To the Letter: The Material Text as Space of Adjudication in Pope's First Satire of the Second Book of Horace

In Alexander Pope's imitations of Horace, Pope famously uses Horace's model as a legitimation and defense of his poetic provocations. Thomas Bentley noted the strategy already in 1735, when he described Pope's Sober Advice from Horace as "an admirable Expedient […] to get upon the Back of HORACE, that you may abuse every body you don't like, with Impunity!"¹ Pope's practice of printing certain of his imitations alongside the source-text further buttressed the protective function of the original: small numerals within the text referred the reader directly from a potentially offending line to its Horatian "equivalent." But in the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, the reader witnesses the legitimation not merely of themes or particular phrases, but of the satiric project itself: for the source-poem is the second of Horace's famous "defenses" of satire. Thus in this work Pope enacts a kind of double justification, legitimizing not only his particular choices of words and motifs, but also his chosen profession. Ironically, however, Pope's strongest defense may emerge not from the alignment of his work with Horace's, but rather in its difference. For it is true that both poets set out to legitimize or justify their satire, and indeed to do so literally—putting versions of themselves in discussion with a legal counsel, and in dispute against the charge of libel (an actionable offense in both Pope's England and Horace's Rome). However, it is precisely in their use of the figure of the law that the two poems diverge. For Horace invokes the law as a kind of metaphor for the "laws" of genre, ultimately declaring the sovereignty of his poetry under its own, literary codes of conduct—codes both in competition with, and in mockery of, the laws of the State. In contrast, Pope invokes the law as that which his poetry abides by, enforces, and indeed enacts or performs. Whereas Horace defends against charges of illegality with claims of a-legality, Pope argues that his satire is immanently legal—that it is a space in which the power of the law and its agents—including Pope's poetry itself—are continually re-upheld.

Although, as I will demonstrate, Pope so thoroughly reworked Horace's text in his Imitation, it is worth noting the reasons that Pope chose to engage with Horace in the first place. Many scholars have identified satire as the dominant genre of the Augustan Age: David Nokes writes that "in terms of voice, register, theme, and style, satire set the fashion" in eighteenth-century literature.² Moreover, Thomas E. Maresca documents how Horace in particular was seen as having "solidified the genre" of formal verse satire and was imbued with a "canonical authority."³ But eighteenth-century writers did not look to Horace merely self-effacingly and nostalgically, as a be-all-and-end-all of satire; rather, as Margaret Anne Doody points out, Horace's satires embodied for the Augustans an extreme literary self-consciousness, a self-consciousness that they attempted to manifest for and in their own time. Doody suggests that no poet before Horace "ever [wrote] so much about writing itself, about styles and genres and the difficulty or ease of writing."⁴ She notes that "in many of the sermones [i.e., satires] the making of the poem is part of the subject,"⁵ thus rendering them particularly fascinating to eighteenth-century writers, who, post-Restoration and in an era of increasing mass literacy, had begun questioning the role of poetry anew. Doody explains that the eighteenth-century poets most valued Horace's ability to "capitalize […] on generic instability, [and to] create […] new genres, mixed styles. [Horace's] works […] self-conscious, varied, and free […] brought sharply...