Page "Augustan poetry" Paragraph 14

In satire, Pope achieved two of the greatest poetic satires of all time in the Augustan period, and both arose from the imitative and adaptive demands of parody.

The Rape of the Lock ( 1712 and 1714 ) was a gentle mock-heroic, but it was built upon Virgil's Aeneid.

Pope applied Virgil's heroic and epic structure to the story of a young woman ( Arabella Fermor ) having a lock of hair snipped by an amorous baron ( Lord Petre ).

The structure of the comparison forced Pope to invent mythological forces to overlook the struggle, and so he borrowed sylphs from ludicrous ( to him ) alchemist Paracelsus and makes them the ghosts of vain women.

He created an epic battle over a game of Ombre, leading to a fiendish appropriation of the lock of hair.

Finally, a deus ex machina appears and the lock of hair experiences an apotheosis.

To some degree, Pope was adapting Jonathan Swift's habit, in A Tale of a Tub, of pretending that metaphors were literal truths, and he was inventing a mythos to go with the everyday.

The parody was in no way a comment on Virgil.

Instead, it was an imitation made to serve a new purpose.

The epic was transformed from a paean to national foundations to a satire on the outlandish self-importance of the country nobility.

The poem was an enormous success, at least with the general public.