The remarkable achievement of Pope's later career was to write poems which fused the positive energies of the old epic, the anger of satire, and the skepticism and subjectivity we expect in the writing of a "knowing and judicious age." The Roman poet Horace had emphasized his own disinclination for the epic and for the martial doings central to it. And certainly Pope's imitations of Horace, the important work of his later career, give us an excellent rendition of Horace's civilian voice. But Pope's Horatian poems are also his most original, personal, and agitated writing; in their own versions of high civility, Pope imitates but also measures his distance from Horace and, in a manner one could not have predicted, goes on to create a link between the heroic and the sociable in the career of the writer of satire.
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In his most accomplished poems, Pope will cause us to imagine some version of himself undergoing some significant development in the very act of writing the poem at hand. Like Dryden, he focuses on public affairs, but in his engagement with them, it is his tendency to foreground the poet's person. What connection there is between the "real" Pope and his imagined, often theatrical, versions of himself is, of course, an important question, but not different from what we might ask about any autobiographer. It would not, however, be irresponsible to assert that Pope's ideal versions of himself make better use of craftiness, deviousness, and anger than did their fleshly counterpart, who, as Johnson quipped, could not drink tea without stratagem. Physically misshapen, usually in pain, almost never without a professional quarrel, devious in his literary dealings even with his friends, this "actual" Pope displayed himself in his poems as a being whose anger was a gift of the gods, whose writings were heroic acts, and whose passion itself could be a mode of civility. Although his poems, like all satire, are public writings deeply implicated in contemporary events, they are also major documents in the history of self-portrayal, not to say self-fashioning.
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Pope aims his later satire at the modern, commercial society coming into being after the collapse of the Stuart monarchy. His targets might have been Dryden's: the Hanoverian kings invited to the throne by a Whig parliament; the financial machinery invented by a society intent on growing rich and powerfula national bank, a national debt, stock and bond markets; the standing army financed by these instruments; the political style governing such a societydeal making, influence, bribery; and the larger consequences, as Pope saw them, of this political and commercial energy: a culture in shreds, a cheapened literary
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