POPE'S REMARKS ON LITERATURE
ALEXANDER POPEBORN : 21 May, 1688DIED : 30 May, 1744OCCUPATION : Poet, Writer, TranslatorNOTABLE WORKS : The Dunciad, The Rape of the Lock, Translation of HomerCRITICAL WORKS : Preface to the Works of Shakespeare, the Art of Sinking, the Imitation of the Epistle of Horace to Augustus, the Preface to the Translation of the Iliad.Amongst his other works on criticism as a subject, the ’Essay on Criticism’ holds a significant place in the corpus of critical writings in English Literature. It follows the model of Horace’s Ars Poetica , Vida’s De Arte Poetica and Boileau’s L’Art Poetique. Literary Theory is the subject it deals with following the classical tradition ; It is a treatise in verse and is also divided into three parts. FIRST PART: General observations on Criticism as an art, which is a natural gift that has to be properly trained by studying the works of the ancient.SECOND PART: The causes of wrong criticism-Moral, Psychological and Literary.THIRD PART: General rules and norms for the critics to follow.Apart from these, it renders a few observations on the art of writing too, which are largely the utterances of Pope’s predecessors. Its observations on Wit, Diction and Verse are as follows.WIT: In the words of Pope, ‘True Wit is nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but never so well expressed’.A familiar idea that is aptly expressed with all the beauty of art is True wit according to him.DICTION: Pope was in line with Quintilian in this regard i.e to choose ‘the oldest of the new and the newest of the old’. In terms of expression, Pope condemns verbiage. He says that true expression is one that illumines its idea as the sun illumines the earth. ‘Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found’.Thus, in a nutshell, he detests pompous words and reinforces the purpose of diction as to show ‘Nature to advantage dressed ’.VERSE: First of all, Pope condemns cheap musical devices such as open vowels, stale rhymes, resort to Alexandrine and so on. He is of the view that the very sound of the words often suggest their sense which leaves no place for musical or literary devices in literature. In other words, they themselves are an apt illustration of the good and bad devices they speak of. Dr. Johnson scalls it ‘representative metre’.These are the observations that Pope postulated on the art of writing in general apart from his critical reviews in his ‘ Essay on Criticism’.
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