ABSTRACT
Alexander Pope is an isolated hero, and forging his own desperate sense of identity in a world threatening the stable order of civilization which he admired. Pope was a representative writer of his time, to a far greater degree than Swift, Richardson or even Defoe. In one particular respect Pope does appear to be an almost symbolic Augustan. This was in his passion for landscape gardening and devotion to improvement of his small estate. Some have even thought his horticultural ideas 'romantic', and thus in some way at odds with his practice as a poet. He takes instead particular persons and specific events, as in the boldly explicit Epilogue to the Satires. And even The Dunciad, with its mythic colouring and Grub Street locale, fixes historical processes with astonishing directness. Pope writes about the real world. That in itself is not a poetic virtue, but it is an essential condition for an imagination like Pope's to operate at white heat.
