Page 95 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

94 How to write critical essays
which he was born. He is exploiting the points of cultural
reference by which his generation of English intellectuals has
been trained to order their understanding of the
contemporary scene.
Similarly, the precise date of Pope’s birth ‘in 1688’ might have
been cut as wholly irrelevant to his works. Would any poem
have had to alter its stance or style in anticipation of a
significantly different audience if its author had been born a few
years earlier or later?
Alternatively, the date should have been used:
Pope was born in 1688: that pivotal year in British history
which seems oddly apt to the poet’s later, ambivalent stance.
The verse is at once deviant in its protests against, and
conformist in its compliments to, the values of the English
establishment. In 1688, seven bishops of the Church of
England were tried for daring to criticize James II’s policy of
toleration towards Catholics. Yet 1688 later ushered in ‘The
Glorious Revolution’ when the fleeing James was replaced by
the confident Protestantism of William III. Pope, the
religiously deviant Roman Catholic and yet politically
conservative monarchist, creates verse which commutes
uneasily between the almost blasphemous subversiveness of
‘Eloise to Abelard’ and the virtually propagandist reverence
of ‘Windsor Forest’.

Neither of these expansions has yet arrived at a quotation from
any of Pope’s poems. Yet each uses specifics (such as titles, for
instance) to turn biographical fragments into the beginnings of
a critical argument.