‘Pope has often been termed the first truly professional poet in English’ (Pat Rogers). Professionalism was a necessity, 1688 being an unpropitious year to be born Catholic. Religion debarred Pope from university,1 and Pott’s disease meant he grew to just four and a half feet. He was a ‘total outsider’, says Rogers. ‘Poetry […] seems to have been the one obvious way out of his dilemma.’2
Pope went from the City, to Hammersmith, to Binfield in Windsor Forest, where his self-education began – ‘his masters were […] Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden’3 – and in 1716 to Chiswick, where he lived in what’s now the Mawson Arms. Finally, in 1719 he leased land in Twickenham and built his villa and famous grotto. Around 1740, he sent his servant to improve his view by felling trees at Ham House, to the chagrin of the 4th Earl of Dysart: ‘My Lord complains, that Pope, stark mad with gardens, / Has lopt three trees the value of three farthings’.4
Pope was a genius at coining expressions so good that people attribute them to Shakespeare – ‘fools rush in’ etc. – but ‘What makes him so formidable, a Milton among satirists, is The Dunciad, certainly the poetic masterpiece of its century.’ This is Bloom, who says The Dunciad’s ending describes ‘simply the way things are’:
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires, And unawares Morality expires. Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine; Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine! Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor’d; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And Universal Darkness buries All. (IV. 649–56)
However, the DNB says ‘When the nation is challenged or declines, when the civil order seems in jeopardy, Pope and Dryden are likely to come up.’ There’s no sign of them, so it must be that, as the meme saith, this is fine.
Remarkably, every one of the Parkleys Poets went to Cambridge, except Pope the Catholic, and Shelley, who attended Oxford, albeit briefly. It seems that Oxford makes prime ministers and Cambridge poets.
Dictionary of National Biography.
Rogers.
Pope, ‘Epigram on a lord seeking his acquaintance’ (ll. 1–2).