"The sound must seem an echo to the sense": Pope's use of sound to convey meaning in his translation of Homer's Iliad.

Abstract

In his Essay on Criticism, Pope suggested that sound both could and should be used to convey meaning in poetry. To test his practice of this principle, the 52,000 sounds or phonemes in the first two Books of Pope's translation of the Iliad were scored with the help of Whissell's 2000 classification of sounds in terms of emotional meaning. A chi-squared contingency analysis indicated that there was a preferential and face valid use of Passive sounds in some passages and of Active sounds in others. There was also a significant difference between Books (Book I was more Active) and a distinct pattern of rise and then fall within each of them in the preferential use of Active phonemes.