An Argument of Images

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Alexander Pope held complex, often paradoxical views about the relationship in poetry of energy and restraint, vitality and control. Patricia Spacks explores the ways in which Pope’s imagery expresses aesthetic control while it also embodies and enforces ideas about ethical power and limitation. Focusing essentially on the Essay on Criticism, the Essay on Man, and The Dunciad, she studies them in relation to both seventeenth and twentieth century works—Donne’s Anniversaries, Eliot’s The Waste Land—to show the poet’s use of wit, perception, and finally of judgment as organizing principles. The author relates her discussion of Pope’s writings in general to the broader theme of the sources and function of imagery and the ways in which it operates.