Alexander Pope

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Alexander Pope, portrait by Michael Dahl (around 1727)
Alexander Pope signature.svg
Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope (born May 21, 1688 in London , † May 30, 1744 in Twickenham , now part of London) was an English poet , translator and writer of classicism in the early Enlightenment .

Life

Alexander Pope was born into a Catholic family as the son of a linen dealer. Due to the penal laws that were in force at the time in order not to endanger the status of the established Anglican Church , he was almost only able to get his education outside of the "normal" schools. A priest known to the family taught him the classical languages ​​Latin and Greek, and later he also learned French and Italian. Alexander Pope has been writing his own poems since he was 15.

In 1700 his family moved to Binfield in Windsor Forest. Pope fell ill with tuberculosis and asthma and as a result developed a curvature of the spine , which was often held up against him later. He was only 1.38 meters tall and wore a bodice as a back support.

Published after his return to London in 1711 Pope his first major work: An Essay on Criticism ( Essay on Criticism , 1745). With this literary-critical manifesto in the form of a verse-essay he achieved his first breakthrough, and he found access to literary circles, initially from the opposition Whig party. In 1713 he joined the Tories and became a member of the Scriblerus Club , where he met Jonathan Swift , John Gay , William Congreve and Robert Harley . The resulting fictional memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus were in turn caricatured in the satire The Scribleriad ( 1751 ) by Richard Owen Cambridge . The year before, Pope had published a first version of The Rape of the Lock , a comical epic about the war between the sexes, which further boosted his popularity. As in his other epics, Pope demonstrated his skillful mastery of the classic epic design method, but without sharing its basis of a mythical-heroized worldview, and thus translated the traditional epic into a contemporary form with great success.

Pope admired classic authors like Horace , Virgil , Homer and chose them as literary role models. His greatest achievements include English translations of the Iliad (1715–1720, 6 volumes) and Homer's Odyssey (1725–1726, 5 volumes). His transcriptions of Homer's works were, however, linguistically rephrased rather than faithful translations; With his transformation of Homer's rough or powerful expression into an elegant form of language corresponding to the contemporary sense of style, he tried at the same time to break down possible barriers and to bring the ancient poet closer to the educated classes of England. Endowed with the income from these financially very successful translations, he moved one more time, now to Twickenham , with which he escaped the pressure of the anti-Catholic Jacobites .

In Twickenham, Pope also switched to horticulture and landscape architecture . He had an artificial grotto built, for which William Borlase , an antiquarian and naturalist with whom he had a longstanding correspondence, taught fossils and minerals . He befriended his neighbor, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu . After this relationship had cooled off, he began a lifelong relationship with Martha Blount, whom he often visited in her parents' Mapledurham House and to whom he bequeathed numerous items from his property when he died. In Twickenham he also received many well-known visitors, including Jonathan Swift, whom he helped with the publication of Gulliver's Travels .

When his edition of Shakespeare's works was attacked by the publicist and Shakespeare editor Lewis Theobald in 1726, he responded in verse form with the mocking epic The Dunciad ( The Dunkiad , 1778), in which he satirically put Theobald on the throne of the fools and settled accounts at the same time with the so-called Grub Street , the guild of wage clerks. In the later and final version of this ridiculous poem, he expanded his literary polemics 1742–1743 into a general discussion of the cultural and political decline of the Walpole era, which ended with the apocalyptic vision of an all-encompassing doom. With his polished verse and ingenuity, Pope managed to make a name for himself as a satirist. With increasing influence, he established himself as a kind of public authority.

In 1731 he published Moral Essays , three years later An Essay on Man . At the same time he was working on the publication of his correspondence in literary art form.

Pope joined the Freemasons and became a member of Lodge No. 16 , who met at the Goat at the Foot of the Haymarket tavern in London. It was constituted in 1729 and dissolved again in 1745. His friend Jonathan Swift was also a member of this lodge.

In his final years Pope designed a romantic grotto himself in his estate, i.e. H. a tunnel decorated with shells and mirrors that connected the river bank of his property with the rear part of the garden.

Pope died on May 30, 1744. His bequest fell to Martha Blount.

William Warburton was in 1751 posthumously Alexander Pope's collected works, The Works of Alexander Pope , out. While Pope is generally regarded as one of the most important English poets of the 18th century from today's point of view, in the following years his work was largely misunderstood from the perspective of a romantic approach to literature in the 19th century and was only properly appreciated again in the 20th century.

Activity as translator and editor

Homer

Title page from Alexander Pope's translation of Homer's Odyssey from 1752

In 1713, Pope announced his plan to translate the Iliad . The work should be available as an annual subscription within 6 years. Pope agreed a fee of 200 guineas with the publisher Bernard Lintot . The translation appeared from 1715 and was completed in 1720. After that, Pope decided to translate the Odyssey as well, but secretly used the help of two co-authors. The work was published in 1726.

Shakespeare

It was around this time that the publisher Jacob Tonson asked Pope to obtain a new edition of Rowe's 1709 edition of Shakespeare's works. The 6-volume edition was published in 1725. In the history of the editions of Shakespeare's works, it occupies a special position, as Pope was the first to collate the Shakespeare texts by comparing the folio-based Rowe edition with the quartos available at the time . However, Pope used the opportunity less for a detailed correction of errors than for an aesthetic correction of the texts. He banned entire parts of the text that he considered unsuccessful in footnotes and, in his opinion, marked good passages with quotation marks and asterisks. While the changes in the text are due to the taste of the time, Pope's foreword to the edition is considered an important document of literary criticism of the 18th century.

effect

Pope was one of the first professional writers of non-dramatic works. The edition of his collected works made in 1717 made him a leading exponent of letter poetry.

The most widely read and often cited work by Pope to this day is An Essay on Man , in which, following on from Greek philosophy and poetry ( Sophocles ), he praises the splendor and misery of human existence with high pathos in poignant verses.

Pope's poetry also reflects the cultural history of his country. He wrote pastoral poems in the time of Queen Anne , translations of Homer under King George I and, in the third phase of his literary activity, on the main religious and intellectual problems of his time.

Pope also became famous for his deeply satirical and aggressively bitter arguments with other writers.

Incidentally, he was the last great poet to write in traditional rhythmic rhyming pairs, he developed the so-called heroic couplets and essentially exhausted their usefulness for later poets.

The introduction to the story “The Immortal” by Jorge Luis Borges is the purchase of an antiquarian copy of the first edition of Pope's Homer translation by Princess Lucinge - probably an allusion to Princess Liliane Marie Mathilde, called Baba, de Faucigny-Lucinge, nee. Beaumont, baronne d'Erlanger (1902–1945), who ran a famous salon and whose husband Jean-Louis Charles Marie Francois Guy Prince Faucigny-Lucinge was a grandson of Charles Ferdinand, Duc de Berry (1778–1820), and thus the memory evoked in the bibliophile Jean de Valois, duc de Berry . The manuscript of the story is said to have been found in the last of the six volumes of this edition, which the princess bought from the antiquarian Cartaphilus, who was buried on the island of Ios like Homer in Smyrna, the alleged birthplace of Homer, shortly before his death.

Quote

Pope wrote a famous poem about Sir Isaac Newton :

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said "Let Newton be!" and all was light.
Nature and nature's laws lay in the dark night;
God said: Be Newton! And they shone with splendor.

Pope, however, was not allowed to put this poem in Westminster Abbey as an epitaph .

Literary places

Today you can still visit:

  • Alexander Popes Grotto and Villa, Cross Deep, Twickenham, Middlesex
  • Manor House and Popes Tower, Stanton Harcourt near Withey (Pope translated Volume 5 of Homer's Iliad here)

Works

  • Pastorals (1709)
  • An Essay on Criticism (1711)
  • The Rape of the Lock (1712)
  • Windsor Forest (1713)
  • Iliad (1715-1720, Homer translation)
  • Memoirs of the extraordinary life, works and discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus . Written by Dr. Arbuthnot and Mr. Pope. January 1, 1725 ( digitized version )
  • Odyssey (1725–1726, Homer translation)
  • Miscellanies (1727, with Jonathan Swift )
  • The Dunciad (first in 1728, then changed and expanded several times)
  • An Essay on Man (1732-1734)
  • Imitations of Horace (1733-1737)

Revisions

literature

Web links

Wikiquote: Alexander Pope  - Quotes
Commons : Alexander Pope  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Alexander Pope  - Sources and full texts

Remarks

  1. ↑ Cf. Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock: Pope, Alexander , in: Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-476-02125-4 , pp. 462-465, especially pp. 463 f.
  2. ↑ Borlase, William . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 4 : Bishārīn - Calgary . London 1910, p. 255 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).
  3. ↑ Cf. Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock: Pope, Alexander , in: Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-476-02125-4 , pp. 462-465, especially p. 464.
  4. ^ William R. Denslow, Harry S. Truman : 10,000 Famous Freemasons from K to Z, Part Two . Kessinger Publishing, ISBN 1-4179-7579-2 .
  5. ↑ Cf. Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock: Pope, Alexander , in: Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-476-02125-4 , pp. 462-465, especially p. 465.
  6. ↑ Fraser, George: Alexander Pope. Routledge 1978 p. 52.
  7. ^ Damrosch, Leopold: The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope. University of California Press, 1987. p. 59.
  8. ^ Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells: The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. P. 350.
  9. ↑ Originally in the volume El Aleph (1949), cf. Jorge Luis Borges, Complete Stories. The aleph. Fictions. Universal history of wickedness . Hanser, Munich 1979, pp. 7-23.
  10. ^ Baba de Faucigny-Lucinge . Her father was Emile Beaumont Baron d'Erlanger .
  11. ^ W. Franke: Generic constants of the English verse epitaph from Ben Johnson to Alexander Pope. Philosophical dissertation, Erlangen 1864.
  12. ↑ westminster-abbey.org
personal data
SURNAME Pope, Alexander
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English poet, translator and writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 21, 1688
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH May 30, 1744
Place of death Twickenham