Pope, Possum, and Pound; Modernism and the Heroic Couplet

In the original draft of “The Wasteland” that T.S. Eliot sent to Ezra Pound for critique, T.S. Eliot had written a passage in heroic couplets (rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter).

Pound told Eliot to delete the heroic couplets because Alexander Pope and John Dryden had already done heroic couplets, mastered them, and Eliot could not equal Pope and Dryden at their game.

Does that sound like hubris? For a poet of Eliot’s gifts to be discouraged from writing in any form because Pope and Dryden, generations earlier, had done it might seem surprising at first--particularly in light of Pound's famous dictum, “make it new,” which by definition is an approach unabashed by tradition. Even now, with years having passed since I first read Pound’s comments, it seems troubling. But Eliot, himself one of the most perceptive writers of a gifted century, accepted Pound’s advice and deleted the passage in heroic couplets.

So what about Pope, Dryden, and Dr. Johnson? (I add Dr. Johnson because his life overlapped the others, he wrote in heroic couplets, and because Eliot admired him immensely—and because Dr. Johnson considered Pope and Dryden the greatest poets of the period [Milton, too, but that is another discussion, and Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes are all in blank verse]). And because I prefer Johnson to Dryden.)

I do not feel a connection with Dryden. “Alexander’s Feast” has always irritated me with its silly refrain, “Happy, happy, happy pair! / None but the brave, / None but the brave, / None but the brave deserves the fair.” Ugh.

I have tried to like Dryden. I find much of great value, such as “MacFlecknoe.” There is a reason that great minds such as Dr. Johnson have admired Dryden and why he is still studied, taught, and remains in print. But I do not connect with his work. I admit that the failing is mine, not Dryden’s. Part of the cause of my antipathy might be an unfamiliarity with the Anglian accent that informs Dryden’s verse. The rhymes fail more to a modern ear than do those of Pope, Johnson, Milton, or even earlier poets such as Shakespeare or Spenser.

Pope, on the other hand, is a genius of jaw-dropping facility. He is Mozartian in the seeming ease of the perfection of his lines. The parallel with Mozart is intriguing: Pope was one of the few child prodigies in literature. As a twelve-year-old, he was already composing verses of mature accomplishment. He was the master of the forms he chose, and his invention seems limitless. He never seems stale or stilted; his mots, like Mozart’s notes, are ever juste.

Pope never seems to flag. His lines never seem to strain to meet the demands of rhyme or meter. He doesn’t go in for poetic inversions or archaisms to make things work. It is as if the Muse flowed through him with a lilting lightness.

What brought me to these comments was a couplet of Pope’s that I encountered almost at random, on opening my copy of the Yale Press edition of the complete poems and focusing where my eyes fell. The perfection of the couplet, and the richness of thought it expresses, and the seeming ease of its flow arrested my attention and made me wish to share it.

Here is the couplet, from Pope’s “An Essay on Man: Epistle I”, lines 33 and 34:

Is the great chain, that draws all to agree,

And drawn supports, upheld by God, or thee?

The meter is iambic pentameter. The rhyme is perfect. One could argue that the first foot on the first line is not an iamb but a trochee, but some variance is necessary or meter becomes mere rumpty-tum. Pope does not become rumpty-tum.

One might also be tempted to stress “great” rather than “chain”, but that would weaken the meaning. Pope plays with the word “draw”; “draw” is the pivotal conceit or play of wit within the couplet. What is drawn is the chain. Pope places the word carrying more meaning in the stressed syllable of the second foot; read it that way and the line—and the couplet—is drawn into focus.

The word “draw”, the only word used twice in the couplet, is used to mirror its own meaning. The first use (“draws”, active and in the present) means “to pull in or toward.” The second (“drawn”, in the past, having resulted from the original action) means “under tension”; the result of being pulled to. The shift in meaning echoes the movement toward tension. That tension is further riffed on: drawn ==> supports, supports ==> upheld. Whose force is the mover, the applier of the tension that keeps everything in its place? This was written by a poet whose life overlapped with that of Isaac Newton. The drawn chain is gravity; is inertia; is the “Great Chain of Being;” it is the tensile force whose tension makes the clockwork cosmos turn in all its ratios and harmony.

Though “drawn” is in the past tense, the next word, “supports” is in the present—once again, establishing a currency to the line: the temporal omnipresence of God.

The finesse and richness of Pope’s couplets are on display in this one couplet. In that crumb of verse his genius is manifest. This is what Pound meant—and why Eliot accepted the point.