of the literary domain had a double aspect: not only was he one of the first professional writers to benefit hugely from the new marketplace of letters he so often derided, but he became an object of commodification himself, not only as target of a Pope-bashing industry which made money for others, but also as a cultural emblem of the male author whose creativity and masculinity both were defined against his sexualized body. This book will use a wide variety of men to make my case about the history of male creativity for this period—from friends of Pope such as Wycherley and Cromwell to enemies like Curll, Cibber, or Ned Ward; from important figures on either side of Pope such as Oldham and Dryden or Wilkes and Sterne—but I use Pope’s example as primary evidence, especially in Chapter 4, because he is so often paradigmatic of the complex intersection of male bodies, sexuality, and the poetical character.
Saving specific analysis of Pope and his contemporaries for the last chapter, I extend these preliminary observations about where his cultural exemplarity as sexualized male author can be discovered: (1) in his use of the two metaphorical economies; (2) in eroticized discussions of poetry in his correspondence with older male friends; and (3) in the literal and figurative function of Pope’s head and groin when they were publicly associated with his writing.
Sexual matters were often located by Pope at the site of creativity and in commentary about the poetical character, where ideas of the eroticized male body and genital urges were significant adjuncts of how he imagined the nature of his own poetic inspiration and output. Two brief examples will illustrate. First, in his earliest letter to the aging William Wycherley, the sixteen-year-old Pope applied a traditional reproductive trope to the poetical character, using the well-worn association of mental creativity with birthing: “True Wit,” he writes, “may be defin’d a Justness of Thought, and a Facility of Expression; or (in the Midwives phrase) a perfect Conception, with an easy Delivery.”28 Second, in the summer of 1707, when he was nineteen, Pope addressed and mailed a verse epistle to his friend Henry Cromwell (London dandy and rake, cousin of Oliver, and nearly thirty years older than the young poet). The poem was published piratically by Edmund Curll in his Miscellanea (postdated 1727, but published in 1726) and then again in 1735 in his unauthorized Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence, although Pope never acknowledged it as his own. Humorously distinguishing himself from the poetasters whose rhymes would offend the hard-of-hearing Cromwell, the teenaged Alexander makes his mock-humble case, comparing himself to one Pentlow, who was, according to Curll’s 1735 note, “A Gamester remarkable for his Virile Parts, which he us’d to be fond of Shewing”:
I hope, you think me none of those
Who shew their Parts as Pentlow does,
I but lug out to one or two
Such Friends, if such there are, as you. (Corr. 1: 26, 12 or 13 July 1707)
In this cheeky analogy, questions of manliness, friendship, and poetry are tumbled into an outrageous scenario of Pope’s well-hung wit which is lugged out only for close male friends who can appreciate the difference between small and large Wits, between “remarkable … Virile Parts” promiscuously displayed to all or privately unbuttoned for friends only. The lines contain a bawdy and impolite mélange of penises, wit, male friends, genital exhibitionism, and an implied hierarchy within male literary communities. Together, both examples reflect in their different ways a convergence of masculinity, homosocial relations, sexuality, and cultural constructions of male creativity. One can approach these metaphors as instances of Pope’s personal difference, marshaling biographical facts which link the sexual content of the tropes to his impoverished sex life, unfortunate physical limitations, unmarried status, or other aspects of his apparent marginalization; and of course about the uniqueness of Pope in many of these respects there can be little doubt.29 But I want to suggest that what we often view as most unique about Pope can also be understood as intensified or exaggerated symptoms of underlying cultural structures. The two deployments above are of course intimately tied to Pope’s idiosyncratic interest in matters sexual—both his lifelong penchant for erotic subject matter as well as his heterosexual disappointments as he aged—but they are not wholly exclusive to Pope, being also representative of similar rhetorical equations used by his contemporaries.
This fortuitous convergence of the biographically unique but culturally exemplary Pope is most helpfully present in the ways he located his eroticized creativity in the homosocial context of male friends, especially in his teens and early twenties. As is now generally accepted, the story about Pope and poetry and sex goes far beyond his experience of heterosexual fantasies and disappointments, and must include discussion of relationships with the men he loved—usually older men (Caryll senior, Garth, Wycherley, Walsh, Trumbull, Cromwell) who offered the young poet another context through which the male creativity-sexuality conjunction would be voiced. In these relationships we can see an older model of masculinity dependent on rank and reputation, one in which young Alexander’s entries into manhood and the public realm of male authorship were interconnected. The patronizing and protective milieu of older male friends provided the young poet a means of approaching a world of manly competence at a time when his adolescent sex-drive was beginning to be linked closely to his budding literary ambitions. Aspects of male friendship, that is, compensated the absence of wife or lover, but they also affected the ways Pope understood his creativity as a sexualized energy. And in the male culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—when Pope grew up and entered the republic of letters—the power relations and social hierarchy which were so important to collective notions of both manliness and male authorial stature were often characterized by eroticized metaphors and narratives, part of an older cultural model of male friendship which encouraged sexualized locutions and gestures of narrative transvestism between men. Writers of Pope’s day incorporated certain of these epicoene and homosocial elements in their self-conscious remarks about male creativity and in allegories about the poetical character. One result can be seen in sometimes elaborate figurative gesturing and eroticized rhetorical flourishes, as in the following letter to Pope (in his early twenties) from the older Cromwell, who explains that Wycherley feels particular affection for Pope—whom he has not seen for some time—and is keen to receive his young friend:
Mr. Wycherley has, I believe, sent you two or three letters of invitation; but you, like the Fair, will be long sollicited before you yield, to make the favour the more acceptable to the Lover. He is much yours by his talk; for that unbounded Genius which has rang’d at large like a libertine, now seems confin’d to you: and I shou’d take him for your Mistress too by your simile of the Sun and Earth [i.e., in an earlier letter, Pope said that he was to Wycherley as the earth to the sun: “the Earth … is clearer, or gloomier, just as the Sun is brighter, or more overcast”]: ’Tis very fine, but inverted by the application; for the gaiety of your fancy, and the drooping of his by the withdrawing of your lustre, perswades me it wou’d be juster by the reverse. Oh happy Favourite of the Muses! how per-noctare, all night long with them? but alas! you do but toy, but skirmish with them, and decline a close Engagement. (Corr. 1: 136, 7 December 1711)
Cromwell’s epistolary wit may be exaggerated, combining an older rhetorical posturing with the locker-room strut of the libertine, but the passage contains a typical intersection of discursive elements which shaped collective constructions of male creativity. First, the beloved male friend as mistress or female lover, here twice used—initially, Wycherley the lusty libertine returning to his lover, the feminized Pope; then Wycherley-as-Mistress to the masculinized but stand-offish Pope. Second, the male writer as phallus-poet, as sexual favorite of the female Muses—here, the endless staying power of poet-Pope is flatteringly presented as a copulatory tease. Third, a clear articulation of masculine hierarchy, with Wycherley (in his early seventies) given preeminence as older male to feminized mistress-Pope, but the younger poet’s brilliant wit still acknowledged.
What we are seeing here are revealing aspects of the male literary community into which Pope sought entry, and of the ways he experienced the reception of his poetic creativity
