Chapter 2 - Godless Dunces: Alexander Pope

Summary

In this chapter, I argue that Pope’s poetry is profoundly concerned with the deleterious effects of unbelief and that, at the same time, he found atheistical materialism creatively productive. First, I chart Pope’s career-long engagement with religion, paying special attention to his numerous clarion calls for unity across confessional divides and to atheism’s negative role in bringing this unity about. I address broad swathes of Pope’s work, including the Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1714), the Horatian imitations and Moral Essays of the 1730s, and, most critically, the Essay on Man (1734). After tracing Pope’s ecumenical impulses, I turn to the 1743 Dunciad, showing how the final iteration of Pope’s mock-epic masterpiece incorporates and expels godlessness at almost every turn: from the replacement of Lewis Theobald as King Dunce by Colley Cibber, whose gaming addiction Pope consistently ridicules and aligns with atheistic notions of chance, fortune, and chaos, to the dunces’ intellectual vacuity and Pope’s “Epicurean” method of composition, I show how the poem is haunted by God’s absence from start to finish.