On the Poetry of Pope

by Geoffrey Tillotson

Oxford at the Clarendon Press
Date of 1950
hard cover

Very Good/No Jacket
Fading to front board.

Genres: Literary Criticism

179 pages, Textbook Binding

First published January 1, 1971

Reviews

[Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is old-fashioned literary criticism at its absolute best. It is not formalist, at least, not in a New Critical sense. If anything, this is old historicist. Tillotson marshals an astonishing awareness not just of the totality of Pope's verse, but also an incredibly deep and broad reading of the sources that inform that verse. Not talking here about being up to speed on Dryden. Tillotson is able to write lucid, authoritative prose about Pope's poetry because he knows his Sylvester, his Du Bartas, his Sandys, not to mention Denham, Waller or Blackmore and a couple dozen more writers lurking beneath the surface of a canon that others glibly surf. In other words, because the author has assimilated and thought very hard about a broad stream of poetic tradition that doesn't just cover the recognized cultural canon, he can go to war with Romantics who (wrongly) impugn Pope for poetic sins he didn't commit. The roots and branches of Pope's prosody are thus laid bare with impressive and thorough precision (and economy, the whole clocking in at a tidy 170 or so pages). But Tillotson doesn't rest content with large generalizations about literary history and Pope's place in that tradition. His close readings of dozens of passages as well as single lines opens up vistas into the mastery and majesty of Pope's verse that any number of contemporary theoretical studies are neither interested in nor capable of. Tillotson has a rich appreciation for the nuances of the heroic couplet, brought to the apex of its capacity in Pope's extraordinarily flexible and various use of the form. His close readings, informed by history, literary history, Latin and prosody, measure the height of Pope's achievement and give even long time students of the verse new and valuable insights into poetry that has all too often been all too easily or casually pigeonholed and dismissed. An essential, great book.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most readable and engaging academic work about poetry that I've ever read. I'm sure that the intellectualati will clamor that its out of date or "formalist," but I learned much about that formerly amorphous period in between Dryden and the Romantics, and why Pope both builds on the former and anticipates the latter.

Pope is not as mind-blowing as Wordsworth, not as hip as Byron, Keats, or Shelley, and not as revered as Milton, but his poetry speaks for an epoch, and deserves reading. Read Tillotson's short but profound book as you go along and you'll enjoy it more.