An introduction to the 1728 Dunciad<?TITLE> An introduction to the 1728 Dunciad. Like much of this site, this introduction is a work in progress. The purpose of this introduction (together with the notes) is to give the general reader sufficient information to grasp the meaning of the 1728 text of the Dunciad. “Only a very naive reader would care to maintain that all poetry should be immediately self-evident, and that the poet should not presume upon any knowledge that is not ‘common-knowledge.’ On the other hand, a poet’s references are sometimes so recondite that even to his contemporaries much of his meaning is lost, or, if not lost, found only with the help of footnotes which he or his editor has been bound to supply. With the passage of time, too, what once was common knowledge may cease to be generally known ... All Pope’s poems make a considerable demand upon the modern reader, but none more than the Dunciad. The reader whom Pope had in mind was on who possessed the intellectual background of a well-read amateur of letters in the early eighteenth century. This ideal reader would have a lively recollection of at least th ore familiar classical autohrs, and would therefore be quick to respond to the classic phrase in a modern context, the deliberate echo, the epic turn, the double entendre; he would have an intimate acquaintance with the London life of his day, and more particularly with the leisured world of wits and beaux and men of letters; and he would be easily familiar with the political and domestic history of the period. So equipped, as intelligent reader of 1728 would respond to the Dunciad with the immediate awareness of a contemporary and the discrimination natural to one of the initiated. Compared with readers such as these, the twentieth-century reader is necessarily at a disadvantage. Pope’s allusions — and, if need be, his jokes — may be explained by his editor; but explanation is not the same thing as immediate recognition.” — James Sutherland in the Preface to the First Edition of the Twickenham Edition of the Dunciad, 1943. (p. v) Yet if we are to understand the poem, some explanation is needed. Let’s begin with the poet and his times. The New American Desk Encyclopedia has this entry: POPE, Alexander (1688-1744), the greatest English poet and satirist of the AUGUSTAN AGE. Only 4ft 6in tall, he was partly crippled by tuberculosis. He first set out his literary ideals in his Essay on Criticism (1711), written in rhymed (heroic) couplets. His best known works are the mock-epic The Rape of the Lock (1712), his translation of the Iliad (1720) and the Odyssey (1726), The Dunciad (1728 and 1743), An Essay on Man (1733-34) and Moral Essays (1731-35). This entry refers to: AUGUSTAN AGE, the high point of Roman culture, marked by the reign of Emperor Augustus (27 BC-14 AD) and the literary works of Livy, Horace, Ovid and Vergil. In the first half of the 18th century, English neoclassicists sought to emulate such writers and the term Augustan denoted all that was admirable in art and politics, though, in a manner typical of the period’s liking for paradox and representative of its political divisions, it was often used ironically. The Wikipedia articles on Alexander Pope and on Augustan literature provide an accessible general introduction, subject, of course, to the usual Wikipedia caveats. The 1728 Dunciad is a satiric poem, cast in part as a parody of the Aeneid and written in rhymed iambic pentameter, known as heroic couplets. This is the verse form used by Dryden in his translation of the Aeneid and by Pope, both in his translations of the Iliad and Odyssey and in the mock-epic The Rape of the Lock. The targets of the Dunciad’s satire include bad or insipid writing, pedantry, and what Pope and his circle considered a general decline in learning and culture. The satire, however, is not only general but personal and becomes downright nasty at times. W. J. Courthope wrote in the preface to his edition of the Dunciad, that “the general reader is apt to pass lightly over the Dunciad as if it were merely the poetical record of a literary quarrel between Pope and a number of obscure writers of whom little is known and less deserves to be remembered.” Still to come: a brief account of the significance of Pope, in general the place of the Dunciad (1728 and variorum) in Pope’s career heroic poem – mock epic what is a dunce irony of what I am doing description of the apparatus All original material is copyright 2007 by Allen Mellen </body> </html>