Pope is undoubtedly monotonous. Except in one or two
lyrics, such as the Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, which must be reckoned
amongst his utter failures, he invariably employed the same metre. The
discontinuity of his style, and the strict rules which he adopted, tend
to disintegrate his poems. They are a series of brilliant passages,
often of brilliant couplets, stuck together in a conglomerate; and as
the inferior connecting matter decays, the interstices open and allow
the whole to fall into ruin. To read a series of such couplets, each
complete in itself, and each so constructed as to allow of a very small
variety of form, is naturally to receive an impression of monotony.
Pope's antitheses fall into a few common forms, which are repeated over
and over again, and seem copy to each other. And, in a sense, such work
can be very easily imitated. A very inferior artist can obtain most of
his efforts, and all the external qualities of his style. One
ten-syllabled rhyming couplet, with the whole sense strictly confined
within its limits, and allowing only of such variety as follows from
changing the pauses, is undoubtedly very much like another. And
accordingly one may read in any collection of British poets innumerable
pages of versification which--if you do not look too close--are exactly
like Pope. All poets who have any marked style are more or less
imitable; in the present age of revivals, a clever versifier is capable
of adopting the manners of his leading contemporaries, or that of any
poet from Spenser to Shelley or Keats.
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