According to Horace, “Poets and kings were not born every day and poets were the first teachers of mankind.” Horace is a well-known satirist in Roman literature. According to Middleton Marry, satire means the condemnation of the society through ideology without reformative aims and objects in his mind. But its nature is to amend the society by his satirical castigation because satire is a criticism of life and an exposure of human nature, weakness of human beings, follies of human beings, obscurities of human beings and short-comings of human beings in a concrete shape. The satirist uses humor, wit, mockery, ridiculous, innuendo and irony to achieve his goal in literature.
Many writers wrote satires in prose or verse. Among whom Dryden, Rodester, Samuel Butler, swift, Wickerley, Addison, Pope, Fielding and Johnson…but Pope belonged to the 18th century which was called the age of satire in prose and poetry. Addison, Steel and Swift dominated the field of prose while Pope all alone dominated the field of poetry in the 18th century. His best satirical work in verse is considered Rape of the Lock.
Actually, Rape of the Lock is a satire on the aristocratic stratum of the 18th century. The opening of the book is bitter. As the text shows:
“In task so bold can little man engage
And soft bosom dwell such mighty rage”
As one critic has rightly said, Pope’s Rape of the Lock is an impersonal satire, and is not against any individual but against the prevailing evils of the 18th century in the shape of follies, vanities and out of status doings. Actually, Pope started writing the poem to reconcile between the two families but as the poem developed the poet forgot his original intention and started satirizing the prominent evils of his age.
Pope satirizes only upper class, upper society and upper friendship in the best way. On the other hand, he criticizes women’s frivolities, justice’s injustice, and judge’s wrong decision openly in the book. Especially, he criticizes women’s wrong thinking to robe men showing their sex at public places. They used to go at the parks to make friendship with people in shape of new boyfriends. They used cosmetic power to make his body cute as mousetrap for men. As we see Blinda did it and falls in trouble forever and lost her chastity.
To sum up, it is a bitter impersonal satire on the upper class that exposes what the English were doing in the age of Pope. The moral condition was very bad. People have forgotten all manners, moralities and etiquette and were running after the foolish things as rape, frivolities, and trivialities and were following all types of corruption of mind knowingly because the age of Pope was strong financially. All the people of the age were rich and it were the rich who were falling in the corruption. It is right that excessive of everything is bad and it leaves bad effect on the mind that money a lot. It was the case with the rich people of Pope’s age. Looking at the people of England in bad condition Wordsworth had exclaimed in these words:
“England had need thee, she is a fen
Of stagnant water, alter sword and pen
Firesides, the heroic wealth of hall and bower
Have forfeited their ancient dower”
It was a fact that the English had lost their heroic qualities before the age of Pope. When Pope was born and became young he found his age full of corruption. That is why he wrote Rape of the Lock in mock epic style so that people could know the age in which Pope was living and it was his right to do so.
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Hi freind? Are you a literature teacher? You like poems and short stories I also have published here short stories and poems. Though I am a professor in mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry, but I love words, I love to write poems and short stories. I like ti write articles of different topics and like to write blogs of any sort. All that you have said here added info on my part about the value of literature.They are life and serve as aspirations to humans.
That is one reason why man can express his feeling ,hatred, joys, hatred and love because of the innate talent in literature through poems, stories and the like.