Alexander Pope

From Philosopedia

Pope, Alexander (21 May 1688 - 30 May 1744)

Pope’s Essay on Man (1734) contains the celebrated couplet:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind is man.

Pope, who was only 4' 6" tall (1.4 meters), is generally conceded to be the leading 18th century English poet. According to Voltaire, Pope’s “The Universal Prayer," attached to An Essay on Man, was mainly influenced by the philosophy of Lord Shaftesbury, and that prayer has often been called the deists’ prayer.

Pope was the son of an Anglican vicar, a prosperous linen draper who later oonverted to Catholicism. His mother was forty-four when Alexander, her only child, was born. Debarred from a Protestant education because of his parents' religion, Pope was almost entirely self-taught - his aunt taught him to read; from a local priest he learned Latin and Greek; and for a time he attended a clandestine Catholic school.

As a child he was afflicted by a tubercular condition, Pott’s disease, which left him with a pronounced spinal curvature starting in his later childhood. In addition, as can be discerned in his Eloisa to Abelard (1717). Medical records show that his genital apparatus was dysfunctional and his romantic life was thus thwarted.

Joseph Addison attacked Pope for his Tory leanings, but Pope called Addison and his Tatler friend Richard Steele “hermaphrodites” (homosexuals). William Wycherly and the poet-critic William Walsh, among others, liked Pope. Pope prospered by publishing his translations of Homer, which have been said to be magnificent but somewhat inaccurate. With the money earned, he bought a lease on a house in Twickenham, where he and his mother lived for the rest of their lives.

The Popes, appropriate family name that it was, were Catholic. Or were they? Joseph McCabe states that Pope was one of a large and brilliant circle of Deists in London, that although many quote the words about the proper study of mankind they often forget to quote the preceding “presume not God to scan.” Lord Chesterfield described Pope in one of his letters as “a Deist believing in a future life.”

The Catholic Encyclopedia claims him on the ground that he “willingly yielded” to a friend’s suggestion that he should receive the sacrament when he was dying. It is another of the constructive untruths of that flower of Catholic culture,” McCabe complains. “What Pope said was, ‘I do not suppose that it is essential, but it will look right,’ ” which McCabe finds strange language for a man who had been an “apostate” for a quarter of a century. McCabe cites Pope’s “Universal Prayer” as an indication that Pope actually had entirely deserted Catholicism and was a deist. Also, some say Pope was a Mason, which has a deistic outlook.

According to Martin Greif, Pope had something else in common with some of the Vatican Popes: He had strong homoerotic desires. A member of the “Scriblerians,” an all-male club that included homosexuals such as John Arbuthnot, John Gay, Robert Harley, Jonathan Swift.

In the 1730s Pope engaged in one of the most famous and venomous literary feuds in history, according to Martin Greif in The Gay Book of Days:

• Pope, supposedly jealous that his friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had taken up with John Hervey, Baron Hervey of Ickworth, began satirizing Hervey’s effeminacy in his poetry, most notably as “Lord Fanny” in Imitations of Horace (1733–1738) and as “Sporus” in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1734). If Pope’s picture of the mincing Lord Fanny had not set London laughing, the reference to Sporus had literate London holding its sides, since Sporus was the boy ‘bride’ of Nero who would bare his rear for the emperor to attack in public.”

Greif continues, “At the same time, Nero’s ‘husband’ was Doryphorus, who would return the favor in kind - also in public. Hervey, understandably upset by these jibes, responded with verses of his own that ridiculed the crippled poet’s hideous hump and his less than noble birth. London wags found this hilarious, too. Eventually, the feud died down and was forgotten.”

{CE; A. Owen Aldridge, EU, G. S. Rousseau, “Scriblerians,” GL; RAT; RE; TYD}