We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2020
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.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
