ABSTRACT
‘On Silence’ was first published on 20 May 1712. Pope probably first composed his imitation of Rochester’s ‘Upon Nothing’, in the period between 1702 and 1703 during which he wrote his first imitations of short pieces by various other English poets of the seventeenth century – Waller, Cowley and Dorset – alongside Chaucer and Spenser. As Pope told Spence: ‘In these rambles of mine through the poets, when I met with a passage or a story that pleased me more than the ordinary, I used to endeavour to imitate it’ (OAC, I.20, no. 45). Three contemporary manuscripts of the poem survive, representing two distinct states of the text: an undated autograph fair copy of a 16-stanza poem, ‘Upon Silence in Imitation of a Modern Poem on Nothing’, in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library; a transcript of this poem in the hand of Ralph Bridges, in the Percy collection of the Bodleian Library; and a transcript, in an unidentified hand, of a significantly different state of the poem (also consisting of sixteen stanzas), in the British Library. The relationship between the two manuscript states of the poem is discussed by Howard Erskine-Hill (1966: 274–7), who supports TE’s 1702 date for the Clark manuscript and suggests that the British Library manuscript probably belongs to 1703. In his ‘Advertisement’ to the Imitations of English Poets, with which the poem was included in the Works of 1736, Pope says that the poems were written ‘some of them at fourteen or fifteen years old’, while a note to a letter to Cromwell of 17 May 1710 in the 1737 edition of Pope’s Letters (Corr., I.87n) identifies ‘a paper enclos’d’ as ‘Verses on Silence in imitation of the Earl of Rochester’s poem on Nothing; done at 14 years old’, which repeats the description of the poem when it was reprinted in the 1726 edition of Miscellany Poems: ‘Writ at Fourteen Years of Age.’ Sherburn (1934: 99) gives the poem a biographical slant, aligning it with ‘Pope’s struggle for faith in the wisdom of silence in the months after Dennis’s fulminations’, that is, in relation to the controversy over the Essay on Criticism; but there is no evidence that composition or rewriting was prompted by those events. On 9 April 1712 Lintot paid Pope £3 16s 6d for this poem together with the previous one and the one that follows in the present edition, making it one of his better-paid efforts (McLaverty 2001: 17). ‘On Silence’ was published in Miscellaneous Poems and Translations as the first (the second being ‘To the Author of a Poem, Intitled, Successio’) of ‘two | Copies of Verses, | written | Some Years since in Imitation of the Style of | Two Persons of Quality. | By the same Hand.’ For further discussion of the possible extent of Pope’s role in the publication of Miscellaneous Poems see Headnote to ‘The First Book of Statius his Thebais’.
