SOURCE: “Virgins Visited by Angel Powers: The Rape of the Lock, Platonick Love, Sylphs and Some Mysticks,” in The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, edited by G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 3-20.

In the following essay, Brückmann investigates the pastoral, platonic, and mystical contexts of the sylph machinery in The Rape of the Lock, concentrating on the poem's multiple allusions to each tradition.

Although nearly all exclaim over the sylph machinery Pope added to The Rape of the Lock in 1714, no one has yet given close attention to the suggestions they offer for a reading of the poem, despite the fact that Tillotson long ago provided an elaborate appendix on The Count of Gabalis, the seventeenth-century satire on Rosicrucianism on which his machinery was modelled.

Praise for the sylphs has not always been unqualified. At least two critics in Pope's own...