Himanshi Parmar : Neoclassical Age

Hello, here i am writing a blog on Alexander pope and his notable work as a task of Thinking activity. Along with this i, also discuss about the very famous poem of neoclassical age called, Rape Of The Lock.

Alexander pope is very famous figure. He was from the generation "The poet" of great nation. But the poetry was limited in the early Eighteenth Century. There were few lyrics, little or no love poetry, no epics, no dramas or songs of nature worth considering. But in the narrow filed of satire and didactic verse, pope was the undisputed master. Many of the foreign writers, as well as majority of English poets, looked him as their model.

He was the only important writer of that age who gave his whole life to letters. Swift was a clergyman and politician, Addison was secretary of state, other writers also depended on patrons or politics or pensions for fame and livelihood. But pope was independent,and had no profession but literature. With the strong determination and by held it, inspite of religious prejudice, he overcome the physical and temperamental obstacles that would have discouraged him.

He knew little of the world of nature or of the world of the human heart. He was lacking, apparently, in noble feeling and instinctively chose a lie when the truth had manifestly more adventurages. Yet this jealous, peevish, waspish little man became the most famous poet of his age and the acknowledged leader of English literature. Let us discuss about his life.

:- Life of Pope

He was born in London in 1688. The year of the revolution. His parents were both Catholics, who presently removed from London and settled in Binfield, near Windsor. Where pope passed his childhood. Pope received very little school education. Because of an unfortunate prejudice against Catholics In the public schools. And might be because of his own weakness and deformity.He contracted a tubercular infection in his later childhood; tuberculosis is a highly contagious disease that generally causes damage to the lungs but can also affect other areas, such as the spine, as it did in Pope's case. Tuberculosis was a widespread concern in Pope's time, since effective treatments for the disease were still two centuries away, and half of those who developed full-blown symptoms would eventually die. Pope lived, but because of his illness, he never grew taller than four feet six inches, suffering from curvature of the spine and constant headaches. His physical appearance, frequently mocked by his enemies, undoubtedly gave an edge to Pope's satire, but he was always generous in his affection for his parents and many friends.

But he started reading lots of English books and mainly focus on reading classics. Very early he began to write poetry. Because of his Catholic religion, he rejected by many of hid desirable employment. So he decided to make literature his life work. And he started following the Dryden, whom he consider his only master. Though much of his works seems to depended on Boileau, The French poet and critic.

Some intresting facts about Pope's life :-

1] Second quoted writer in the English Language :-

Alexander Pope’s poetry and famous sayings are extremely popular to this day, a well-known fact about Alexander Pope. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations places him second only to William Shakespeare. Some of his verses are now idioms in common speech, e.g. “damning with faint praise”.

2] Health issues :-

Even from a young age, Alexander Pope had bad health. He suffered from Pott disease which is a form of tuberculosis affecting the spine. As a result, his growth was stunted and he developed a hunchback. He also had breathing difficulties, eye inflammation, and high fever. His poor health made it even harder for him to integrate in society, on top of his Catholic roots, a sad fact about Alexander Pope.

3] He rarely left the house without a gun and his Dog :-

His satire made him lots of enemies and he developed a slight paranoia, after also being advised by friends to not leave his house on his own. This was especially the case after a failed attack by the son of critic John Dennis. Pope therefore carried a brace of pistols and brought with him his dog, a Great Dane called Bounce.

4] His lavish London home :-

From his earnings after translating Homer, Alexander Pope actually made a good living. This meant that he was able to live in a villa in Twickenham in London, complete with a grotto and lovely gardens, an interesting fact about Alexander Pope.

5] Three of the moons of Uranus are named after characters from his poetry :-

Alexander Pope’s best-known poem is The Rape of the Lock and in it, the heroine Belinda and two Sylphs, Umbriel and Ariel, inspired the naming of the satellites of the planet Uranus. All the 27 known satellites of Uranus are named after literary characters, but it’s interesting that the other 24 all owe their names to Shakespeare.

6] famous phrases originate from Pope’s work :-

We use a lot of phrases and idioms which first appeared in Pope’s poems. For example, the line “To err is human; to forgive, divine” come from Alexander Pope’s work.

The popular film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind owes its title to Pope’s poem Eloisa to Abelard.

Finally, the phrase “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” is extremely well-known and has been used everywhere from Hollywood movies to everyday life. It comes from Pope’s work An Essay on Criticism.

7] He cured his headaches with coffee :-

Samuel Johnson used to say that Alexander Pope inhaled the steam of coffee to cure headaches., an interesting fact about Alexander Pope. Pope called this “Mocha’s happy tree”. This might just be connected to the rising popularity of coffee during his time, especially among English tea-drinkers. Samuel Johnson was known for drinking extremely large amounts of tea in one sitting, so it’s only normal that he’d have found Pope’s love of coffee peculiar. As for Pope, he advised drinking strong coffee on a regular basis.

8] His nickname was “the Wasp of Twickenham” :-

Because of his satirical works, Alexander Pope didn’t make many friends among the famous people of his age. For example, he wrote The Dunciad as a comic version of Virgil’s Aeneid and basically ridiculed everyone he didn’t like: the stupid, the tasteless, the incompetent.This will have caused his many enemies to be created.

9] His skull may have been exhumed :-

Upon his death, Alexander Pope was buried in the nave of the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin at Twickenham, next to his mother. There are rumors that his skull was dug up afterwards, and bought to be examined by phrenologists. This has fed into a belief that his spirit now haunts the church.

This is some of the intresting facts about his life. Now let we discuss about some of his notable works.

MAJOR WORKS :-

(1) An Essay on Criticism (1711)

(2) The Rape of the Lock (1714)

(3) The Dunciad (1728)

(4) Moral Essays (1731–1735; collected 1751)

(5) An Essay on Man (1733)

Alexander Pope was a superstar of English neoclassical literature, so much so that the first half of the British eighteenth century is often referred to as “the age of Pope.” Pope alternately defined, invented, satirized, critiqued, and reformed almost all of the genres and conventions of early-eighteenth-century British verse. He polished his work with meticulous care, and he is generally recognized as the greatest English poet between John Milton and William Wordsworth.

For convenience we may separate Pope's work into three groups, corresponding to the early, middle, and later period of his life. In the first he wrote his "Pastorals," "Windsor Forest," "Messiah," "Essay on Criticism," "Eloise to Abelard," and the Rape of the Lock; in the second, his translations of Homer; in the third the Dunciad and the Epistles, the latter containing the famous "Essay on Man" and the "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," which is in truth his "Apologia," and in which alone we see Pope's life from his own view point.

1} Pastorals (1709):-

Pope was a child prodigy. His first publication, Pastorals (1709), drew on long-established literary conventions but nevertheless announced him as a major new talent. Pope's next major work, An Essay on Criticism (1711), was much bolder. In the work, Pope finds modern literature largely failing in its responsibility to follow unchanging “nature,” the test of which is how well we can recognize basic human truths in ancient classical works (particularly Homer). An Essay on Criticism became the manifesto for a major movement in literary criticism: neoclassicism. Pope wrote the entire essay in heroic couplets (pairs of rhymed iambic pentameter lines).

2} Rape of the lock (1714):-

Pope surprised many by showing he was also a master of humor and satire with "The Rape of the Lock", which immediately made Pope famous. A fashionable young lady, Arabella Fermor, had a lock of her hair cut off without permission by a suitor, and Pope was asked by a mutual friend to soothe ruffled tempers with a jest. Adopting a mock-heroic style that drew upon Homer and others (who were valorized so seriously in An Essay on Criticism), Pope showed how ridiculous it was to treat the event overseriously and simultaneously satirized the vanity and glitter of upper-class society. Here i am sharing the small trailer of poem Rape of the lock.

3} Pope's Translations :-

He had done poetic imitations, transformations, or translations of Vergil, the Bible, and Chaucer. The fame of Pope's Iliad, which was financially the most successful of his books, was due to the fact that he interpreted Homer in the elegant, artificial language of his own age. Not only do his words follow literary fashions but even the Homeric characters lose their strength and become fashionable men of the court. So the criticism of the scholar Bentley was most appropriate when he said, "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." Pope translated the entire Iliad and half of the Odyssey; and the latter work was finished by two Cambridge scholars, Elijah Fenton and William Broome, who imitated the mechanical couplets so perfectly that it is difficult to distinguish their work from that of the greatest poet of the age.

Works In Literary Context :-

1] Pope and Neoclassicism :-

Pope, particularly in An Essay on Criticism and “Epistle to Arbuthnot,” contributed to neoclassicism, or the resurgence in ancient ideals in art and literature—particularly the ideals of ancient Greece and Rome. For Pope, the core truth is whatever has lasted longest across many generations of readers; thus we should look to ancient literature for truth. In the epics of Homer, for example, the ethics of heroism, loyalty, and leadership are as true now as they were then. In addition, the balanced and symmetrical structures of classical literature and architecture represent values of reason and coherence that Pope says should remain central to all modern arts.

2] Comic Satire :-

Pope used his great knowledge of and respect for classical literature to write mock-epics that poked fun at the elite. Essentially Pope believed the upper class possessed an exaggerated sense of its own importance. He also made fun of hack writers, comparing their shoddy work with timeless stories of the past. Pope is credited for proclaiming, “Praise undeserved is satire in disguise.”

3] Pope and Proverbs :-

Pope's style and personal philosophies have become part of the English language. For example, “A little learning is a dang'rous thing” comes from An Essay on Criticism, as does “To err is human, to forgive, divine.” Other well-known sayings from An Essay on Criticism include “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread” and “Hope springs eternal.”

Conclusion :-

Pope was died at 30 May 1744, in Radnor House, Independent school, Twickenham, United Kingdom. But remain in the heart of people for his extraordinary works and satires.

Question - 2

Write in a brief about your favorite work from the neoclassical age.

Rape of the lock is one the most famous work of the neoclassical age. So here i want to discuss the poem is in brief.

The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic narrative poem written by Alexander Pope.it was first published anonymously in Lintot's Miscellaneous Poems and Translations. In May 1712 in two cantos. Contains 334 lines.a revised edition "Written by Mr. Pope" published in March 1714 as a five-canto version contains 794 lines.this was sold more than three thousand copies in its first four days.The final form of the poem appeared in 1717 with the addition of Clarissa's speech on good humour. The poem was much translated and contributed to the growing popularity of mock-heroic in Europe.

The story focuses on the central character, Belinda, whose lock of hair is cut off at a social gathering. Although trivial to most, Belinda is outraged that her lock of hair has been cut by the Baron. In the Rape of the Lock, Pope uses Belinda and the Baron to mock two of his acquaintances, Arabella Fermor, and Lord Petre. The poem follows the events of the night, leading up to Belinda’s “horrific” loss.

Why was the poem written?

Pope wrote The Rape of the Lock in response to a request made my his friend John Caryll, a prominent Roman Catholic of the time. Caryll explained that his friend, Lord Petre, had cut off a lock of Arabella Fermor’s hair. Ever since the incident, the families had been feuding. In order to make light of the situation, Pope wrote The Rape of the Lock. “The stealing of Miss Belle Fermor’s hair, was taken too seriously, and caused an estrangement between the two families, though they had lived so long in great friendship before. A common acquaintance and well-wisher to both, desired me to write a poem to make a jest of it, and laugh them together again. It was with this view that I wrote the Rape of the Lock.”

Summary of the poem :-

At the opening of the poem, Belinda, a beautiful and wealthy young woman is asleep. Ariel, her guardian sylph, watches over her and sends her a dream which highlights what the role of the sylph is namely to protect virtuous young women.He is worried that some disaster is close at hand, though he is not sure what form it will take. He instead warns her through the dream to “beware of man.” Belinda then awakes and begins dressing herself for a day of social engagements. With the help of her maid Betty, and that of her attendant sylphs, Belinda then completes the elaborate process of beautifying herself.

Then she sails from London to Hampton court.The two locks in which she has styled her hair look especially attractive, and the Baron eyes them in admiration he has resolved to take one for himself, either by force or by theft.

Belinda soon sits down with two men to play a game of ombre. With a little help from her band of sylphs, Belinda begins the game well, declaring that spades are to be trumps, and quickly gaining the upper hand. The Baron, however, is quick to fire back and begins to dominate the game, and Belinda is close to being beaten. At the very last second, though, Belinda is able to win the final play.she was extremely happy. But baron decided the to steal her lock of hair with the help of Clarissa. Clarissa draws out a pair of scissors. And he unexpectedly steal Belinda's lock of hair. The Baron crows with delight and Belinda screams in horror at what has happened.

Belinda asked then for her lock of hair to Baron. But even Baron became failed to find it. So everyone started searching lock of hair.At last, Clarissa quiets the group and makes her own speech, which essentially argues that this whole debate is silly that everyone, including women themselves, places too much value on transient female beauty, and that women should instead invest their time and energy in being the best moral beings they can be. But her good sense is lost on the assembled company, and Belinda calls the women to arms.

However the lock of hair. She Never get back but it will burn brightly in the sky as an eternal testament to Belinda’s spectacular beauty. And there the poem ends.