Suppose it were Friday lvii: finding the words

for David Letimide

What delights the poet, then,

in the exposition of an idea?

I am afraid the answer is

quasi-unintelligibility,

offered Harvard's Helen

Vendler in her Clark Lec-

tures at Trinity College 

in 2003 - an annual rite

in letters on a par with

being offered the Order

of the Garter for endur-

ing the scrutiny of the

Victoria Cross. To this

ingredient, she offered

two others from Alexander

Pope - memorableness and

concision. 

If, then, it is not so much ideas that Pope is after as the representation of his own more vivid form of thinking, how shall we define the kind of thinking the literary reader finds in Pope? Living thought must establish itself as the norm at the very beginning of the verse .. Living thought has to be quick and mobile, ever darting to extremes and polarities, but resting in none of them. Living thought must, like ordinary thought, character-ise, allegorise, reason, de-nominate and analogise - but it must also jump up and down, over and under, left and right; it must swell and contract, leap from register to register, joke and feel pangs.

     Above all, it must advance 

     too swiftly for instant 

     intelligibility: the reader 

     must hang on for the ride, 

     bouncing to the next hurdle 

     hardly having recovered his 

     seat from the last. It is 

     as if the poet wants to 

     say,

     This is what thinking is 

     really like: have you 

     ever known it?

In his Epistle ii from the poem Vendler is discussing, An Essay on Man (1733), Alexander Pope lends her this explicit support:


Most strength the moving principle requires;

Active its task, it prompts, impels, inspires.

Sedate and quiet, the comparing lies,

Form'd but to check, delib'rate and advise ..






Always when one comes to the Essay, 
the glory of play is what rises 
closest to the formative surface, 
permeating and suffusing that 
veneer as we feel in our sweetest 
exertions. Even 'sedate and quiet'
as our posture may be, we engage
in that extracting, idealising
race which is the victory of
our poetry - to make itself our
natural mode of discourse with
those we love: memorable, con-
cise, too fleet to refuse. 

Helen Vendler
Poets Thinking
  Alexander Pope: Thinking,
  Miniaturizing, Modeling,
  and Mocking Ideas
Harvard University Press, 2004©


Alexander Pope
The Poems of Alexander Pope
  An Essay on Man, II, 67-70
John Butt, editor
The Twickenham Text
Yale University Press, 1963©