ABSTRACT
The Temple of Fame is Alexander Pope's only poem to concentrate at length on works of spatial artistry, and a separate treatment of it is needed. Renaissance poetry is often found to speak through a number of related symbolisms in attempt to blend the arts of space and time within some highly charged unit. The Christian Trinity itself might, in its fusion of unity with diversity, its dramatic formation, be called an archetype of all such symbolisms. Such symbolisms are developed by the Romantics, whose insight delights to express itself, as Shakespeare's does not, in the vertical dimension. Architecture, springing from king and ancestor worship and the will to establish for them cenotaphs and memorials, asserts the vertical against the horizontal, flowers into the eternal meanings of temple and cathedral, and finally embeds itself in poetic symbolism. Metaphysical poetry shows a dearth of such major symbols, since its concern with the eternal dimension is conceptually explicit.
