Pope’s Cowley: To Bare One’s Heart in Poetry

Pope’s Cowley: To Bare One’s Heart in Poetry

We first take a look at the employment of the “language of the heart” in Pope’s poetry. In the Epistle to Augustus , Pope (1737) deplores the state of contemporary literary taste which largely neglects Cowley’s poetry:

Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet, His moral pleases, not his pointed wit; Forgot his Epic, nay Pindaric Art, But still I love the language of his Heart. (ll. 75-78)

Notwithstanding the contemporary tendency towards negligence, Pope expresses admiration for Cowley, and, by the “language of his heart,” Pope is most probably referring specifically to Cowley’s autobiographical Essays , which in turn adopted as model Montaigne’s confessional Essais. Honesty, which implies the courage to expose one’s heart to the public, is an attitude that Pope valued in both Cowley and Montaigne.

Around the same time when he composed the Epistle to Augustus, Pope was hard at work on the Horatian Imitations . In the first Imitation, published in 1733, he states his aim at transparency in his poetry:

I love to pour out all myself, as plain As downright Shippen, or as old Montagne. In them, as certain to be lov’d as seen, The Soul stood forth, nor kept a Thought within; In me what Spots (for Spots I have) appear, Will prove at least the Medium must be clear. In this impartial Glass, my Muse intends Fair to expose myself, my Foes, my Friends; Publish the present Age, but where my Text Is Vice too high, reserve it for the next. (ll. 51-60)

While assuring the revelation of truth and nothing but the truth in “pour[ing] out all myself” and “expos[ing] myself” with his chosen “Medium” of poetry that will reflect all indiscriminately as in an “impartial Glass.” Pope makes himself both vulnerable and susceptible to malicious criticism. By the 1730s, when his fame and fortune were secure, Pope knows that in certain circumstances it may be more judicious not

All citations of Alexander Pope, unless otherwise indicated, are found in The Twickenham Editions of the Poems of Alexander

POPE’S “LANGUAGE OF THE HEART” IN WORDSWORTH’S TINTERN ABBEY 253 to publish his sincere ideas from the soul but to “reserve it for the next [generation].” How much Cowley

actually disclosed about himself in the Essays is another question (Davis, 2008, pp. 115-116), but it is that notion of daring to bare one’s heart to the public through one’s poetry which Pope esteems most about the forgotten predecessor.

Pope respects Cowley’s candor, if not the mere yet earnest intention of it, but he does not attempt to compare Cowley’s literary merit or current status with his own. Interestingly, while Cowley’s reputation dwindles after his death in 1667 and throughout Pope’s 18th century, it is Wordsworth who contributes to the revival of his literary status in the early 19th century. He adopts Cowley’s style of the Pindaric ode in “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” which concludes the second volume of his Poems in Two Volumes, published after Lyrical Ballads in 1807.