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This essay originally appeared in Rationality and the Liberal Spirit: A Festschrift Honoring Ira Lee Morgan, Willie Cavett and Paul Marvin Brown, Jr., Profesor of English Literature at Centenary College of Louisiana, edited by the Centenary English Department (Shreveport, Louisiana: Centenary College, 1997), pp. 56-68.
Pope and the Allegorical Mode1
When he first published The Temple of Fame (1715), a version of Chaucer's House of Fame, Alexander Pope felt constrained to attach a "Note" defending his decision to write a poem in the allegorical mode, since, as he exclaims, "Some modern Criticks, from a pretended Refinement of Taste, have declar'd themselves unable to relish allegorical poems" (p. 251).2 It was not too early in the century for Pope to detect the ripple of disapproval that would later become a wave of revulsion with the emergence of Romantic theory. Coleridge's disregard for allegory and personification was also anticipated by Johnson and, to some extent, even by Addison, Lord Kames, and others who objected to allegorical agents, particularly in epic poetry. But the eighteenth century was heir to a great tradition of allegory and allegorical forms such as prosopopoeia (or personification), and the allegorical mode certainly played a significant if not dominant role in shaping the thought and expression of eighteenth-century poets from Dryden to Collins.3 In this essay, I intend to concentrate discussion on allegory and allegorical strategies in the poetry of Alexander Pope, but it is worthwhile to begin by looking briefly at some eighteenth-century perceptions of allegory. For Pope and his contemporaries the word "allegory" had at least two different, although not unrelated, meanings. On the one hand it implied what most of us generally understand by the term and what is contained in the meaning of the original Greek word from which it is derived: to say one thing and mean something else or something more.4 On the other hand allegory was frequently associated with one particular figure of speech --prosopopoeia, or personification. Such an association, of course, was not peculiar to the eighteenth century; allegory has traditionally employed personified abstractions to express the immaterial. In Allegory of Love C.S. Lewis described the process in the following way: "you start with an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience, and can then invent visibilia to express them. If you are hesitating between an angry retort and a soft answer, you can express your state of mind by inventing a person called Ira with a torch and letting her contend with another invented person called Patientia."5 What Lewis describes is one important form of allegory, perhaps even a dominant form in much of the literature of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, but it was not the only allegorical tradition handed down by medieval authors to their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century posterity. The early Christian exegetes, finding allegory a particularly agreeable way of uncovering the truths hidden in the stories of the Bible, introduced an elaborate method for explicating Holy Scripture, reading Bible narrative in as many as four different senses: a literal or historical sense, an allegorical sense, a tropological or moral sense, and an anagogical or spiritual or mystical sense. This interpretive or exegetical tradition, however, was not limited to readings of the Bible. Works of literature also were sometimes read for their hidden (and even not so hidden) allegorical meanings. For example, Dante affirmed in the famous letter to Can Grande that the Divine Comedy was intended as such an allegory: "Be it known that the sense of this work is not simple, but on the contrary it may be called polysemous, that is to say, of more senses than one."6 Thus seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critics, the inheritors of this tradition, saw allegory as something larger than, not bound to, prosopopoeia. In his essay On Allegorical Poetry (1715), published the same year as Pope's Temple of Fame, John Hughes defines allegory as "a Fable or Story, in which, under imaginary Persons or Things, is shadow'd some real action or instructive Moral; or, as I think it is somewhere very shortly defin'd by Plutarch, it is that in which one thing is related and another thing is understood" (p. 88).7 That is not to say that the very close relationship between allegory and personification was denied or ignored. Hughes' first example of allegorical writing following this definition was Milton's personification of sin and death in Paradise Lost.8 Elsewhere Hughes makes it clear that prosopopoeia is one form of allegory, but one form among many: "As Allegory sometimes, for the sake of the moral Sense couch'd under its Fictions, gives Speech to Brutes, and sometimes, introduces Creatures which are out of Nature, as Goblins, Chimaera's, Fairies, and the like; so it frequently gives Life to Virtues and Vices, Passions and Diseases, to natural and moral Qualities; and represents them as divine, human, or infernal Persons" (p. 95). Even here Hughes begins by pointing out that whatever form an allegory takes, it is "for the sake of the moral Sense couch'd under its Fictions," hence reinforcing the idea that an allegory is a twofold structure, a story or a fiction with a further meaning couched within, a fable and a moral. The moral or positively didactic quality of allegory and allegorical personifications is perhaps inherent, but it is nowhere more apparent than in two of the most influential allegories of the period -- Prodicus' Choice of Hercules and Cebes' Tablature of Human Life. These two allegorical portraits of the vices and the virtues had been a part of every schoolboy's life at least since Shakespeare's day. Further, as Earl Wasserman observed, "Both were admirably suited to serve as textbooks, for the Greek in which they were written is fairly simple and, considerably more important, they teach pleasingly most commendable moral codes."9 Allegory was intended to instruct. Again, as John Hughes said, it should shadow forth some "instructive Moral," or as Joseph Addison puts it, allegorical fables "take off from the severity of instruction, and inforce it at the same time they conceal it" (Tatler 90). Significantly, Hughes concludes his essay on allegory by commending Addison's Tatler and Spectator essays for reviving the allegorical "Genius": "I need only mention the Visions in the Tatler and Spectator, by Mr. Addison, to convince everyone of this. The Table of Fame . . . and several others . . . which are all imagin'd, and writ with the greatest Strength and Delicacy, may give the Reader an Idea more than any thing I can say of the Perfection to which this kind of writing is capable of being raised" (p. 104). Hughes' praise of Addison, however, suggests that he saw something more than merely a moral lesson in the periodical essays, for he commends their "Strength and Delicacy," criteria suggesting aesthetic as well as moral values. In fact, a good deal of the adverse criticism of allegorical writing centered on the clumsy and unwieldy nature of most allegorical abstractions or on their wild improbability. Blackmore, for instance, censures Ariosto and Spenser, complaining that they "are hurried on with a boundless, impetuous Fancy over Hill and Dale, till they are both lost in a Wood of Allegories, --Allegories so wild, unnatural, and extravagant, as greatly displease the Reader."10 Hughes' response to such criticism is to point to the license granted to allegory because of its "moral Sense":
But although he describes allegory as a "Fairy Land . . . peopled by the Imagination," Hughes nevertheless feels certain bounds or rules are necessary in order to attain "perfection" in the allegorical mode. He therefore suggests "four Qualities" which "are essential to every good allegory: the three first of which relate to Fable, and the last to the Moral." The qualities Hughes names are these:
It is interesting to note that although he places great emphasis on the moral sense throughout his essay, Hughes' values (liveliness, propriety, consistency, and clarity) are preeminently aesthetic. His critical interest is focused on the strength and delicacy of the fable, and although he urges us to see both allegory and personification as essentially didactic, he uses the "mystick Sense" as a justification for flights of fancy and imagination -- "such Licences" as would otherwise be "shocking and monstrous." Thus allegory not only instructs, but delights, and the moral lesson is dependent on the aptness of the fable or personification. The fable must bring the moral to life, give it form and substance, and present it to the feelings and the senses. "It is a kind of Poetical Picture," Hughes explains, "or Hieroglyphick, which by its apt Resemblance conveys Instruction to the Mind by Analogy to the Senses; and so amuses the Fancy, whilst it informs the Understanding. Every Allegory has therefore two Senses, the Literal and the Mystical; the literal Sense is like a Dream or Vision, of which the mystical Sense is the true Meaning or Interpretation" (p. 88). The association of allegory with vision, whether as painting or dream, is an important one throughout the history of the allegorical mode. But as Wasserman has shown, it had a special significance to the eighteenth century: "The almost consistent association of personification with vision in the eighteenth-century mind arises out of this conviction that personification is the consequence of vehement feeling and imagination flying to the farthest reaches its sensory nature will allow."11 Moreover, in Hughes we find an explicit identification of poetry and painting: "The Resemblance which has been so often observ'd in general between Poetry and Painting, is yet more particular in Allegory; which . . . is a kind of Picture in Poetry" (p. 88). Frequently, therefore, allegories are presented as visions or as visualizations, with the allegorical imagery employed as a means to reinforce the reader's impression that he is watching an action or viewing a scene vividly evoked by the words of the poet. According to such a conception of allegory, the poet is in fact a creator, a maker of imaginary worlds (cf. Hughes, p. 89), or even fairy lands, in which the truth or moral lesson is shadowed forth in the form of a fiction, a fable or personification. Although the importance of the moral sense is not to be denied, the success or failure of an allegory depends upon its quality as a work of art, upon the strength and delicacy of the poet's vision and his ability to recreate that vision in language, to give it form as well as meaning, to picture in words the flights of his imagination and convey to the understanding of the reader the truths couched in the artist's fictions. Finally, the fable and the moral are inseparable. The meaning of an allegory is locked within the experience of the fable. The fable constitutes the allegory. The truth is the fiction. II Although, according to the eighteenth-century conceptions we have been examining, many of Pope's poems can be read allegorically, his only acknowledged allegorical poem was The Temple of Fame, the "Hint" of which, Pope explains, was taken from Chaucer's House of Fame, a medieval dream-vision. Eventually, I want to consider ways in which Pope's other poetry can be seen to employ some of these notions of allegory, but first we should consider Pope's own conception of what it meant to write a poem in the allegorical mode. In the "Note" attached to the first edition of The Temple of Fame, Pope defends his use of allegory by referring to its long tradition among the ancients, from the poems of the old Provencal to those of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser. To make the form appear respectable in the face of criticism from certain "modern Criticks," Pope goes so far as to enlist the authority of Aristotle, a name that would carry great weight with neoclassical readers: "for if Fable be allow'd one of the chief Beauties, or as Aristotle calls it, the very Soul of Poetry, 'tis hard to comprehend how that Fable should be the less valuable for having a Moral" (p. 251). Geoffrey Tillotson pointed out in his introduction to the Twickenham Edition, that Pope's appeal to Aristotle is rather ineffective, since in the Poetics his concern was with tragedy and not with poems such as House of Fame (p. 221). But whether or not Pope distorts Aristotle's sense of "fable," we can see that Pope's definition of allegory (a fable with a moral) conforms very well to Hughes' definition in his essay On Allegorical Poetry and to the long tradition of allegory which the eighteenth century inherited from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Nevertheless, despite this long and respectable tradition, Pope acknowledges that "The Incidents indeed, by which the Allegory is convey'd, must be vary'd, according to the different Genius or Manners of different Times." Then, seeming to echo Dryden's formula for restoring Chaucer, he adds: "and they should never be spun too long, or too much clog'd with trivial Circumstances, or little Particularities" (p. 251).12 But, Pope points out, there is good reason for going to the trouble of writing in the allegorical mode, for it appeals to our natural love of indirection: "We find an uncommon Charm in Truth, when it is convey'd by this Side-way to our Understanding; and 'tis observable, that even in the most ignorant Ages this way of Writing has found Reception" (p. 251). Pope's critics would have been quick to observe that it is a way of writing suited only to ignorant ages, but Pope appears to recognize that the strongest appeal which allegory has is its indirection, its capacity for engaging the reader's imagination and enlisting participation in the poetic process, for conveying a moral or meaning by "Side-way to our Understanding." The moral of The Temple of Fame, however, appears to be taken in at a glance. "The whole is lucid, coherent and objective," said G. Wilson Knight, "A child could understand it."13 And perhaps he was right. At our first glimpse of the temple we see it standing "High on a Rock of Ice" (l. 27), a symbol of the transient durability of the poem's allegorical subject; it can be defaced either by freezing storms or burning suns: "For Fame, impatient of Extreams, decays / Not more by Envy than Excess of Praise" (ll. 43-4). Later, following Chaucer, Pope reminds us that Fame is the sister of fortune: Some she disgrac'd, and some with Honours crown'd; Moreover, the Temple of Fame is accompanied by a Mansion of Rumor, where lies and truths are confounded and spread throughout the world by the Goddess Fame, who "sits aloft, and points them out their Course" (483). It is a disillusioning vision in the sense that the scales drop from both the poet's and the reader's eyes:
But although the poem may be reduced to such a moral, that is only a part of its meaning. Pope's allegorical strategies are subtle and complex, and the deeper meanings of the poem emerge from the reader's experience of the fable. Following Chaucer and the allegorical tradition, Pope writes the poem in the form of a dream-vision. As "balmy Sleep" charms the poet's "Cares to Rest," fantastic visions arise from his mind and "A Train of Phantoms" compose an "Intellectual Scene" (1-10). With a magnificent flight of the imagination the poet describes himself standing at a magical nexus "betwixt Earth, Seas, and Skies" (11). Beneath him lies a fairy land, above the "Rock of Ice" and the Temple of Fame (11-30). What follows is an allegorical journey from the icy mountain inscribed with various names, to the temple facade with four allegorical fronts facing the four quarters of the earth, and finally into the temple itself where we examine emblematic statuary as though we were on a stroll through the gardens of Stowe. Throughout the experience is visual, but it is more than merely visual. Pope attempts to give his vision sensual form by alluding to familiar analogues in art and literature. The temple facades are evoked with vivid descriptions of their architecture and their decoration; the statues of the various heroes that populate the temple interior are often verbal reproductions of well known works of art; and the description of the temple itself seems in some ways almost Miltonic. At the center of the vision is the most important abstraction of all, the presiding deity of the poem, who appears in the midst of her jeweled temple on a "glowing Throne":
When on the Goddess first I cast my Sight, The sense of vision is skillfully evoked not only by the language (the references to "Sight," the words "gaz'd," "Vista's," "view"), but by the movement and the details of the description. The Goddess grows before our eyes, swelling to the roof, and with her the temple itself expands and opens "ampler Vista's" to our view. But the visual richness is even more striking when we compare Pope's passage to his source in Chaucer, which, as I have said, was also a dream vision:
For Alther-first, soth for to seye, While Chaucer's passage is straightforward and factual (at first she was smaller than a cubit, then in a while she stretched from earth to heaven), Pope's is lush with pictorial detail and is much more imaginatively realized. We find the same visual richness in the allegorical portrait of the Goddess herself:
Such was her Form, as antient Bards have told, Pope condenses the thirty lines of Chaucer's description into ten, leaving out details which he must have considered "trivial Circumstances, or little Particularities," but arranging the traditional features of the personification into a vivid pictorial composition: the Goddess above, surrounded by the nine muses "in Order rang'd" beneath with their eyes "fix'd" on Fame. But the description of Fame is not the only kind of allegorical portrait we find in the poem. The descriptions of the heroes who adorn the four fronts and the statues which appear inside the temple are allegorical as well, carefully selected for their emblematic values. Because they are generally historical figures (although some are mythological), I have called them "historical personifications." For example, the figures that rest atop the "Six pompous Columns" surrounding the "Shrine it self of Fame," are meant to represent specifically classical values in poetry and philosophy, the same values which Pope had enshrined in the Essay on Criticism (1711), published only a few years earlier.15 The first is the statue of Homer:
High on the first, the mighty Homer shone This portrait, like the portrait of Fame, projects a vivid and emblematic content. His statue of "Eternal Adamant," Homer is imaged as the "Father of Verse" and dressed as a priest in "holy Fillets." His gently waving beard contrasts with the "boldness in his Looks," as his "strong Expression" contrasts with the "brave Neglect" of his poetry. He is both venerable and imposing: "In Years he seem'd, but not impair'd by Years." And on the column the boldness and fire of his verse is illustrated with scenes from the wars of Troy. This picture is hardly an abstraction, yet the portrait of Homer embodies the ideals of Homeric poetry: strong expression and brave neglect. We find a similar allegorical appropriateness in the other portraits as well. Virgil, next in order, is enshrined in "purest Gold," with a "reverend Eye" fixed on Homer. The ordered regularity of Virgilian verse ("Finish'd the whole, and labour'd ev'ry Part, / With patient Touches of unweary'd Art") is expressed by his symbolic pose: "The Mantuan there in sober Triumph sate, / Composed his Posture, and his Look sedate" (196-209). Pindar follows in his "Carr of Silver bright;" depicted as "some furious Prophet," he seems the incarnation of his sublime poetic style:
Here, like some furious Prophet, Pindar rode Then follow the descriptions of "happy Horace" who "temper'd Pindar's Fire" (223-32); Aristotle, "the mighty Stagyrite," who sits "fix'd in Thought" (233-37); and "immortal Tully," the "Great Father of his Country" (238-43). Each represents a classical ideal (of poetry, wisdom, or patriotism), embodying it and shadowing it forth. But if these are the ideals of just fame, the reality is presented in the dramatic procession of suppliants who crowd around the Shrine of Fame, where "Unlike Successes equal Merits found" (295), and in the Mansion of Rumor, where lies and truth contend until "At last agreed, together out they fly, / Inseparable now, the Truth and Lye" (494). But the allegory somehow reconciles these extremes, and the poet, the youthful Bard who cannot deny he came "not void of Hopes" (501), determines neither to seek nor to reject the reward of Fame ("She comes unlook'd for, if she comes at all"). His final decision is to follow virtue rather than the fickle Goddess:
But if the Purchase costs so dear a Price, In the light of the poem's closing lines the classical ideals represented by the six historical personifications that surround the throne of Fame become even more significant, and we realize (if we have failed to see it earlier) that The Temple of Fame is, in part at least, an allegory about poetic fame in particular.16 It is important to recognize, therefore, that there is "an honest Fame," that not all the rewards of Fame are to be scorned. But from the tension raised within the fable between the ideal and the reality a solution emerges: to achieve an honest fame one must seek virtue. For Pope that moral would have a special meaning, as we shall see, but for the moment it is enough to observe the way in which the meaning of the poem emerges from the experience of the fable. It is, as G. Wilson Knight suggested, quite "lucid" and "coherent."
III Before we move on to Pope's satiric allegories I would like to pause to examine the allegorical vision which closes the prophecy of peace at the conclusion of Windsor Forest (1713). The entire poem, of course, might be read as an allegorical celebration of the Peace of Utrecht, although, as Earl Wasserman pointed out, such a limited reading would be an unnecessary contraction of the poem's imaginative parameters.17 However, we should not overlook the fact that Pope employs allegorical strategies in several of the episodes of the poem, allowing the fable to suggest a number of interlocking meanings. The pivotal episode, for instance, the metamorphosis of Ladona, is an allegorical equivalent for several of the poem's major themes: the pursuit of Ladona by Pan recalls the earlier imagery of hunting and warfare, and her escape through transformation images the restoration of harmony and peace by Anne with the Treaty of Utrecht; the contrast of Ladona the huntress and Ladona the river mirrors the contrast between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa which emerges in the later portions of the poem; finally, her association with the Thames, the "great Father of the British Floods" (219), prepares the way artistically for the closing prophecy of peace spoken by "Old Father Thames" (329-434). The allegorical vision at the end of the prophecy, however, is the most significant piece of allegorical writing in the poem, for it illustrates the way in which Pope allows the abstractions to embody and restate the themes introduced earlier in historical and mythological passages. Old Father Thames concludes his address to Peace with the following lines:
Exil'd by Thee from Earth to deepest Hell, Once again Pope manages to bring the abstractions to life with deftness and economy; each personification is imaged with striking visual detail. But more importantly, the vision is a summary and a reenactment of the poem's theme: the restoration of peace and harmony and the expulsion of faction and discord. The allegorical strategies we have examined so far, the personification of the Goddess Fame, the historical personifications in The Temple of Fame, and the allegorical vision at the conclusion of Windsor Forest, all recur in Pope's later satirical works, although the contexts are significantly altered. This recurrence is not really extraordinary, however, when we consider how much allegory and satire have in common. Pope, as we have seen, defines allegory as a fable with a moral, a story that teaches its lesson by indirection, conveying it by a side-way to our understanding. Similarly Dryden recognized two components in satire: wit and morality (or, as Alvin B. Kernan prefers to call them, art and morality).18 In a somewhat more elaborate form Northrop Frye distinguished the same two poles: "Two things, then, are essential to satire; one is wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack."19 Neither allegory nor satire is a direct statement of a moral lesson or meaning, but a fictional representation. The essential difference between the two forms is generally one of ends rather than means. Although both suggest their meaning through indirection, through fables and fictions, the satiric purpose is usually to attack.20 In the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1734/5), for instance, Pope includes several allegorical portraits, the most famous of which are those of Atticus (the patron) and Sporus (the flatterer). As with the ideal descriptions of heroic virtues in The Temple of Fame, Pope portrays vice surrounded with emblems that define it and evoke a sensual response. Here is the picture of the flatterer Sporus:
Eternal Smiles his Emptiness betray, It is not essential that we know that Sporus was the name of a boy castrated, changed into a woman, and married by Nero (Suetonius, Nero, XXVIII, i), although that sharpens the edge of the wit. But this "personification" is historical in a much more immediate way. More than a bodying forth of flattery, in the type of Sporus the flatterer, for his eighteenth-century readers at any rate, Pope's portrait is purportedly of Lord Hervey, and the Eve whose ear he is at is Queen Caroline. But the true source of the satire resides in the language of the characterization, in the wit or art of the poetry itself. The historical allusion to Lord Hervey draws him into the description and uses him as a contemporary type of the flatterer, just as the allusion to Milton's Satan at the ear of Eve defines the vice. The allegorical mode is transformed into the satiric; the fiction here becomes a means of attack. Just as an allegorical portrait can be used to describe vice as well as virtue, an allegorical vision can be one of gloom as well as glory. The prophecy of peace which concludes Windsor Forest, for example, can be metamorphosed into the satiric vision of Vice triumphant which closes Dialogue I of the Epilogue to the Satires (1738):
In golden Chains the willing World she draws, And (with an echo from The Temple of Fame) we hear "her black Trumpet" of infamy proclaim: "Not to be corrupted is the Shame" (160). But the vision of Dialogue I is only a prelude to Pope's final satiric vision in Book IV of The Dunciad (1743), which in many respects we might view as his most elaborate allegory, complete with learned commentary (in The Dunciad Variorum, 1729, and The Dunciad, in Four Books, 1743), a presiding deity (the Goddess Dulness), and an army of historical personifications (including Lewis Theobald, in 1728, Colley Cibber, in 1743, and an assortment of hacks, booksellers, and miscellaneous dunces). But the allegorical vision of Book IV gives an added meaning to the fable of dullness; the enthronement of the Goddess turns the satiric comedy of the earlier books into a tragedy of truly cosmic proportions. As the book opens there is just enough light in the midst of an infernal "darkness visible" for the poet to describe the ensuing festivities. With Wit, Logic, Morality, and the rest at her feet and her Laureate "on her lap" (20 ff.), the Goddess Dulness presides over the celebration of Chaos and approaching night. Finally the poem ends with the following allegorical passage, a satiric vision surpassing that of Dialogue I even as dullness surpasses vice as an emblem of corruption:
She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold The blackness of the vision is nearly total. Almost everything succumbs to the "uncreating word." Finally it is only the poet who, with his creating word that brings the fable to life, can transcend the "Universal Darkness." And it is the fable itself which constitutes both the moral and the morality of the poem. The fiction has become its meaning, and Pope has joined allegory to satire in an intricate and imaginative union: the marriage of indirection and attack.
Notes 1. Only once during my years at Centenary College did I dare to stray from my own chosen fields of medieval and Renaissance literature into the neighboring territory of the eighteenth century, the Augustan Age that Lee Morgan had claimed as his own proper domain. It was during a semester when Dr. Morgan was abroad, the Centenary exchange professor at Aarhus University, that I filled in for him for the sake of a few senior English majors so desperate for instruction in Pope and Johnson that they could not wait for Dr. Morgan's return the next fall. Now that I have heard rumors of his retirement from the field, I have found the courage to offer once again these few words on the poetry of Alexander Pope in Dr. Morgan's honor and for his judgment. [cited] 2. This and all subsequent quotations from Pope's poems are from The Twickenham Edition of The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, et al. (London and New Haven: Methuen & Co. Ltd. and Yale University Press, 1939-67). Pages and lines are cited in the text. [cited] 3. There is a substantial literature on allegory and personification in these periods of English literature. I am particularly indebted to Earl R. Wasserman, "The Inherent Values of Eighteenth-Century Personification," PMLA 65 (1950), 435-63; Edward A. Bloom, "The Allegorical Principle," ELH, 18 (1951), 163-90; and Stephen Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985). John Gatta, Jr., "Coleridge and Allegory," Modern Language Quarterly 38 (1977), 62-77, offers a corrective to the view that Coleridge was always critical of allegory, describing his attitude as "an intriguing combination of ambivalence and ambiguity" (p. 77). [cited] 4. allegorein (allos=other + -agorein=to speak) to speak so as to imply other than what is said. Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon. [Greek letters transliterated for this plain text version.] [cited] 5. Allegory of Love (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 45. Lewis professes to find the origins of allegorical expression in the struggle of human emotions, the psychomachia between good and evil such as that at the conclusion of Statius' Thebaid (pp. 49-56), but there are other early examples of personification allegory; in Homer, for example, Rumor and Strife sometimes appear as personified characters (in Books 2 and 11 of the Iliad), and in Virgil's Aeneid (Book 4) the personification of Rumor is even more affective. [cited] 6. See C.H. Grandgent, Companion to the Divine Comedy, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 15. [cited] 7. Critical Essays of the Eighteenth Century 1700-1725, ed. Willard Highley Durham (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915), p. 88. Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text. [cited] 8. As Stephen Knapp points out, this somewhat uncharacteristic passage from Paradise Lost was a favorite example among eighteenth-century critics, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge, pp. 51-65. [cited] 9. "The Inherent Values of Eighteenth-Century Personification," p. 438. [cited] 10. "Preface to Prince Arthur, An Heroick Poem," in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J.E. Spingarn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), vol. III, p. 238. [cited] 11. "The Inherent Values of Eighteenth-Century Personification," p. 446. [cited] 12. Compare "Preface to Fables," in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W.P. Ker, vol. 2 (1926; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), p. 265. [cited] 13. The Poetry of Pope: Laureate of Peace (1955; rpt. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1965), p. 94. [cited] 14. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, second edition, ed. F.N. Robinson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957), p. 295. [cited] 15. For a comparison of The Temple of Fame and the Essay on Criticism see Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 354 ff. [cited] 16. For a discussion of The Temple of Fame and Pope's literary identity, see John Paul Russo, Alexander Pope: Tradition and Identity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 133-75, especially, pp. 147-164; David Wheeler, "So Easy to Be Lost": Poet and Self in Pope's The Temple of Fame," Papers in Language and Literature, 29 (1993), 3-27. [cited] 17. "Windsor Forest," in The Subtler Language (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), p. 110. My own discussion of Windsor Forest, especially those points dealing with the myth of Ladona, derives much from Wasserman's reading. [cited] 18. See Kernan's discussion of Dryden's "Essay on Satire" in The Plot of Satire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 6-18. [cited] 19. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 224. [cited] 20. Ellen D. Leyburn's Satiric Allegory: Mirror of Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), helped me clarify my own notions of the relationship between allegory and satire, see especially pp. 1-14. I have borrowed the term "indirection" from her argument and adapted it to my own interpretation. [cited]
© 1997 Michael L. Hall |