"Nameless Graces Which No Methods Teach" ˸ Alexander Pope’s Eighteenth-Century Metapoetic Triplet

Abstract

Alexander Pope’s calculated use of the triplet in his early poetry lays the foundation for educating the public about how to maintain high quality literature and how to once again form a community in their divided nation. Pope’s triplets in An Essay on Criticism and his translation of The Iliad act as a balance between classical and neoclassical ideas about poetry. The sense of tension between these ideologies, carefully crafted to catch readers’ attention, disallows audiences from slipping into easy assumptions about how poetry should be written. Instead, Pope underscores the contrasts between classical and neoclassical ideals. In doing so, he draws attention to the defining features of the eighteenth century, ultimately establishing a uniquely eighteenth-century triplet. |Pope adds a further metapoetic layer to his triplet in An Essay on Criticism when he demonstrates the third line’s role in his establishment of poetry rules that allow for variation, but only when it is necessary or enhances the beauty of the work. The extraction and analysis of triplets reveals their self-contained narrative of the increasing complexity of art as it transitions from sketching to poetry, music, and drama, eventually returning to poetry. Via this discussion of art, Pope moves his readers through the act of artistic creation to underscore the work of the mind in the design and function of his poem. Such guidance of his audience allows Pope to shape the poetic atmosphere of the eighteenth century and to progress a form of poetry which he had positioned himself to popularize. |Pope promotes resolution and a united community through the structure and content of his revised Rape of the Lock (1714). While he removed the triplets that would formally uphold the idea of unification, his poem’s form, added machinery, and depictions of Belinda’s locks of hair suggest that he is enacting a metapoetics of the triplet structure to demonstrate how a triplet can enact unification in the eighteenth century. In The Rape of the Lock, the structure and content of the poem imitate the unification offered by the triplet form, thereby confirming its functional presence as a form writ large.