Pope's 'Figur'd Worlds'

Abstract

To travel overseas was one of Alexander Pope's dearest wishes. It is well known that his infirmities thwarted that desire. What has been recognized only infrequently is the extent to which he journeyed in his mind. This article offers a conspectus of imaginative travel in the poet's thought and verse. The greater part of the article attempts to locate the foreign places and peoples that most interested him, a journey from France and Italy, via the eastern Mediterranean, to Africa, the Americas, and the Far East. From this gazetteer of ancient lands and modern states it becomes apparent that Pope experienced the world through, and his authorship bears the influence of, dioerent senses of ‘figuring’: the writings of those abroad (a descriptive sense); and works of art and artefacts (a crafted sense). To these forms of mediation a further, rhetorical, sense applies: in his poetry the world is also presented in figures of speech—similes and metaphors, and metonyms and synecdoches, which draw on the descriptive and the crafted for their comparisons and associations. Pope's own world has received a deal of biographical and literary-historical attention; informed by those same disciplines, this essay provides a narrative atlas of the world in Pope.