Introduction: Pope and Berkeley

Abstract

In An Essay on Criticism Alexander Pope says that if one wants to write truly correct and impressive verse it is ‘not enough no Harshness gives Offence,/The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense’ (ll. 364–5). He goes on to illustrate this direction with a series of lines whose sound echoes their sense, whose sonic, syntactical and metrical effects seem to imitate the actions being described in the semantic content of the lines. This book asks how it might be possible for the sound to echo the sense.¹ It asks what Pope might have thought language was, and how language works, if the sound can be made to echo the sense of a passage of verse. In a note on these lines from An Essay on Criticism, the Twickenham Edition of Pope’s poems gives full details of analogous statements made by Pope in his letters, and by earlier poets, including Marco Girolamo Vida, Dryden and the Earl of Roscommon. The last’s ‘Essay on Translated Verse’ provides the most direct analogue for Pope’s statement. Roscommon says that in good verse the ‘The sound is still a Comment to the Sense.’² Pope, one might say, is naturalising what Roscommon presents as an artificial activity: only people can offer a comment, whereas an echo is a naturally occurring phenomenon. But Pope says the sound should ‘seem’ an echo. He does not say that it is an echo, a natural imitation of the sense, but only that it should seem to be so.