Introduction: Toward Deconfining Pope

Abstract

Despite some magisterial work, particularly on individual poems, critical commentary has not always served Alexander Pope well. Quite recently ignored, he had been a center of attention when the “industry” cranked out articles and books from what Hugh Kenner described as its “Natchez-Augustan manor.” Too often, Pope was “declawed,” made into a polite, civil figure whose ideas were hardly relevant, his bite by no means dangerous. In the heyday of criticism on Pope, his thinking was made to match the latitudinarian and liberal ideas of his commentators. It is time to return to Pope and to deconfine him (he himself stridently opposed all kinds of sectarianism, confinement, and reduction). Comparison of An Essay on Man with Dryden’s Religio Laici and Eliot’s Four Quartets offers valuable new insights into its character as both an essay(-poem) and a contribution to the layman’s faith tradition, the latter of which is strongly anti-sectarian and inclusivist; it sets us on a path toward appreciation of Pope’s concern with wholeness—with, that is, catholicity.