Thoughts on this guy? Almost everyone who reads his poetry comes out with an extremely polarized opinion.

I generally dislike his poetry, but there are some high notes in his epistles and moral essays. He has no ear for music in language. He is completely formulaic and aware of it, the “tone” of his writing is completely one-note, which makes him incapable of writing a convincing epic, but sometimes lends itself to satirical or didactic writing. Are you capable of appreciating a poet when you know he has a formula?

>>24553238 (OP)
>He has no ear for music in language.
This is just unbelievably wrong, I have to wonder if you have any ear for language. I think you just mean that you find couplets monotonous after a while, and this true, but as a matter of fact he has an exquisite ear for language.

>>24553238 (OP)
>Are you capable of appreciating a poet when you know he has a formula?
Every writer has a formula, Pope's is just more constrained. The point about epic form is right; Pound:
>Any work of art is a compound of freedom and order. It is perfectly obvious that art hangs between chaos on the one side and mechanics on the other. A pedantic insistence upon detail tends to drive out “major form.” A firm hold on major form makes for a freedom of detail. In painting men intent on minutiae gradually lost the sense of form and form- combination. An attempt to restore this sense is branded as “revolution.” It is revolution in the philological sense of the term….
>Art is a departure from fixed positions; felicitous departure from a norm
But actually his Iliad is unrivaled precisely because here he have Homer rendered with musical grace and fineness by a great poet

>>24553720
He does have a control on the syntactic smoothness of language, but he has no ear for the sound of poetry. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but at some points in his poems it becomes embarrassing.

E.g. picrel. The last couplet
>and teach vain wits a science little known,
>T’admire superior sense, and doubt their own!
The last line is so sonically clunky that it’s a complete anticlimax

>>24553877
I don't see it. You can criticise Pope for being unimaginative and a little repetitive, but the actual language is perfectly poetic, even a little too much.

>>24553877
I don't know what you mean. Notice how the t sound of "t'admire" corresponds with "little", and "science" with "superior sense". This is all intuitive but you can see the patterns consciously. The coma/clause at the end is a satisfying rhythm
You may agree with Milton that rhyming is a sign of a barbaric age. Certainly the best musical effects are less routinely ordered

>>24553238 (OP)
I don't think of satire as a genre highly enough to bother with hundreds of pages of Pope or any other famous satirist. Writing the premodern equivalent of "I AM SILLY" webcomics is not real literature no matter how you do it.

>>24553926
Satire isn’t really a genre, it’s more that Pope is attacking his contemporaries. This is more essential to what art is than you realize. Eliot is a satirist (when he’s good). Byron a great satirist, scandalizing the public

And obviously Dante
Even Shakespeare though more covertly
If fact it can be argues that all art is a satire at some lev, since it is reaction to the world and not pure imagination

>>24553926
This nigga loves his own farts

>>24553238 (OP)
>It cannot be unwelcome to literary curiosity, that I deduce thus minutely the history of the English "Iliad ." It is certainly the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen, and its publication must therefore be considered as one of the great events in the annals of learning.
>Samuel Jonhson

>>24553238 (OP)
>And the language from Pope's 'Translation of Homer' (1716) and Darwin's 'Temple of Nations,' (1803) may, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions, be too faithfully characterized, as claiming to be intolerable in conversation or in prose
>I do not stand alone in regarding the translation as the main source of our pseudo-poetic diction
- Coleridge

>If Homer speakes of blood flowing, Pope tells us that 'slaughtered heroes swell the dreadful tide.'
>no other work in the language has so greatly vitiated the diction of English poetry...
>it has done more than any, or all other books towards the corruption of our poetry.
- Southey

>the thunders of his pen are whispered flatteries; its forked lightning pointed sarcasm
- Hazlitt

>His deviations from Homer were uniformly the result of imperfect sympathy with the naked simplicity of the antique, and therefore wilful deviations, not (like those of his more pretending competitors, Addison and Tickell) pure blunders of misapprehension.
- De Quincey

>>24554432
Johnon meant something very specific with his praise for Pope's Iliad, but he didn't think Pope was greater than Homer, Shakespeare or Milton.

>>24554506
>His Iliad translation appeared between 1715 and 1720. It was acclaimed by Samuel Johnson as "a performance which no age or nation could hope to equal".

>>24554506
Bob Southey! You’re a poet, poet laureate,
And representative of all the race.
Although ’tis true that you turned out a Tory at
Last, yours has lately been a common case.
And now my epic renegade, what are ye at
With all the lakers, in and out of place?
A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye
Like four and twenty blackbirds in a pye,

Which pye being opened they began to sing’
(This old song and new simile holds good),
‘A dainty dish to set before the King’
Or Regent, who admires such kind of food.
And Coleridge too has lately taken wing,
But like a hawk encumbered with his hood,
Explaining metaphysics to the nation.
I wish he would explain his explanation.

You, Bob, are rather insolent, you know,
At being disappointed in your wish
To supersede all warblers here below,
And be the only blackbird in the dish.
And then you overstrain yourself, or so,
And tumble downward like the flying fish
Gasping on deck, because you soar too high,
Bob, And fall for lack of moisture quite a dry Bob.

Cold-blooded, smooth-fac'd, placid miscreant!
Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin's gore,
And thus for wider carnage taught to pant,
Transferr'd to gorge upon a sister shore,
The vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want,
With just enough of talent, and no more,
To lengthen fetters by another fix'd,
And offer poison long already mix'd.

An orator of such set trash of phrase
Ineffably—legitimately vile,
That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise,
Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile,
Not even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze
From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil,
That turns and turns to give the world a notion
Of endless torments and perpetual motion.

>>24554511
Yes, we know the Johnson quote, but if you actually read him, you'll understand he was praising nothing more than the fulfilment of contemporaneous tastes, considering Pope to be the latest stage in the evolution of poetic refinement, while at the same time considering Homer, Shakespeare and Milton to be greater poets on the whole.

>>24553720
Holy seethe