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Note: At the time that this episode aired, Stephanie Burt went by the name Stephen Burt. This transcript has been updated to reflect her name change.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Homeboy Alexander Pope

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Curtis Fox: Yes, this is the poetryfoundation.org podcast for the week of July 9th, 2007. I'm Curtis Fox. This week, “Homeboy Alexander Pope.” Up on poetryfoundation.org this week is an article about how the poems of Alexander Pope, the classic 18th-century poet, have a lot in common with hip-hop lyrics. The article is written by Stephen Burt, a poet and critic who joins me by phone from his office at Macalester College in St. Paul. Hi, Steve.

Stephanie Burt: Hi.

Curtis Fox: So, let's just cut to the chase. What could Alexander Pope possibly have in common with Nas?

Stephanie Burt: Well, not everything, but Pope is working in an art form where not only are rhyming couplets the norm and rhyme quite important, but the compositions people produce and expect to be judged by are often responses to one another. And the sophisticated reader or listener should be aware of those chains of responses.

Curtis Fox: So, there's often a backstory in Pope when he's insulting a poet, we have to know that that poet insulted him or that critic insulted him.

Stephanie Burt: It helps to know.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Stephanie Burt: It helps to know. You don't always have to...

Curtis Fox: Well, actually...

Stephanie Burt: You gotta at least be aware that he's probably responding to something.

Curtis Fox: And how is that like hip-hop?

Stephanie Burt: Well, hip-hop has answer records. Hip-hop has feuds. Hip-hop has schools. There's the East Coast-West Coast rivalry, which even I know about, and, again, that I'm not an expert.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Stephanie Burt: Hip-hop has coded references to members of your party, members of the other guy's posse. Hip-hop has boasting.

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Curtis Fox: And, also, I guess one of the same letters that you point out is that, there's a real risk of retribution among hip-hop artists, especially as we know. And Pope felt vulnerable sometimes and he carried around protection, right?

Stephanie Burt: He walked around London with a dog who could serve as an attack dog if need be after he published a long poem called 'The Dunciad.”

Curtis Fox: And he also carried some pistols with him too, didn't he?

Stephanie Burt: Yes, pistols.

Curtis Fox: So, your article for poetryfoundation.org is essentially a close reading of one poem.

Stephanie Burt: Yeah.

Curtis Fox: It's called, “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.”

Stephanie Burt: Yeah.

Curtis Fox: Now we don't have time to go into the whole poem, but give me one passage from that poem that gives you a lot of pleasure.

Stephanie Burt: Well, I like almost all of it, but from near the beginning, where Pope is talking about how all of the would-be poets and wannabe poets and bad poets and bad playwrights and all of the lousy writers and wannabe writers in England seem to be bothering him and asking him to help them and read their manuscripts and give them something. Everybody wants something from him, and he just can't get a moment's peace. And that's the first passage I'm gonna read you.

Curtis Fox: Go ahead.

Stephanie Burt: Pope is imagining his friend, the doctor, is physically present in the room, which is one of the conventions of epistolary poetry poems that pretend to be or actually are personal letters. And he says, “Shut, shut the door, good John! Fatigu'd I said, tie up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead. The dog-star rages! Nay 'tis past a doubt, all Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out.” And that is a joke because Bedlam is an insane asylum and Parnassus is where the poets live.

Curtis Fox: Right.

Stephanie Burt: So, with all these crazy bad poets around him, it's as if the line between the nuthouse and the home of true poetry had been erased.

Curtis Fox: Yes.

Stephanie Burt: All Bedlam or Parnassus is let out, fire in each eye and papers in each hand. They rave, recite, and madden around the land. And they're not just going around the land. They're going towards Pope's country house, which he built to get some peace which he now can't have.

Curtis Fox: Right.

Stephanie Burt: “What walls can guard me, or what shades can hide? They pierce my thickets, through my grot they glide.” That's grotto. “By land, by water, they renew the charge; they stop the chariot and they board the barge. No places sacred, not the church is free. Even Sunday shines no Sabbath-day to me: Then from the Mint walks forth the man of rhyme. Happy to catch me just at dinnertime.”

Curtis Fox: So, what's he doing here? The language is kind of exaggerated and he's making kind of a boast that he's a famous person. At the same time, he's annoyed by his own fame, right?

Stephanie Burt: Yeah. He's also making a complaint that is sort of: Is this what I worked hard for, that I could just be bothered all the time?

Curtis Fox: Yeah. And then he proceeds in the poem to satirize all sorts of general poets in general and particular well-known poets of his day.

Stephanie Burt: Yes. First, he gives examples of crappy poets you'll never hear of who don't correspond to particular individuals who are bothering him. And then he gives examples of individuals who are famous, who he thinks there's a good reason to attack or criticize in his verse.

Curtis Fox: One...

Stephanie Burt: “Dedicates in high heroic prose and ridicules beyond a hundred foes, one from all Grub Street.” That's where publishing happens. “One from all Grub Street will my fame defend and more abusive calls himself my friend. This prints my letters that actually happened that expects a bribe and others roar allowed subscribe.” And then he gets into the would-be friends, the poets who want his help, who are so sort of dunderheaded that in trying to pay him a compliment. So, he'll help them out. They actually insult him. “There are who to my person”—that is his body—"who to my person pay their court. I cough like Horace.” That's Pope's favorite Latin poet. “I cough like Horace. And though lean am short.” And I read that passage, not just because it's another example of Pope's woody flexibility and ability to pack a lot of thoughts into these couplets that are also insults. But because it's the lead-in to Pope's alternative autobiography, his story of what actually is important about him.

Curtis Fox: And that...

Stephanie Burt: That was the other passage I was gonna read to you. Is that good idea?

Curtis Fox: Yeah, that is a good idea. And this passage leads into actually the most touching part of the poem.

Stephanie Burt: Yes.

Curtis Fox: It's the most autobiographical part. And it touches on his own disability. Pope had tuberculosis of the bone and was basically a dwarf.

Stephanie Burt: Yes.

Curtis Fox: I guess you would say...

Stephanie Burt: Yes.

Curtis Fox: And a hunchback and was tortured physically by this and emotionally, I'm sure, his entire life.

Stephanie Burt: He was a hunchback and he was in constant pain. He was strikingly short, under five feet. I think four feet six. Dwarf is misleading 'cause it also refers to a genetic disorder Pope did not have.

Curtis Fox: OK.

Stephanie Burt: But, yeah, he was short and ugly and in pain constantly throughout his adult life and very conscious of it. There is a way, in someone who was less smart or less verbally adept or less successful, that would really become self-pity…

Curtis Fox: Right.

Stephanie Burt: …becomes in Pope, instead, a way of speaking about his weaknesses from a position of strength. And that's what one of the things that he does in this... I agree, I find it a touching passage from the epistle that we're looking at.

Curtis Fox: Can I get you to read that?

Stephanie Burt: Yes. “Why did I write? What sin to me unknown dipped me in ink, my parents' or my own? As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame. I lisp'd in numbers,”—that means poetic meter—"I lisp in numbers, for the numbers came. I left no calling for this idle trade. No duty broke, no father disobeyed. The Muse but serv'd to ease some friend, not wife. To help me through this long disease, my life. To second Arbuthnot! thy art and care. And teach the being you preserv'd to bear.”

Curtis Fox: Yeah, that seems so modern when he says, “to help me through this long disease my life.”

Stephanie Burt: Yeah, that's...

Curtis Fox: And he's not but he means that quite literally, I think.

Stephanie Burt: Well, he means it literally and figuratively.

Curtis Fox: Pope's known as being extremely funny. What do you think is the funniest line in the poem or some of the funniest lines in the poem?

Stephanie Burt: Some of the funniest lines in the poem…Well, here he is defending himself for saying things that sound mean and insulting by doing some more insulting, by saying, these foolish writers who I'm insulting are so convinced that their work is great that they don't care what I say. I'm not hurting them.

Curtis Fox: (LAUGHS)

Stephanie Burt: And he describes how, in particular, bad playwrights will just keep on writing and keep on trying to get their plays performed. No matter how much people explain that they're terrible, no matter how many insults are thrown at them. And that the joke here is that, you can say what you want about these people and they're gonna keep doing what they're doing. And it's that very persistence that makes them silly and and funny to look at. “Who shames a scribblers, break one cobweb through, he spins the slight self pleasing thread anew. Destroy his fib or so sophistry in vain, the creatures at his dirty work again, thrown in the center of his thin designs, proud of a vast extent of flimsy lines.”

Curtis Fox: (LAUGHS) I think they can still hold true today, I think.

Stephanie Burt: Oh, yeah.

Curtis Fox: Humor in contemporary poetry is almost never satire. Why not, do you suppose?

Stephanie Burt: Because satire depends on a prior ground of agreement among the poet and his or her imagined readers as to what is ridiculous and what deserves to be attacked.

Curtis Fox: So, you know, similar values.

Stephanie Burt: Yeah. I mean, there aren't that many really original poets alive at any one time.

Curtis Fox: Right.

Stephanie Burt: It may be that we simply happen just as a matter of that's the way the dice came out. We simply happen not to have a major figure right now whose chief mode is extended digress of witty satire.

Curtis Fox: We had the disadvantage that even if there were such a poet around today, he wouldn't necessarily know that the people he's satirizing are reading him. And one gets the feeling from Pope that the people he was making fun of, read the…

Stephanie Burt: That's right.

Curtis Fox: …read the poem and...

Stephanie Burt: That's exactly right. And that is a major difference between what Pope is doing and what is available certainly to American poets now. Even American poets who have reason to believe they have many readers. Adrienne Rich comes to mind.

Curtis Fox: Right.

Stephanie Burt: And who have reason to believe that they can actually change the way their readers behave. And I think Adrienne Rich has done so. My favorites among her poems are not the ones that have maybe had the greatest cultural impact, but she's a wonderful poet and she really has changed the way a lot of people behave. But the people whom she most wants to denounce in her poetry are not the ones who are going to be reading it.

Curtis Fox: Steve Burts, thanks so much.

Stephanie Burt: Thank You.

Curtis Fox: Steve Burts’s article on Pope can be found at poetryfoundation.org, where you can also read his reading guide to John Donne. Steve Burts’s latest book of poems is Parallel Play, published by Graywolf Press. Let us know what you think of this program. Email us at podcastpoetryfoundation.org. The music used in this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For the poetryfoundation.org podcast, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.