EPIC AND MOCK EPIC : The Dunciads owe their form to a late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century hybrid of ancient and modern, the mock-epic or mock-heroic poem. Epic, which reflected on the culture and values of a society by retelling a traditional story of heroes and the gods who protected them, was the earliest narrative verse form known in Europe, the Greek Iliad and Odyssey attributed to Homer being, along

doi:10.4324/9781315833897-13

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ABSTRACT

head of Trinity College, Cambridge, was far more important to Pope’s grievances than the earlier Dunciads had revealed: a draft of the verse character of Aristarchus, not printed until 1742 and 1743 (IV.203-74), probably dates from a decade or more earlier.5 By finally including in The Dunciad in Four Books this indictment of Bentley’s literary, educational and political record, and by encouraging Warburton to elaborate the caricature of his methods, manner and attitudes, Pope was making explicit the connection between his dislike of modernity and the quarrel over the meaning of the past which had first called into question the gentlemanly taste of his early mentors. Although Bentley was eighty in 1742, and actually died in that year, the ridicule that had greeted his edition of Paradise Lost in 1732 had effectively renewed the topicality of what might otherwise have appeared an obsolete antagonism.