Pope's Eloisa and the Heroides of Ovid

Pope'stsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Eloisa and the Heroides of O vid H o yt T ro w b rid g e I Th ERE IS A REMARKABLE discrepancy in critical judgments of Pope’s E loisa to A b ela rd between his own period and later times. For almost a century, Emile Audra says, the poem was generally considered in both France and England to be "la plus belle et la plus emouvante des epitres amoureuses.”1 If anything, he under­ states the enthusiastic admiration felt for the poem by readers and critics from its publication in 1717 to the end of the eighteenth century. In 1756, E loisa was "in the Hands of all, and in the Mem­ ories of most readers.’’2 Joseph Warton, who thought that it would outlive all but two or three other poems by Pope, described it as "one of the most highly finished, and certainly the most interesting, of the pieces of our author.”3 Critics of the 1780’s praise it in even more superlative terms; Dr. Johnson calls it "one of the most happy productions of human wit,” excelling eveiy composition of the same kind. Gilbert Wakefield says that Gray’s E leg y is more finished and pathetic than any other poem in the world—"Pope’s E loisa alone excepted”—and William Mason regards Pope’s epistle as "such a ch ef d ’oeuvre, that nothing of the kind can be relished after it.’’4 As Audra’s remark implies, this consensus of admiration did not outlast Pope’s century. Some nineteenth-century readers, including Byron,5 continued to believe that E loisa was a beautiful and mov­ ing poem, but for the most part its reputation was buried, along with almost everything Pope wrote, in the revolution of taste ini­ 11 Ra c is m in t h e Eig h t e e n t h Ce n t u r y tiated by Wordsworth’s epoch-making ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA P reface. In our own century, in spite of the sweeping revaluation of Pope which has been in progress for some forty years, the poem has by no means recovered the critical esteem in which it was held during his age. According to Geoffrey Tillotson, Mason "spoke the enthusiasm of a past cen­ tury. The modern reader is inclined to overlook or disparage E loisa to A b ela rd .” Tillotson does his best to make the poem sound worth reading, but his remarks about its "rhetoric,” "geometrizing,” and "operatic flights” seem more likely to discourage any reading at all than to open the way toward a fair and unprejudiced appraisal.® A more perceptive and sophisticated reader, Reuben Brower, leaves the poem in little better case. His chapter on E loisa in T h e P oetry o f A llu sio n presents a systematic comparison with Pope’s formal model, the H ero id es of Ovid. Brower knows these poems, in the original, as well as most professed classical scholars, and he reads them as living poetry. Yet his subtle analyses of the language of particular passages in Ovid and in Pope do not add up to any con­ vincing account or defense of the poem as a whole. There are "mo­ ments we remember and treasure in E loisa to A b ela rd ,” Brower says, but he finds no overall design or formal structure except a suc­ cession of coups, tirades, and remembered scenes, following Ovidian patterns of wit and rhythm. If this is all the poem has to offer, Brower is quite right in concluding that E loisa to A b ela rd may strike us as "remarkable” or "fine,” but that in reading it we are not likely to feel "how moving” or "how convincing.”7 Where a contrast between contemporary opinion and later judg­ ment is so sharp, there is surely some reason to surmise that the fault may lie not in the poem but in us, in our way of reading it. The readers and critics of a poet’s own time may, of course, be mis­ taken in their judgments of his works; as Dr. Johnson says, con­ temporary...