SOURCE: "Wit and Poetry and Pope," in Alexander Pope, edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1986, pp. 9-12.

Mack is a critic well known for his work on Pope. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in his Pope and His Contemporaries (1949), Mack discusses the mockheroic metaphor in Pope's works, particularly in The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad.

The great pervasive metaphor of Augustan literature, including Pope's poetry, is the metaphor of tone: the mockheroic. It is very closely allied, of course, to the classical or Roman myth … and is, like that, a reservoir of strength. By its means, without the use of overt imagery at all, opposite and discordant qualities may be locked together in 'a balance or reconcilement of sameness with difference, of the general with the concrete, the idea with the image, the individual with the representative...