Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 27 Dec 2018

Alexander Pope by Edith Sitwell

If I went out onto the streets of my home town and asked a selection of the good burghers of Malvern to name a short list of the most famous or most well-regarded English poets, I wonder how many votes there would be for Alexander Pope? My instinct is, not very many. Unlike Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth or Eliot, Auden or even Betjeman, Pope seems to have very little by way of public profile and even those who have heard of him might be hard pressed to name any of his work.

For me though he’s a titan and I know I’m not alone in this assessment but my admiration tends to be shared not by the general public but by other poets, academics and those who publish poetry – he’s still one of the most anthologised writers and was (and maybe still is) the poet eclipsed only by Shakespeare for the number of entries he has in the Oxford Book of Quotations. As if to confirm my instinct that Pope is a ‘poets poet’, this intriguing and distinctly unconventional biography, first published in 1930 was written by fellow-poet and all-round aristocratic eccentric, Edith Sitwell.

Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) was a leading light in what we now refer to as the Augustan school and was, along with his idol, John Dryden, the consummate master of the heroic couplet. The Augustans were so-named because of their admiration for the literature and culture of the Classical World and they saw their poetry as less to do with private sentiment and inspiration and more about public commentary and especially satire on public mores. Pope’s willingness to use his extraordinary poetical skills to puncture public and political pomposity and pretence made him as many (or possibly more) enemies as friends.

Pope divided opinion during his life and not just because of his poetical pronouncements. He also suffered from what would now be considered appalling discrimination because of his physical disabilities. The profile of Pope prepared by The Poetry Foundation tells us:

“At the age of twelve, he contracted spinal tuberculosis, which left him with permanent physical disabilities. He never grew taller than four and a half feet, was hunchbacked, and required daily care throughout adulthood. His irascible nature and unpopularity in the press are often attributed to three factors: his membership in a religious minority, his physical infirmity, and his exclusion from formal education.”

It was alarmingly commonplace at the time for people to interpret a physical disability as having its reflection in the moral character of the disabled person and Pope had to get used to constant references to himself as some kind of deformed devil.

Despite this his poetical genius couldn’t be denied and his precocious talent still gave him entry to the literary world where his reputation grew exponentially from his late teens to his middle age. His early pastoral poems and his translations of the Classics (Homer in particular) made him a fortune – he was for some time the highest earning writer of his age. Alongside these he wrote extraordinary contemporary satire – the mock-heroic The Rape of the Lock; An Essay on Man; An Essay on Criticism  and one of the greatest ever poems, The Dunciad which is a fabulous attack on the mediocre, second-rate lick-spittle authors who spend their time swanning around high society and literary gatherings.

Sitwell’s biography is relentlessly focussed on defending and promoting Pope’s reputation. There’s no pretence at seeking to find an academic, balanced assessment of Pope and his talents – as far as she is concerned this is all about being partisan. Pope was great, one of the very greatest, end of story.

I don’t mind this approach at all. She’s completely upfront about this from the outset and she writes with some of Pope’s own spirit; she can be delightfully direct and even spiteful when its needed to push her argument forward. Her view was that the record shows Pope to be a warm-hearted soul who has been badly done by and the hatefulness that surrounds his physical disability has blinkered critics to his brilliance of mind and spirit.

She uses the majority of the book to reconstruct the story of his life and doesn’t really get drawn into too much discussion about the poetry until a dedicated chapter at the end where the poems are assessed. This gives her plenty of space to explore his loyal friendships with Jonathan Swift and John Gay and his rather ambiguous relationship with his neighbour’s daughters, Martha and Teresa Blount – Martha being the one woman he loved all his life despite the relationship never really being consummated.

Sitwell also focuses on Pope’s running battles with several critics – especially John Dennis who hated him and his work – and with  Lady Mary Wortley. I think it’s fair to say that Sitwell hates Wortley with a passion. She paints her as a society beauty who dazzles all her company but turns on them vituperatively should she construe a slight aimed in her direction. Pope was swept away by Wortley when they first met and a doting friendship developed but when she perceived Pope had in some way snubbed her, her wrath was as intense as the original passion of the friendship. Sitwell entirely takes Pope's side in the spat and doesn’t hold back on reaping due revenge on the spoiled, entitled Wortley – all the more satisfying I suspect because the target has no right of reply!

I went to this book with a degree of trepidation because I thought it might be a difficult read – Sitwell can be oddly oblique and mannered. But I was entirely wrong. It’s about as close to a romp as it could be given the subject matter and it makes Pope a much more three-dimensional figure than might otherwise be expected.

The book seems to be out of print at the time of writing this but second hand copies, paper and hardback, can be picked up for a very modest price.

 

Terry Potter

December 2018