BiblioVault - Books about 1688-1744

Alexander Pope

The Genius of Sense

David B. Morris

Harvard University Press, 1984

Alexander Pope

Tradition and Identity

John Paul Russo

Harvard University Press, 1972

In an impressive blend of biography and literary assessment, John Paul Russo views Alexander Pope’s life as it illuminates the major themes and tendencies of his poetry, and his poetry as it reflects the ideals of the man. His main concern is the interaction of Pope’s growing identity with his continual interest in classical Western poetic and moral traditions. Russo focuses initially on the basic biographical facts that contributed to Pope’s identity as man and as poet. He then shifts his attention to the artistic ideals that from the beginning affected Pope’s conduct of life as well as his work.

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Imagining Monsters

Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England

Dennis Todd

University of Chicago Press, 1995

In 1726, an illiterate woman from Surrey named Mary Toft announced that she had given birth to seventeen rabbits. Deceiving respected physicians and citizens alike, she created a hoax that held England spellbound for months. In Imagining Monsters, Dennis Todd tells the story of this bizarre incident and shows how it illuminates eighteenth-century beliefs about the power of imagination and the problems of personal identity.

Mary Toft's outrageous claim was accepted because of a common belief that the imagination of a pregnant woman could deform her fetus, creating a monster within her. Drawing on largely unexamined material from medicine, embryology, philosophy, and popular "monster" exhibitions, Todd shows that such ideas about monstrous births expressed a fear central to scientific, literary, and philosophical thinking: that the imagination could transgress the barrier between mind and body.

In his analysis of the Toft case, Todd exposes deep anxieties about the threat this transgressive imagination posed to the idea of the self as stable, coherent, and autonomous. Major works of Pope and Swift reveal that they, too, were concerned with these issues, and Imagining Monsters provides detailed discussions of Gulliver's Travels and The Dunciad illustrating how these writers used images of monstrosity to explore the problematic nature of human identity. It also includes a provocative analysis of Pope's later work that takes into account his physical deformity and his need to defend himself in a society that linked a deformed body with a deformed character.

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Poets Thinking

Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats

Helen Vendler

Harvard University Press, 2006

Poetry has often been considered an irrational genre, more expressive than logical, more meditative than given to coherent argument. And yet, in each of the four very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation; although they may prefer different means, she argues, all poets of any value are thinkers.

The four poets taken up in this volume—Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats—come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler shows us Pope performing as a satiric miniaturizer, remaking in verse the form of the essay, Whitman writing as a poet of repetitive insistence for whom thinking must be followed by rethinking, Dickinson experimenting with plot to characterize life’s unfolding, and Yeats thinking in images, using montage in lieu of argument.

With customary lucidity and spirit, Vendler traces through these poets’ lines to find evidence of thought in lyric, the silent stylistic measures representing changes of mind, the condensed power of poetic thinking. Her work argues against the reduction of poetry to its (frequently well-worn) themes and demonstrates, instead, that there is always in admirable poetry a strenuous process of thinking, evident in an evolving style—however ancient the theme—that is powerful and original.

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Resemblance and Disgrace

Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture

Helen Deutsch

Harvard University Press, 1996

Like the miniatures of which Pope was so fond, the book is at once particular in its focus and wide-ranging in its conceptual scope. While drawing on recent feminist, historicist, and materialist criticism of Pope, as well as current theoretical work on the body, it also attends closely to the local ambiguities of the poet’s texts and cultural milieu, details often lost to critical view. The result is a revitalized—and broadened—reading of Pope, and of our understanding of the processes of authorship. By focusing on the process by which ideas of authority and authenticity took shape at specific moments in Pope’s career, Resemblance and Disgrace calls into question distinctions between theoretical abstractions and material details, between literary originality and critical derivation, following Pope’s own example of rewriting intellectual boundaries as creative opportunities.

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