Take Pope’s former friend, Joseph Addison. He may have transformed the literary essay in English with the Spectator; he may have risen from relative obscurity to be secretary of state under George I; he may have ruled literary London for two decades. All this is as chaff before one of Pope’s most clinical couplets: ‘Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, / And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer’ (Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot). It has been hopeless triage for Addison’s reputation ever since. Perhaps one could admire a proper villain, but so sneaking an Iago can never recover. Any basic primer in poetry will tell you never to repeat a word where you might vary it, but Pope’s ‘leer, sneer, sneer’ riff defies that rule with lethal force. He claims earlier in Arbuthnot, his autobiographical epistle of 1735, that he cannot help it:

Why did I write? What sin to me unknown
Dipt me in ink, my parents’ or my own?
As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came.

Poor Alexander, cursed with the original sin (‘my parents’ or my own’) of genius in poetry! Even as a baby, he ‘lisp’d in numbers’. It would be ridiculous vanity if he could not demonstrate its truth in the poise and energy of every line. When Grace Kelly avers in High Society, ‘I’m sensational, everybody says so’, it only works because she palpably is. Thus also for Pope. He was subject to various stigmas – a Catholic born in the year of the Glorious Revolution (1688), with his tiny frame and tubercular spine held up by prostheses throughout ‘this long disease, my life’. In poetry he could demonstrate his vigour as one fated to be a literary Achilles, dipped in ink rather than the Styx, by a muse mother rather than Thetis. Only supreme performance vindicates such vanity, and you are only ever as good as your next couplet, but Pope was very, very good.

He wrote nothing serious except in heroic couplets. That looks like a restriction until you experience the tonal range of what Pope can do with those twenty or so syllables. We’ve seen the easy, personal tone in Arbuthnot, capable of being tinged with venom – this was his Horatian voice. From there you can go up to the full Wagnerian symphony and choir of the Dunciad’s conclusion:

Lo! Thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! Lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.

or to the pastoral serenity of Windsor Forest:

Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain,
Here earth and water seem to strive again,
Not Chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d,
But, as the world, harmoniously confus’d.

Then there is the orientalist parody in Belinda’s powder room in the Rape of the Lock:

This casket India’s glowing gems unlocks,
And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.
The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,
Transform’d to Combs, the speckled, and the white.
Here files of Pins extend their shining rows,
Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.

(Rape of the Lock, I, 133–38)

There is a prize for any first-time reader who saw ivory and tortoise-shell combs immediately, rather than some bizarre tortophant out of a bestiary. And you can bet your life that rows and doux were a perfect rhyme as they spoke it in the days of Queen Anne.

Pope only wrote verse for the page, and assures us that ‘The Play’rs and I are, luckily, no friends’ (Arbuthnot, 60), but he could also catch theatrical dialogue as surely as Congreve or Wycherley. In his Epilogue to the Satires (1738), where he explores the motivations of a satirist, he has this glittering exchange between himself (P) and a straight-man friend (F) about who is fair game for naming:

P. The pois’ning Dame – F. You mean – P. I don’t. F. You do.
P. See, now I keep the Secret, and not you!
The bribing Stateman – F. Hold, too high you go.
P. The brib’d Elector – F. There you stoop too low.
P. I fain would please you, if I knew with what;
Tell me, which Knave is lawful Game, which not?

One wonders where a former attorney-general or a Victoria Cross winner might fit in this bickering calculus today. Too high or too low?

The sharp-eyed reader will no doubt be wondering why this so-called review is yet to mention the book it is supposed to be about. The problem is that Hone’s Alexander Pope in the Making is a work of scholarship and, as such, fails to give a living reason why general poetry readers might seek to interest themselves in Pope as a writer. It is a very good work of scholarship that sets out to paint a highly political version of the young Pope’s formation as a covert or cultural Jacobite in the time of Queen Anne, before he became better known as a Hanoverian satirist. Hone’s promise is to investigate ‘Pope’s early engagement and collaboration with a group of largely forgotten but unexpectedly subversive poets’. He gets there by performing a deep dive into the archives and it is fascinating enough, if you already have a deep and scholarly interest in Pope’s life and literary reputation.

If you are not immersed in the academic criticism of eighteenth-century poetry and culture but remain interested in Pope, then there are two things worth knowing about Hone’s findings.

The interesting thing is that early modern poetry (approximately 1550–1750) has been reimagined such that the circulation of manuscript within coteries is just as important as poems’ appearance in print before some sort of proto-public. The late, great Harold Love at Monash was one of the main pioneers of this approach, working on writing from the last decades of the seventeenth century. Hone now adds the young Pope (before his translation of Homer established him both financially and as the dominant English poet) to this world of manuscript circulation, where meaning depended on who was reading which copies of poems and in what contexts. Consequently, his early pastoral poem Windsor Forest (1713) belongs more to a Catholic and Stuart-loyalist community rather than to the whole, mostly Protestant, nation of Britain.

The dull thing is Hone’s indulgence in the eighteenth-century scholars’ version of the culture wars, the Jacobite question. Should the house of Hanover rule to maintain the Protestant Succession, as Whigs maintained? Or should there be a return to the true Stuart line, as Tories wished?

Hone thinks Pope was really more of a Jacobite than late twentieth-century scholars like Reuben A. Brower, Maynard Mack, and even Pat Rogers were willing to imagine. While I am largely convinced on the facts as led, it’s a debate only a scholar could love. It also shows the obsessive reach of twenty-first-century politicisation. The Jacobite alternative was a live question in 1714 as Queen Anne was ailing, and it remains a significant set of issues for British political history. I just fear that we are universalising our current obsession with cultural politics when we make it the main game for literary and cultural history

Microanalysis of Pope’s manuscripts and their paths of circulation allows for better reading of these historically distant but alluring poems. By contrast, the obsessive attempt to X-ray poems for political affiliations that speak to the eternal battle between conservatives and progressives is tedious. You don’t need to diagnose Pope as a Jacobite to notice that he has a lot of broadly conservative loyalties and only a handful of progressive ‘get out of jail free’ cards for the modern reader. Hone takes a couple of those cards away; if you think to read Pope for affirmation of good political morality, then look elsewhere. If, however, you care for the music of English poetry or the snap of ironic wit, and don’t mind being challenged to disagree with a supremely confident rhetorician, read on.

By 1738, Pope was enraged by Sir Robert Walpole’s Britain as a cultural, political, and economic entity. So he proclaimed the need to write quickly in these riddling couplets:

Vice with such Giant strides comes on amain,
Invention strives to be before in vain;
Feign what I will, and paint it e’er so strong,
Some rising Genius sins up to my Song.

(Epilogue to the Satires, 6–9)

Whatever a satirist presents as caricature and exaggeration soon becomes reportage. The riddle is satisfying to spring, and the irony in ‘rising Genius’ glitters. Who cares whether Pope was reactionary enough to toast the king over the water when he could come up with something that is still so handy to think and feel with in the age of Robodebt?