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Alexander Pope: Biography And Visits

Windsor Great Park

Sometimes the coincidences of history seem too perfect. In 1688 Parliament replaced the catholic leaning James the Second with the protestant William of Orange, who was married to James's protestant daughter Mary. This event was known as the Glorious Revolution. And it was in this very year, 1688, that the poet Alexander Pope was born into a catholic family. The revolution which occurred in the year of his birth was to mark the life of Pope, and perhaps inspire a typical desire in his poetry to overcome false differences between people.

Following 1688 the catholics of Britain found themselves in a difficult situation. A university education was automatically denied Pope. He was also unable to live in London, the artistic as well as political centre of the country, after a law passed in 1689 had all catholics expelled from residence within ten miles of London. Pope's father had been a successful London linen merchant until this anti-catholic legislation was passed. Pope's family moved from Hammersmith to Binfield in Windsor Forest around 1700, and to Chiswick in 1716. Pope was taught by a succession of catholic tutors, apart from one year of schooling at Twyford near Winchester. Added to these disadvantages a tubercular illness of the spine contracted at age twelve left young Alexander humpbacked, and only about four feet in height.

In the face of hostility and misfortune Pope cultivated close personal friendships, with authors such as Jonathon Swift, and John Gay, and with politicians, such as Henry St John, who with another of Pope's friends Hanley, Earl of Oxford, managed the Tory ministry under Queen Anne. Through his friendships and his poetry Pope trod a thin line between living within the status quo, and challenging it. His challenges generally involved an appeal for the kind of social open mindedness which was alien to his times, or perhaps to any time. He wrote in his early poem Windsor Forest:

 

The time shall come, when free as seas or wind

Unbounded Thames shall flow for all mankind

When nations enter with each swelling tide,

And seas but join the regions they divide (397 - 400)

 

Pope accepted that seas divide regions, but he also saw these same seas linking those regions up again. The sea made Britain a separate island, while also providing a highway to the world. Pope accepted the divided world as it was, in an image that also suggested a coming together.

Pope plainly loved Windsor Forest, feeling in its beauty a distant promise for an amalgamation of all the broken elements of life. Part of Windsor Forest was subsequently enclosed, and became Windsor Great Park, which can be visited today.

 

Pope is sometimes portrayed as an elitist writer who was a strong critic of cheap journalistic writing that appealed to the lowest common denominator of taste. He is described sitting in his beautiful villa in Twickenham, a retreat from contemporary vulgarity, with his books, his paintings, and his busts of Inigo Jones and Palladio. After producing a translation of Homer which sold well, Pope found himself financially independent, and able to follow his own literary ambitions free of the dictates of business. But in his approach to his audience Pope's instinct was to show up the false divisions that people create, rather than strengthen a division between the elite and the rest. In his Essay On Criticism written in 1711 during the early part of his career Pope starts the poem by suggesting that only very special people could write and appreciate poetry. Then as the poem develops it becomes very difficult to work out who "special" people are. Special people certainly aren't those who have read a lot: Pope says that sometimes learning makes people stupid: "...by false learning is good sense defaced." He also talks of "The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head." Just as the special people who can read and write poetry are difficult to pin down, the quality of poetry itself is also difficult to define. It is a nameless grace "which no method can teach." Sometimes in finding something good, the old ideas of what is good have to be left behind: "From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part." Pope is talking of a quality which is too free and vague to be bounded in one group of people. "Some foreign writers, some our own despise. The ancients only, or the moderns prize." Certainly the spirit he is looking for is not dictated by social class. Pope pokes fun at poems regarded highly simply because someone posh wrote them:

 

What woful stuff this madrigal would be

If some starved hackney sonnetteer, or me?

But let the lord once own the happy lines

How the wit brightens! How the style refines! (418 - 421)

 

But just when the spirit of poetry is vague enough to exist everywhere, this quality becomes so difficult to pin down that it is caught hardly ever. Even though "all burn alike who can or cannot write" it is only the lucky few who capture to some extent the ethereal quality. Something so special exists in us all, whilst it remains to the few to express what we all feel: "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."

Between 1715 and 1720 Pope produced his translation of The Iliad, after securing a ground breaking subscription deal with the publisher Bernard Lintot. The money Pope made from this venture made him the first English poet to be able to live from the proceeds of his writing. Not only could he make a living, he could live in grand style in the artistic haven of his villa in Twickenham. In 1725 - 1726 Pope released a translation of The Odyssey. He had help with this work, but tried to keep the collaboration quiet. This damaged his reputation for a while. He was also attacked for producing an edition of Shakespeare with "regularised" meter, and rewritten sections. Pope did not appreciate the criticism and took his revenge in a mock epic poem called The Dunciad, published in 1728. This poem brought Pope many enemies. Pope even appeared to fear physical attack, his sister reporting that he only ever went out with his Great Dane called Bounce, and a pair of loaded pistols in his pocket.

By 1733 - 34 he was writing his Essay On Man, inspired by the philosophical ideas of his friend Bollingbroke, who was leading the opposition to Robert Walpole's government. In this complex poem Pope was again thinking of a world in which divisions would be overcome, and he wouldn't have to go out with Bounce and his loaded pistols.

 

The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine!

Feels at each thread, and lives along the line:

In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true

From poisonous herbs extract the healing brew?

How instinct varies in the grov'ling swine

Compared, half-reasoning elephant, with thine!

'Twixt that and reason, what a nice barrier?

For ever separate, yet for ever near. (1. 217 -224)

 

In some ways the reader of this poem is a "half-reasoning elephant" compared to the skillful spider or bee. There is the rather shocking suggestion here that in some ways bees and spiders lie higher in the order of things than man. Pope seems very humble when he goes on to write of the subjection of the world to God: "The powers of all subdued by thee alone, is not thy reason all these powers in one?" "All these powers in one" sees no gradation, but a single interrelated world. This humility is actually revolutionary compared to the traditional hierarchical view of the world, the great chain of being reaching from the lowliest creature up to man. As usual Pope treads the fine line between maintaining the status quo and attacking it. He seems to be quietly accepting a higher authority, even as he makes a suggestion that challenges the authority of contemporary wisdom, and would probably require him to continue walking with Bounce.

The Death of Alexander Pope, by William Mason, 1747

Pope spent the last part of his life revising The Dunciad. His fragile health was failing, and he died in his Twickenham villa on the 30th of May 1744. The villa was demolished by a later owner, but part of the garden survives as Alexander Pope's Grotto in Twickenham, which can be visited by arrangement.

Pope is buried in the nave of St Mary the Virgin in Twickenham. As a Catholic he still seemed unwelcome in London, and didn't make it into Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey. Touchingly the artist William Mason painted a picture of the dying Pope about to be welcomed into heaven by Edmund Spenser, Geoffrey Chaucer, and even by that most protestant of writers John Milton. In Mason's painting at least it seems the divions of Pope's life were finally overcome. In his poetry Pope accepted that in the real world the divisions of the world would continue, but there would be something in the wild ocean between regions that always offered the opportunity to bring them together.