Alexander PopeAnmeldelser

The last time I read it was maybe ten years ago. It's simply not funny; Pope never is.

Another in the vein of [b:The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman|76527|The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman|Laurence Sterne|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1403402384s/76527.jpg|2280279] or [b:Augustus Carp, Esq. By Himself Being The Autobiography Of A Really Good Man|837278|Augustus Carp, Esq. By Himself Being The Autobiography Of A Really Good Man|Henry H. Bashford|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347324333s/837278.jpg|822869]. It has its moments.

Fair,
?? "B Gradley's Book"? Hard to read

games celebrate choice of new chief dunce

Nice pics. Could have done with some notes.

More layers than people realize and subtly wonderful.

There are a number of famous phrases in this essay:

To err is human; to forgive, divine.

A little learning is a dang'rous thing.

For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

And I learnt a new word: "coxcomb" - an archaic term for a dandy. Pope draws on numerous place names as synonyms for The Ancients, so Aristotle is "the Stagirite"; Virgil is "the Mantuan Muse"; and,

To copy nature is to copy them.

After reading a few articles by and about Harold Bloom, having almost finished John Ruskin's On Art and Life, and having made a start on Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist, I have gained an appreciation for the work of the critic. Pope points out that Aristotle was a critic of Homer, and Maevius, known for his criticism of better writers (and of Augustus Caesar's vintage), was well-critiqued by both Virgil and Horace. Pope provides advice for the genius, too:

Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet, And mark that point where sense and dulness meet.

and

One science only will one genius fit; So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Our talent requires constant effort, and spreading ourselves too thin means:

Like kings we lose the conquests gain'd before.

Reading is important (especially to "know well" the Ancients), and we should:

Read them by day, and meditate by night.

I could feel Mortimer Adler lurking in the background, and a return to How to Read a Book revealed Pope's sentiments (p. 11):

There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well.

As Pope said:

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

But Pope also touches on the problem for converting sound reading into writing (which is increasingly my problem):

That on weak wings, from far, pursues your flights; Glows while he reads, but trembles as he writes.

Adler spoke of "coming to terms with the author", and Pope seems to be Adler's inspiration:

A perfect judge will read each work of wit With the same spirit that its author writ

Yet Pope draws on the folk tradition, too, especially in relation to the "father" of all sins, pride, "the never-failing vice of fools"; and Socrates' notion of the more we know, the more we know we don't know much ("New, distant scenes of endless science rise!"). In effect, Pope argues that pride prevents reason. If pride can be driven away, then we can use feedback from friend and foe alike to correct our faults. The Stoics, too, can be seen in the background, with echoes of Epictetus' (Discourses 3.24.17) warning that happiness and yearning for something one doesn't have are incompatible, in effect, perfectionism is desiring the impossible, reflected in:

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.

Nietzsche gets a guernsey, too, or, should I say that Nietzsche draws on Pope's Dionysian-ness ("Dennis of the Grecian stage"). There is so much in this essay that a second and third reading will be rewarding. And not just for lessons in literature and history - geography, too. As it turns out, London's Duck Lane (not the current Duck Lane, which Google Maps shows is an alley), now known as "Little Britain", was in Pope's time an area for second-hand booksellers, and before that an area for publishers, too. There is so much in Pope that is familiar, much like John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (which is like reading my own mind, the content is basically the liberal arts curriculum of a modern education). But the difference is that Pope's work requires a more thorough reading of the Great Books. While I have much more to learn about the classics, it is clear that the more familiar one is with them, then the more rewarding a reading of Pope will be.

Tra terremoti, bombe e alluvioni, da noi come nel mondo, la natura resta sempre un mistero da scoprire momento dopo momento, giorno dopo giorno, stagione dopo stagione. Natura come tale e natura degli uomini. Oggetto di studio, osservazione e contemplazione nel corso dei secoli non smette mai di sorprendere, ingannare, illudere, tradire e confortare. Gli uomini sembrano che abbiano perso il contatto con quella realtà dalla quale tutto proviene ed appartiene, non escluso l’Uomo stesso. Il brano poetico che vi propongo oggi è tratto da un lungo saggio in versi di Alexandre Pope intitolato “Essay on Man” e scritto alla fine del settecento. In esso il poeta esamina la stretta correlazione che lega l’uomo alla natura e la natura ad esso. Pope nacque a Londra nel 1688 da una famiglia cattolica. Poco dopo la nascita scoppiò nel suo paese un forte sentimento anti-cattolico e così la sua famiglia abbandonò Londra e si ritirò in campagna per mettersi al sicuro. A causa della fede religiosa non gli venne permesso di frequentate una scuola pubblica. Una sua zia gli insegnò a leggere ed un prete gli insegnò il latino e il greco. A soli otto anni si innamorò delle opere di Omero. Confessò ad un suo amico: “In pochi anni ho avuto la possibilità di conoscere un gran numero di scrittori inglesi, francesi, italiani, latini e greci. Non ho avuto un progetto o un’idea di quello che facevo, lo feci per solo diletto, andavo là dove la fantasia mi portavo. Era come raccogliere fiori nel bosco e nei campi. Quei cinque sei anni furono per me il periodo più felice della mia vita”.

All’età di 12 anni ai ammalò di tubercolosi alle ossa ostacolando la sua crescita. Rimase di bassa statura con varie deformità. Scrisse numerose satire facendosi molti nemici i quali spesso lo presero in giro per i suoi difetti fisici, attaccando le sue idee. Ma queste critiche stupide non lo fermarono nel suo amore per la scrittura. Scrisse tra l’altro l’opera “The Rape of the Lock” (Il Riccio Rapito) del 1712 che ebbe molto successo come opera eroi-comica sul ratto di una ciocca di capelli di una nobildonna del tempo. Non molte delle sue opere sono lette oggi, ma Alexandre Pope resta uno degli scrittori più citati in lingua inglese. Ecco alcune sue citazioni: “Errare è umano; perdonare è divino”. “Gli sciocchi corrono là dove gli angeli hanno paura di andare”. “Non essere il primo tra coloro che vengono messi alla prova, né tra gli ultimi che vengono messi da parte”

ALL are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Tutti siamo parte di un meraviglioso tutto,

Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;
il cui corpo è la Natura e Dio è l’anima;

That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,
che cambia sempre eppure resta la stessa,

Great in the earth, as in th' ethereal frame,
grande nella terra, come come nella sfera celeste,

Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
riscalda al sole, rinfresca con la brezza,

Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
splende nelle stelle, fiorisce tra gli alberi,

Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
vive nella vita, si estende e si distende,

Spreads undivided, operates unspent:
si diffonde indivisa, opera senza tempo:

Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part;
respira la nostra anima, guida la nostra parte mortale;

As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
completa, perfetta, in un capello come nel cuore;

As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns
completa, perfetta, tanto nel pavido uomo

As the rapt Seraphim, that sings and burns:
quanto nell’estasiato Serrafino che canta e arde:

To him no high, no low, no great, no small—
a lui non alto, nè umile, non grande, nè piccolo,

He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all....
egli riempie, lega, collega e eguaglia tutti ...

All nature is but art, unknown to thee:
Tutta la natura non è che arte, a te sconosciuta:

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see:
tutto a caso, senza che tu possa capire:

All discord, harmony not understood;
tutto in disordine, armonia incomprensibile;

All partial evil, universal good.
tutto male parziale, ma bene universale.

The authorship of this book is somewhat confused, as it came out of an early 17th century literary club. The cover of my copy has the author as Alexander Pope, the title page has Pope and John Arbuthnot as joint authors, and Peter Ackroyd's Foreward says "A great part of this work may confidently be ascribed to Arbuthnot, but the voices of Pope and of Swift are also to be found here".

It is a satire on the pretentiousness of higly-educated people whose learning seems to have made them foolish rather than wise. Cornelius Scriblerus is so enamoured of the Ancient Greeks that he endeavours to raise his son Martinus like an Ancient Greek, to the despair of his wife. He even forbids Martinus from playing any children's games that weren't also played in Ancient Greece.

Martinus grows up as foolish as his father, but there is one piece of foolishness that does not seem so foolish in the early 21st century, his method of investigating latent distempers by the sagacious qulity of setting-dogs and pointers, as it has been found that dogs can smell some types of illness and predict epilectic seizures.

It was amusing enough to read once, but I won't be keeping it to re-read.

Not terribly unreadable, and not altogether boring and trying, and quite Rabelaisian, and quite a surprise enjoyment on the 1,001 Books to Read list. I suppose it's to be expected, considering satire to be an acquired taste, but in the hands of many masters, it's actually not untriumphant a piece of literature.

Pope was born of a Catholic family in London in 1688. Pope's Tory friends had been in power until the unexpected close, by her sudden death, of the reign of Queen Anne. Their great triumph was the Peace of Utrecht, ending a long and desultory war with France. With the Hanoverian George I's ascension, the hopes for a Jacobite Restoration were over. During Pope's later years, the Whigs were in power -- Bollinger exiled, and Walpole in control, bringing prosperity with security. Much of the imagery of Pope, and Swift, lifts from shifting winds of credit and banking. He was a critic of the materialism of a commercial society. There is a presumptuous and daring accuracy in his verses. Satire with a moral. Still, his politics is a dragon with only one sulphurus nostril.

A charming Rabelasian squib, which also looks forward to Tristram Shandy, only written by a bunch of fabulous people instead of one fabulous person. The first few chapters (very proto-Shandyan) are satires on The Learned Man who has no idea what he's doing, and could be of interest to those who dislike mansplaining; Cornelius Scriblerus' advice to his wife and wet-nurse on the art of breast-feeding is particularly hilarious. We all know that guy, although our version of 'that guy' is probably less well read. There then follow the Rabelasian chapters on Scriblerus' education, in which he and his punning friend Crambe raise hell (the bad, and some very good, puns are combined with corpse humor) and pronounce on themes anatomical ("Ocular demonstration... seems to be on your side, yet I shall not give it up") with some asides against the eighteenth century editor/critics and on themes metaphysical (with rips on both Descartes and materialists). Finally, and less easy to get through, parodies on popular romance (in which Scriblerus discovers the love of his life, one of conjoined twins who share one set of sexual organs), then a parody of the legal profession (is Scriblerus a bigamist? an adulterer?) and finally some Swiftian nonsense, not as funny as Swift's own works, which ends the book on a down note. But wildly entertaining otherwise.

How to avoid Writers errors Poem style, a good device and I must listen again and then again.

leather,missing end pages, Faulker advertisements last page

My version of the poem had a great introduction which explained what inspired the poem, which was a huge bonus for me! Alexander Pope's poem however was easy enough for me to understand, which I greatly appreciate. I particularly loved the description of the women being dressed at the end of the first canto. There was something so profound in the statement that the women take praise for looking good when it isn't them that look good - it was those that dressed them. Granted, I suspect that most women don't have someone dressing them these days; however, today women are so covered in makeup, and with the prevalence of plastic surgery and botox, I'm not sure that we really are making ourselves look good anymore, it's something else.

Regardless, the poem was actually quite wonderful. Funny, quirky, and clever - overall I loved it! It amused me how he instilled this sense of impending doom and horror into a comedic poem about a woman's hair being cut off as a prank at a party. Knowing the back-story was tremendously helpful in this regard, it I had not known that it was written in response to a prank played at a party, I would have greatly misunderstood the poem.

Who am I to pass judgment on an author who, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is the third most quoted figure in human history (after Shakespeare and Tennyson)? Who am I but an unappreciative boor? Well, I’m a generally educated reader who invested several weeks of reading time to explore the man and his writing—no more, no less. Judge the merit of my comments for yourself, based on my body of reviews.

I had managed to unhappily wade through this entire book until I started trying to read the last included work: The Dunciad, which is a satire (I think), and is, more to the point, Pope’s attempt to settle the score with every critic and foe he ever encountered. What a sad, pathetic subject for a crowning life work! What a sorry personality he must have been to have chosen such a motive to drive him. I literally could not read more. There is a class of people who I can’t stand, and he’s a prime example of them—people who seek to entangle themselves with others (get in other people’s faces) for the sole purpose of giving their empty lives some desperate sense of meaning. They see no more pressing purpose to life than to derive energy from the process of bickering and quibbling—the ebb and flow of ‘reputation’ and ‘appearance’, of ‘status’ and ‘opinion’. This is so alien to my own sensibilities that I simply had to put the book on the shelf without finishing it.

Frankly, it’s the first book I ever wanted to burn. I felt like ripping the offending pages out, spitting on them, trampling them under foot, and eviscerating each printed word. Pope attracted me because of a few selected quotes that have become immortal. The quotes are fine—taken out of context. But the mind that produced them is undeserving. I can only imagine that the world in which he lived was so lacking in true talent that his ability to find favor in high places vaulted him into that vacuum. And in 54 years of life he managed to accidentally vomit out a few memorable phrases amid volumes of tripe. A monkey at a keyboard could scarcely do worse.

No, I’m being excessively dramatic. It’s my anger at the Dunciad that is driving this. I did enjoy a few selected works—when he chose subjects of a bit more substance (still perilously abstract for modern tastes). I enjoyed his lyrical rendering of a comparison of virtue and vice in his ‘Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogue 1’ (page 399). But really—to wade through 737 pages to find a few pages worth reading? I wish I hadn’t.½

On the whole, I did enjoy reading this poem, although I found it very difficult to read. I've heard before that it's very hard to comprehend the first time around, and I would have to agree. Although I did find it humorous, I'm not sure that I pciked up on all of the jokes and satire, even with the footnotes. I think a better knowledge and understanding of British cultural history would have helped me. I think I only really managed to read the surface of the poem, but anythign which I didn't pick up on was not because of Pope but because of my understanding of it.

Amusing, quotable, and quite brilliant

Pope's Scriblerus is not Pope's and not titled Scriblerus. As Peter Ackroyd explains in the book's forward back in 1714 Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift established a literary club under the Scriblerus name. The group wanted to create a satirical periodical, but ended up only with one work. That was published as Pope's work for the first time in 1741 under the title "Memoirs of the Extraordinary life, works and discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus." It was a joint effort though each chapter written by somebody else and often together. Wikipedia suggests that it was mostly written though by John Arbuthnot, in whose home the club met.

I have to admit the exquisite language and some of the content proved to be a minor obstacle for understanding the work. But they didn't stop me from enjoying it. I don't usually read early 18th century literature thus quite a bit of the words used here were either unfamiliar for me or had a different meaning than for the authors' contemporaries. This proved a double challenge as they were parodying something they were familiar with and was part of their literary and scholastic culture, but I only have vague notions of.

The focus of the book is satirizing the view that the older knowledge is the more valuable it is. The longer the author of a work has been dead the higher authority it has. It is a mindset that is getting increasingly difficult to occupy in our age, when the pace of information fold is so fast. We have to fight the opposite fallacy: the newer some information is the more reliable it is. Twitter, constant personal and professional updates may make us think that we are missing something if we are not up to speed.

However Pope and his colleagues were trying to bring Enlightenment and modern reason into fashion and show how antiquated knowledge was outdated. In this work they did it by creating a character who was the exact opposite of their ideal scholar. Through seventeen short chapters we learn about the life of Martinus Scriblerus, starting from before his birth and ending with posthumous appraisal of his life and works. Once you get into the style of the prose you will find it as hilarious as I did. The protagonist's (and his father's) notion of science not just borders with superstition but enters deep into its territory.

I laughed out lots of times their actions were so ridiculous and not just against logical reasoning but ordinary common sense too. I just wish I had got more of the context. If I'd known the literature and the popular people of the era I am sure I would have gotten even more out of the book, by understanding the specific references. But even without that it was a terrific reminder how far we came in terms of understanding the powers working in our surroundings, but also how far we could still go.

an interesting and complex read

Of all the English poets, whose lines are more memorable than Alexander Pope's? They have a savor; they can be admired like jewels.

Compared to the Nineteenth Century's Romantic movement and the Seventeenth's Shakespeare and Milton, the Eighteenth was a near void. There was a little bit going on in France with Diderot and Voltaire, and some minor British works by Swift, Defoe, and Gay, but by and large, Eighteenth Century literature is Fielding and Pope.

He began with his inimitable wit and wordly mastery with 'An Essay on Criticism' when he was only 21. Four years later he added his contribution to the Epic Tradition with 'The Rape of the Lock'. One of the reasons that this was a slow century for literature was that it was kind of a slow century in general. Like all great Epicists before him, Pope captured the spirit of his age, but in this case, instead of capturing it in a broad net of climactic action, beautiful language, and political posturing, he speared it with an acerbic tongue.

His epic was a small one, and like Milton reinvented the genre by turning the hero into the villain, Pope did the same by turning epic into everyday. His lampooning of the high nobility and their self-importance allied him literarily with his contemporaries, such as Voltaire, who all prefigured the social and literary revolution of the coming century.

Pope plays a very delicate instrument with his epic, often balancing a thin line between respect and ridicule: the same line those same nobles had to walk every day. His linguistic and conceptual ability shine here, as does his humor, which lies on the upper borders of the clever and the witty.

His later works consisted of translations and numerous political treatises, which though scathing and brilliant in their way, do not continue the philosophic and artistic exploration begun in 'An Essay on Criticism' and expanded in 'The Rape of the Lock'. The Dunciad certainly has a similar bent, but is too historo-specific to really have the same effect, so 'The Rape of The Lock' is probably the best example by the best British poet of the Eighteenth.

Homer's classic tale of ogres, sorceresses, ghosts, and gods with the original Greek on one page and a solid English translation on the other. This book is a small, easy-to-carry hardback.

(This is the source of Nausicaa, the ancient princess who partly inspired Hayao Miyazaki's manga and movie character.)

-Kushana

May 20, 2007
I had long looked forward to reading Pope, but he was not nearly as delightful as I had hoped.