Pope, Dryden, Milton, and the Poets' Secret

Abstract

My subject is a relatively unexplored area of Pope's wit, his wit as a reader. use wit in the broad eighteenth-century, Lockean sense, meaning the ability to perceive resemblances. Allusion, or something like it, may be studied in an uncustomary way, not mainly to reveal implicit augmentations of meaning, or sources, or misreadings, but to discover how well one author understands another. concentrate on how Pope read Paradise Lost. Pope may be shown to have read it unusually, profoundly. He gives evidence in The Dunciad of having understood-to a virtually unprecedented and long-unmatched degree-Milton's poetic signs and even Milton's distinctive sign system. In two recent essays, have begun to look into this matter. One examines the extent to which eighteenth-century and later commentators on Paradise Lost were attentive to its intratextual parallelism. It is a question of some importance because that poem is so remarkably a tissue of parallels large and small. was drawn to the question when a graduate student, Marilyn Hertling, expressed surprise at Merritt Hughes's remark in his edition of Milton that not until 1947, in Balachandra Rajan's Paradise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader, did a critic first observe (in print, as circumspection requires me to add) that Satan, Sin, and Death constitute an infernal parody of the Trinity-this somehow despite such lines as Sin's, spoken to Satan: I shall reign / At thy right hand voluptuous, as beseems / Thy daughter and thy darling, without end.' How extraordinary; and yet my search through the eighteenth-century commentators reveals no evidence that they saw an infernal trinity, or, indeed, saw much in the way of intratextual parallels at all. My second essay makes a similar point about the commentary (though not the translated poems themselves) in Pope's Homer: that only parallels which are markedly contrastive, calling for the discriminating power of Lockean judgment, get much attention.2 Yet it may be that some readers saw, or began to see, the infernal trinity and other significant parallels; some poets may have been in on the secret. Ronald Paulson, in his Book and Painting, refers in