4 - Poetic spaces

Summary

Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu'd I said, Tye up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead . . .

(Epistle to Arbuthnot 1-2)

Like an epic, Pope's autobiographical poem Epistle to Arbuthnot (1735) plunges in medias res, “into the midst of things” - or we might say, into the midst of spaces. Pope, the successful poet, is besieged by aspiring authors, with “Papers in each hand,” who “rave, recite and madden round the land. | What Walls can guard me, or what Shades can hide? | They pierce my Thickets, thro' my Grot they glide” (5-8). So the poem acts pre-emptively, opening itself by closing the door, to create a sustained refuge of 419 lines where the poet can figure out how he got here in the first place. This is one of the most dramatic spatial gestures of Pope's poetry; this chapter will open the door on others less spectacularly visible.

Pope is one of the most visual of poets. He had learned painting from his friend Charles Jervas, and in “Epistle to Mr. Jervas” he hopes his poems will have the same colour, clarity, elasticity, and precision: “Oh lasting as those colours may they shine, | Free as thy stroke, yet faultless as thy line!” (63-4). But as Lawrence Lipking notes: “The vast majority of modern readers are blind to eighteenth-century poetry. We do not see poems well; we do not make the pictures in our minds that the poets direct and excite us to make.” Part of understanding Pope's poetry is understanding how to see things, because in the eighteenth century description was used very differently. Many early prosodic techniques went out of fashion with the Romantic poets and never quite came back in, so we've lost the power to appreciate their subtleties.