes as sneering. It is the tag that marks the sophistication of the Enlightenmentits growing awareness that what has happened before on earth was merely human history, that what is to come is also to be constructed only by human minds and hands, and that what happens above the planetother than physical motionis unknowable, although not yet to be dismissed as a matter of concern.
This secular savvy is immediately apparent to us in the amused and conversational ease with which Pope begins his
Epistle to Burlington
, a poem on how to use your money well, a poem he thinks of as a "moral essay:"
'Tis strange the Miser should his Cares employ
To gain those Riches he can ne'er enjoy.
But Pope cannot end the poem without directing a long moment of withering abuse at one whose bad taste in landscaping and interior decoration and kitchen staff would exclude him not only from good society, but might also keep him from heaventhat is, if there were sufficient authority in the poet's curse upon his bad company:
Treated, caress'd, and tir'd, I take my leave,
Sick of his civil Pride from Morn to Eve,
I curse such lavish Cost, and little Skill,
And swear, no Day was ever past so ill.
 
Page 276
Here social and aesthetic judgments are supported by suggestions of religious ones: not only the poet's cursing and swearing, but also his pain and discomfort, declare the ideal proximity of his host's residence to Hell itself. Pope supports this declaration by echoing a reminder of the fall of Milton's Mulciber, the architect of Hell's palace in
Paradise Lost
. As Milton had put it, "from morn / To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, / A summer's day." And, indeed, if Milton's Satan was damned for the pride that set him against God, so Pope's Timon is damned for the civil version of that deadly sin. That Pope should want us to hear this sudden resonance of his "moral essay" with Milton's Christian epic tells us that, as between the civil and the deadly sin, even a secular age sometimes found less difference than we might have supposed.
Moreover, if we had any doubt that the good taste, the sociability, and the modernity of the Enlightenment could sometimes find accord with its religious past, we might consider what Timon's library, in its own gesture of mistaken sociability, excludes: "His
Study!
with what Authors is it stord? / In Books, not Authors, curious is my Lord . . . / For
Locke
or
Milton
'tis in vain to look, / These shelves admit not any Modern book." Locke is the great philosopher of empiricism, Milton the great epic and prophetic poetbut Pope strikingly links them together as modern authors. Their union in Pope's line of verse (and presumably on the shelves of the libraries inside the fine houses to which Timon would receive no welcome) tells of the ideal accord some sought for between secular and religious habits of mind.
Perhaps the most profound sign of Dryden's and Pope's originality was in their invention and re-creation of imaginative structures in which that difficult accord could be attempted and scrutinized: the verse essay, the epistle, the imagined dialogue, the mock-heroic, the imitation, the sublime but still polite "great ode" (examples of which are Dryden's
Alexander Feast
, his
Ode to the Pious Memory of Anne Killigrew
, and Pope's
Ode for St. Cecilia's Day
)these were the forms in which they worked, along with others harder to classify, like the polemical, heroical, satirical, journalistic, and philosophical composition of Dryden's
Absalom and Achitophel
. But common to all these kinds of poems is the opportunity they open for the voice of a modern sensibility. This was a critical sensibility, alert to the discoveries and engaged with the controvertists of the time; it revealed itself in a voice that might approve of or excoriate them, but that still spoke conversably in

Other books

Any Man of Mine by Carolyne Aarsen
Nash (The Skulls) by Crescent, Sam
Covet by Tara Moss
Free Yourself from Fears by Joseph O'Connor