Copyright
William HutchingsPublished On
2023-12-19Page Range
pp. 165–168Language
- English
Print Length
4 pages
14. An Epistle to Sir Richard Temple, Lord Cobham
- William Hutchings (author)
Chapter of: ‘Wit’s Wild Dancing Light’: Reading the Poems of Alexander Pope(pp. 165–168)
Chapter 14. An Epistle to Sir Richard Temple, Lord Cobham is a poem caught in a conceptual paradox. On the one hand, it describes human minds as ‘Quick whirls, and shifting eddies’, whose constant movement defies any attempt to define a ‘principle of action’. As soon as you think you have located such a principle, it has gone. ‘Like following life through creatures you dissect, / You lose it in the moment you detect.’ On the other hand, Pope proposes as a solution the idea that each of us, within the mêlée of apparent contradiction, has a single ‘ruling passion’, which is the ‘clue’ to all the rest. Pope’s illustrative character-sketches, however, are most thrillingly alive when engaged in acerbic dissections of their subjects, whether tragic (the talented but wasteful Philip, Duke of Wharton) or comic (the fictional Euclio, a miser desperate to hang on to his wealth even on his death bed).
Contributors
William Hutchings
(author)Honorary Research Fellow at University of Manchester
William Hutchings was formerly Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Director of the Centre for Excellence in Enquiry-Based Learning at the University of Manchester, UK and he is presently Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at that university. He now lectures regularly to public groups locally and nationally. He has a wealth of teaching experience on English Literature courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and is the editor of Andrew Marvell: Selected Poems, the author of The Poetry of William Cowper, and Literary Criticism: A Practical Guide for Students.