ABSTRACT
The habitual model of the relationship between the Victorians and Alexander Pope is one of disapproval: Victorians, admiring lyric poetry over other forms, could supposedly find little room for the satirist and bravura exponent of the heroic couplet. Pope's poetry has never been remembered as a favourite of the age of Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and Alfred Tennyson. Arnold is best recalled as declaring in 1880 in the General Introduction to Thomas Humphry Ward's The English Poets, that Pope was not to be classed as a poet at all, but was rather the 'high priest of an age of prose and reason', and, with John Dryden, a classic not of poetry but 'of our prose'. The redemptive turn to the classicism of Pope was intended, like Arnold's encouragement in 1853 of the return to the classical virtues of the epics of antiquity, to set modern poetics aright and to deal effectively with the post-Romantic legacy of the Victorian muse.
