SOURCE: “Conclusion,” in The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope, University of California Press, 1987, pp. 282-304.

In the following excerpt, Damrosch demonstrates the rhetorical nature of Pope's literary achievement by comparing the aims of his poetry with those of earlier and later poets as well as with strategies of contemporary writers in other genres, particularly novels.

The Rape of the Lock, written at the same period as Windsor-Forest, is a good-humored mock-epic; the Dunciad is not really mock-epic at all, but rather an anti-epic that rejects the prevailing attitudes of a whole civilization.¹ In such a culture, pastoral harmony is utterly defeated by urban squalor. The mirror passage in Windsor-Forest ends with energetic lines that modulate from the emblematic river to the real one:

Through the fair scene roll slow the ling' ring streams, Then foaming pour along, and rush into the Thames. 

(217-18)

In the Dunciad the same...