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Ambiguity toward providing pleasure surfaces in much of Pope's work. As David Morris points out, many of the difficulties and dangers he recognized in poetry depend upon the central role which Pope grants to pleasure. . . . The means for pleasing readers, like the readers to be pleased, belong to a continuum ranging from the worthiest to the most con-temptible.13 Yet the characteristic doubleness with which Pope responded to pleasure affirming its power while rejecting it as temporary may be...
Drydens Journey Into Print Manhood And Poetic Authority
The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self (1988) On May 13, 1700, John Dryden's remains were interred in Westminster Abbey, and the mourners attending the funeral agreed that the event bordered on catastrophe. Dryden's admirer, Elizabeth Thomas, recorded the disrespectful treatment supposedly given to Dryden's corpse (she claims the body was left to rot when the Lord Jeffreys, son of the lord chief...
Comparison Between Nisus Andd Mr Oldham
Oldham (1684) and Pope's On lying in the Earl of Rochester's Bed at Atterbury (1739) indicate how the emerg ing class of professional writers interpreted the careers of these Restoration poets. Dryden's elegy was one of eight tributes that prefaced the volume of poetry (Remains) collected and printed shortly after Oldham's death by Hindmarsh. Yet while it joins the other verses in paying homage to the youthful promise of the deceased, To the Memory of Mr. Oldham...
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Anxiety over this development appears in A Familiar Epistle to Mr. Julian, Secretary to the Muses (1677), a satire attributed to Buckingham but most likely composed in collaboration with Rochester's circle. Robert Julian, a former naval clerk, probably began his career in manuscript publication by acting as a scribe for Buckingham and his associates from there he progressed to the entrepreneurial publication of both separate texts and larger compilations. Since this trade in manuscripts,...
Gray The Marketplace And The Masculine Poet
To be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. In 1767, an anonymous pamphlet appeared entitled The Sale of Authors, a Dialogue, in Imitation of Lucian's Sale of Philosophers. Written by naval official Archibald Campbell, this pamphlet features Apollo and Mercury conducting an auction among booksellers for the premier writers of the day, including James Macpherson, John Wilkes, Charles Churchill, and Thomas Gray. With its magnified sense of poets' powerlessness in the...
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Much of Oldham's verse displays ambivalence over the possibility of such authority, even while it articulates his desire for it. Published in 1683, A Satyr . . . Dissuading the Author from the Study of Poetry (also referred to as Spencer's Ghost) depicts the poet's interview with an apparition of Edmund Spenser, whose diatribe warns the speaker To shun the dang'rous Rocks of Poetry (34). Although John Cleveland, Abraham Cowley, Ben Jonson, and the court wits functioned as the strongest...
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Written in August 1742 two months after the death of his beloved West Gray's Sonnet first appeared in print in Mason's edition of Gray's works (The Poems of Mr. Gray, to which are prefixed Memoirs of his Life and Writings, 1775), and achieved some notoriety when Wordsworth criticized its use of poetic diction in his preface to Lyrical Ballads. The Sonnet has not lacked defenders against Wordsworth's charge that it favors a family language of literary devices common to poets over the very...
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Initially, Dryden seems to have accepted his subjection to playhouse audiences. His epilogue to the first performance of The Wild Gallant (1663) allows that English gentlemen and ladies are the best judges of sense in drama (For he ne'r thought a handsome Garb or Dress, So great a Crime to make their Judgement less Works, 8 89 ), and the preface to the Indian Emperour (1665) states that pleasing the people ought to be the Poets aim, because Plays are made for their delight (Works, 9 12). Yet...
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Goldsmith stands as a pivotal figure in eighteenth-century constructions of authorship because his conspicuous failure to establish a coherent authorial identity exposes at its peak the conflict over the professionalization of poets' work. Public response to this failure was often scornful perhaps more than any other writer of his stature, Goldsmith faced a remarkable lack of respect from his contemporaries. Although many critics and readers praised his writing, viewing him as a figure stamped...
On Lord Holland Seat Near Margate Kent Analysis
Yet to his argument that poetry's voice is stifled in the public sphere, Gray makes an important exception Satire will be heard, for all the audience are by nature her friends (Corresp., 1 296). A contributor to the London Magazine agreed. Comparing the poems of mourning written after the death of Gray (1771) and after the death of satirist Charles Churchill (1764), the writer concludes that Churchill, although less deserving, commanded a greater share of the limelight in his day Gray's poetry...
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As Robert Halband notes in his biography of Hervey, this relationship had initially been friendly, but deteriorated as Hervey pursued his career as a courtier aligned with Robert Walpole's party he eventually rose to the position of lord keeper of the privy seal and Pope became increasingly identified with the Tory Opposition.19 The quarrel between them escalated in the early 1730s when Pope repeatedly criticized Hervey as Lord Fanny, a spinner of weak couplets (The First Satire of the Second...
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Although Pope's earlier verse had satirized the moral and intellectual shortcomings of the upper classes, his challenge to the cultural authority of leisured, aristocratic males receives its most sustained articulation in the Dunciad's fourth book.57 Once the main focus of Pope's attacks, Hervey is mentioned only briefly here rather, the systems of power that sustain the dominance of peers like Hervey come under scrutiny for their encouragement of effeminacy in ruling-class men an effeminacy...
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Rochester's writing habits his collaboration with others, his lack of concern for textual accuracy, his disregard for revising, collecting, or even signing his work suggest that he viewed writing not as a solitary act of genius that celebrates the poetic self, but as a social gesture clarifying and strengthening the relationships among individual men within an elite circle. The commercial market in letters, however, urged a different perspective on composition, and after his death Rochester's...
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Oldham reveals his opposition to Rochester's model of authorship in the Apology that followed the Satyr against Vertue. The poem begins by claiming that Oldham's muse, acting in Masquerade, articulated not his sentiments but rather those of Rochester When she a Hector for her Subject had, She thought she must be Termagant and mad That made her speak like a lewd Punk o'th' Town 9-11 . By contrast, the speaker, repre senting the authentic Oldham, assures readers that he has a diff'rent Tast of...