Pope's Precocious Decade: Models of Literary History for the Age of Queen Anne

Conceptions of Pope’s poetical development should take more account of the quality of the best examples of his Queen Anne poems, principally the Essay on Criticism (1711) and Pope’s creative translation of Chaucer’s “The Merchant’s Tale” as January and May (1709). The first of these poems is devoted to the nature of literary judgment, its comic absurdities, and its moral, even religious obligations. The other dramatizes the sexual comedy of ill-matched marriages, geriatric folly, and adulterous liaisons. But such poems have in different ways been marginalized by commentators old and new; they have suffered as types of the cockily precocious, the conventional, or the juvenile. The essay suggests that one cause of this effect is that the model of poetical history that explains the Queen Anne Pope needs a more subtle, Gadamerian, sense of the “classic.” This should do more to admit the compelling power of these poems today; it should prompt our re-examining an alleged hiatus between Dryden’s death in 1700 and the mature Pope of satirical mid-career. Pope’s wisdom about life, literature and criticism was indeed precocious; it was, however, an unmistakable product of truths about human nature revealed in these two exuberant works of his youth.