Alexander Pope: The Evolution of a Poet by Netta Murray Goldsmith (review)

53 among writers in English. In discussing representations of Swift in the twentieth century, the book successfully pursues its thesis that Swift himself helped shape his own afterlife. Yet to this reviewerperhaps most compelling are the early chapters with their focus on the works themselves and on Swift’s actions in constructing myths and images of himself: Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture makes a particularly important contribution in showing Swift as a writer in popular forms and media who challenged authorities by leveling political and cultural hierarchies. Frank Palmeri University of Miami NETTA MURRAY GOLDSMITH. Alexander Pope: The Evolution of a Poet. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. xiv ⫹ 316. $84.95. A short, resolutely centrist, critical biography based on primary sources, Ms. Goldsmith’s Alexander Pope purports to ‘‘take a relatively new approach to literary biography’’ by applying ‘‘recent research into creativity,’’ primarily Csikszentmihalyi ’s Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (1996). As represented by Ms. Goldsmith , however, the insights of this recent researcharefarfromearthshaking,forexample , Csikszentmihalyi’s stress on ‘‘orginality as a distinguishing feature of true creativity.’’Moreover, issuesofthenature and nurture of creativity disappear after the first four or five of twenty-eight chapters (there are also a prologue and an epilogue ). The ‘‘Evolution’’ in the subtitle turns out to mean nothing more than a generally chronological arrangement. For eighteenth-centuryscholars,thebook has nothing new to offer. Despite its Preface , it does not address such readers, but rather an amorphous public presumably prejudiced against Pope but capable of learning to admire him. ‘‘There are a number of reasons why even more of us might enjoy reading Pope if we took him off the bookshelf.’’ This book can be recommended to those who would think that pronouncement is news. Each short chapter deals either with a different poem or a group of poems or with a phase of Pope’s life. Although these thought bites inevitably oversimplify, their brevity makes the book easy to consult, and Ms. Goldsmith tries hard—too hard, at times—to give both Pope’s faults and his virtues. A bad feature for any audience, however , is that often material is introduced as doubtful, but thereafter treated as fact. For example, she acknowledges the debateaboutthedegreeandnatureofPope ’s interest in Lady Mary, but later bases arguments on his being in love with her. With no other evidence than a passage in his Letters, she makes statements about his emotions and thoughts, as if the letters were transparent windows into Pope’s soul. Only in a chapter on ‘‘What the Letters Tell Us’’ does she acknowledge that the letters were selected, revised, and sometimes set pieces—far fromtransparent . Her readings of the poems are generally sympathetic and useful, though I cannot agree that ‘‘An Essay on Criticism was to become the most misunderstood poem in the language.’’I doubt that it was even the most misunderstood of Pope’s poems. Ms. Goldsmith’s conclusion rests on the belief that ‘‘if the majority of readers still think the Essay on Criticism makes artistic creativity sound a more banal activity than it is, this is largelyPope’s own fault. He felt he could be explicit about the rational elements in poetry as these were unquestioned, while he expressed his more equivocal ideas about 54 the nature of creative imagination in images and aphorisms.’’ This is Ms. Goldsmith at her worst, a reader who apparently does not understand that there are better reasons than fear of censure for expressing ideas about the nature of imagination in metaphors and images rather than flat statements. Fortunately, she is usually more adroit. She is aware, for example, of the different strains in recent feministresponses to Pope, and her chapter on Epistle to a Lady gains from the implicit dialogue withtheseothercritics,whensheseesthat it is not women alone, but people in general , who seem to Pope contradictory and changeable. She makes valuable points about his portraits’ complexity and mystery ; his understanding that ‘‘women face greater problems in achieving rounded identities in society than men do’’; his need to defend Martha Blount’s reputation . The best feature of the book has nothing to do with itspsychologizingpremise. Whenever a public event or ministerial crisis...