SOURCE: “Moving Cities: Pope as Translator and Transposer,” in The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, edited by G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 151-70.

In the following essay, Nuttall attributes the dynamic elements of Pope's literary style to his use of the poetic techniques of Virgil as evidenced by his youthful translations of Homer's Odyssey.

The criticism of Pope has never been the same—or ought never to have been the same—since Empson declared that he would enter ‘the very sanctuary of rationality’ and applaud the poets of the eighteenth century ‘for qualities in their writings which they would have been horrified to discover’.¹ Empson had critical designs on Popean zeugma which, he saw clearly, worked through a tension between apparent or formal symmetry and a latent asymmetry. The result is wit (not rationality), a contained wildness of the mind. My own...