ABSTRACT
The legacy of Edmund Waller (1606–87) in Alexander Pope’s poetry encompasses more than ‘sweetness’, elegance and harmony. Waller’s occasional verse relies on hyperboles, which enable him to construct poetic hyperrealities. Pope adapts Waller’s sincere hyperboles and their enhanced realities to distinguish The Rape of the Lock from other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mock-heroics. Instead of being direct rhetorical signals of mockery created by the conscious persona, the hyperboles in the Rape are taken at face value by its speaker. The sincerity, inherited from Waller, enables Pope to double his satire, enveloping not just the sparkling world of Belinda, but its speaker as well.
