ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Pope’s self-presentation in the outwardly conventional—not to say, formulaic—“Ode on Solitude,” a juvenile piece purportedly written at age eleven, but a poem to which Pope returned throughout his long and productive literary career. The ode’s quiet yet confident celebration of place (patriarchal, androcentric) masks a very different attitude, apparent in Pope’s letters, towards home: that of despair and bitterness at the loss of Binfield. In the ode, thus, poetic conventions exalting possession conflict with the poet’s emotions of profound dispossession and loss, suggesting the ways in which the expectations of genre and the realities of personal experience, a derivative and a “real” self, can come into conflict. Pope’s adoption of a traditional poetic form (a Horatian ode) and the pertinence of its subject (“paternal acres”) to his experience of disentitlement also raise questions about authenticity that characterize many poems in this study.
