Sporus Passage

Pope is a well known poet of the eighteenth century. Though he has written many kinds of poetry he is known best for his satires. An Epistle to Dr.Arbuthnot  is a typical verse satire of Pope. In it he attacks the poetasters and a few other contemporary writers with whom he was not in good terms.

In Sporus passage Pope attacks Lord Hervey. Pope appears once to have been friendly with Hervey. When Lord Hervey along with Lady Mary Wortley Montague launched his attack on Pope, the friendship between Pope and Lord Hervey began to break. Pope wrote his Epistle mainly as a reply to them.

Sporus was the name of the Eunuch love of the Emperor Nero. Pope deliberately calls Lord Hervey as Sporus as he too shared some of the qualities of Sporus. He is beautiful and corruptive as Lucifer.  He is a person of malicious nature.  His speeches are half-vulgar and half-poisonous.  He is a mere puppet in the hands of other. Her is base flatterer and possesses the characteristics of both man and woman. Being weak in health, Lord Hervey drinks ass’s milk and being ugly in appearance, he applies rogue to his face.

It is said that this indignant, scurrilous and malicious satire against Lord Hervey is harsh. But it is to be noted here that Lord Hervey deserves this bitter satire as he has made a devastating remark about Pope  in his Verses Addressed to the Imitator of Horace.

An Epistle to Dr.Arbuthnot

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope is the most illustrious writer of the first half of the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century was named after him as the Age of Pope. The Age of Pope was considered the golden age of English literature. Pope’s poetic output can be divided into satires, philosophic poems, translations and literary criticism.

As a poet, Pope has written many satires. His satires are of two kinds – personal and impersonal. The Dunciad and An Epistle to Dr.Arbuthnot are Pope’s personal satires. The Rape of the Lock is Pope’s impersonal satire.

Dr.Arbuthnot was Pope’s friend. Once he was seriously ill. He wrote to Pope that he should be careful while attacking others.  Pope wrote this satire An Epistle to Dr.Arbuthnot as a reply to him in 1734.  This poem attacks Pope’s detractors and defends Pope’s character and career.

The poem opens with Pope ordering John, a servant to shut the door.  Pope is afraid of letting in the budding poets. He asks John to tie the knocker of the door.  He thinks that the mental hospitals like Bedlam and Parnassus are let loose in the road.  He finds the poets with papers in their hands and fire in their eyes.  Pope is not left alone.  Wherever he goes he is followed by the budding poets.  They come into his house by climbing the wall and shrubs.

Pope is confused on what to do and what not to do with these poetasters. If he appreciated their poetry, they overflow with more poems.  If he says something negative about their poetry, they feel hurt Pope advises them to wait for nine years before publishing their poem. The writers are unable to accept this advice.  They ask Pope to make some corrections in their poem.  They also try to bribe him.  Some poets blackmail him.

Pope scolds a few poets like Colley, Henley, Moore Smith, Bishop Philips and Lady Mary Wortley Montague. At this point, Arbuthnot warns Pope not to use name in his poem. He advises Pope to be prudent. But Pope wants to be honest.  He claims that he would not be called as cruel when he calls a fool as a fool. He then talks bout how a few dramatists approach him to recommend scripts, which are rejected by the theatres and production companies.  They all try to flatter Pope.  Some say that Pope’s nose is like Ovid’s and they compare Pope with Hercules and Alexander the Great. Pope does not listen to such flattery.  He calls himself an ordinary man.

Then Pope starts explaining why he writes.  He says that he is writing not out of any compulsion.  Nobody asked him to write poetry but he did it by himself.  He writes because his friends like Swift, Granville,Congreve and others enjoyed reading his poetry.  They praised his works.  Even Dryden encouraged Pope to write and publish poems.

Pope, then, discusses why he attacks other poets through his satire. He calls them as donkeys and fools. When he exposes their foolishness, they get angry and criticizes him.  Pope says that if their criticism is correct he would readily accept it. Pope then criticizes Addison.  Addison, according to Pope, is genius.  His defect is that he wants to dominate the literary world.  He thinks that he is the greatest of all writers.  Pope calls Addison a coward because Addison attacks many writers but he fears being attacked by them.  Lord Halifax is attacked next.  He loves being flattered.  He helps the poetasters who flatter him. Then Pope attacks Lord Hervey in the name of Sporus. Lord Hervey values glamour, sensual pleasure and social climbing.  He is not only a man-woman but also an animal-demon, a shape changer like Satan.

Pope further says that he has never been a worshipper of fortune.  He is bold and courageous.  He has never flattered anyone for selfish reasons. He claims that he was brought up well by his parents.  His parents are peace loving.  They are good citizens of England.  They led a happy domestic life.  Pope also wants to live a similar life.  He concludes the poem by praying that Arbuthnot should lead a happy, peaceful and prosperous life.

Pope’s An Epistle to Drbuthnot resembles an Horatian satire because in this poem Pope ridicules gently at man’s foibles.  He is amused rather than indignant.  

Atticus Passage

Pope is a well known poet of the eighteenth century. Though he has written many kinds of poetry he is known best for his satires. An Epistle to Dr.Arbuthnot  is a typical verse satire of Pope. In it he attacks the poetasters and a few other contemporary writers with whom he was not in good terms.

Pope in his An Epistle to Dr.Arbuthnot gives a bad picture of Addison. This passage is known as Atticus Passage. Once Pope and Addison were intimate friends. The misunderstanding between them cropped up when  Addison  commented that Philips’ Pastorals was better than Pope’s. Further Pope believed that Addison had prompted Gildon to attack him. He believed that Addison’s friendship was a deceptive friendship. So he criticised Addison by calling him Atticus in An Epistle.

Atticus was the most elegant scholar of the Roman literature. Pope called Joseph Addison as the English Atticus on account of his refined taste, philosophical mind and his acquaintance with the Greek language and literature. 

In the Atticus passage Pope discusses both the merits and weaknesses of the great writer. He says that Addison is not only a good writer but also a good speaker. Both his writings and his speech contain ease, smoothness and grace. He is blessed with many talents which he used in adorning his writings.  He is almost successful in every branch of literature. He is inspired by the fair goddess of Fame. But like a Turkish Sultan he wants to rule the world of literature all alone. He is also jealous of his rivals. He will not warmly commend his rival’s compositions. Though he will not disapprove the works of his rivals openly, he will encourage others to fall foul on them He lacked courage to strike his rivals openly, though he wanted to hurt their sentiments and feelings. He was a timorous foe and a deceptive friend.

Though the famous Atticus passage was written as a satire on a specific person, Joseph Addison, it was more than the portrait of an individual.  It is a satire on insincerity, hypocrisy, deceptive friendship and pride.

Capitalism: A Ghost Story

Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist, activist and a social critic. The God of Small Things is the only novel written by Roy. She won the Booker Prize for it in 1997. Since then, she concentrated her writing on political issues. These include her criticism on the Narmada Dam project, India's testing of Nuclear Weapons in Pokhran, India’s new economic policy and the exploitation of the tribal and the poor peasants. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization and anti-corruption movements and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism.

Capitalism: A Ghost Story is a collection of essays in which Arundhati Roy examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India. She also shows how the globalized capitalism has subjugated billions of people to the intense form of racism and exploitation. She is worried that the government which promises to uplift the poor supports only the wealthy to amass more and more wealth.

Arundhati Roy begins the essay by describing the house of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani.  She wonders whether it is a house or a temple of new India or a warehouse for the ghosts of India. The building has twenty seven floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, gymnasium and six hundred servants. Roy points out that in India 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India’s GDP. Here, one has to remember that millions of people in India survive on less than twenty rupees a day. She attributes this disparity  to Government’s new economic policy. The new economic policy has made the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Arundhati Roy gives a long list of investments made by the corporates like Ambanis, Tata, Jindals, Infosys, Essar and Vedanta. In their race for growth, they have spread their wings across Europe, Central Asia, Africa and America. Privatisation has been a boon to these corporates. They sell the rich minerals of India to other countries at an exorbitant rate after paying a pittance to the government.

Roy is quite critical that Indian government seizes lands from the poor farmers in the name of infrastructure projects, dams, construction of high ways, airports and car manufacturing units. It shows its generosity to the multi-national companies by liberally contributing these huge tracts of land to them. Once national leaders like Vinobhave and Jayaprakash Narayan fought for land reforms. They redistributed the land from feudal landlords to landless peasants. Today it is vice versa. The government takes away lands from the poor peasants and deliver them to industrial giants. It is disheartening to note that millions of Dalits and adivasis who are thus driven away from their villages live in slums and shanty colonies in small towns and mega cities.

The off shoot of capitalism is privatisation. Privatisation leads to corruption. In India, corruption has pervaded all fields. Each new corruption makes the last one look small. Even mountains, rivers and forests are privatised in our country. But it is done in the name of ‘progress’. In 2005, the state governments of Chattisgarh, Orissa and Jharkhand signed MoUs with many private companies for mining Bauxite, iron ore and other minerals. These companies paid a pittance to the governments but earned trillions of dollars by exporting these valuable resources to foreign countries. Sometimes the government facilitated the industrialists to set up their factories by forcibly displacing the people who lived there for many generations. The people who refused to leave their homeland were branded as ‘maoists’ and were put in prison.

The government is very keen on attracting foreign investment in India. For this, they create necessary infrastructure at the cost of poor Indians. In Gujarat, for the construction of dams, thousands of people lost their lands and houses. They were compelled to move to some other parts of the state. Arundhati Roy indignantly argues that even the cruellest dictators who lived in the past would not have done such a merciless act. Thus the capitalism and globalization have destroyed the life of the people who are marginalized.

Arundhati Roy’s Capitalism: A Ghost Story though points out certain bitter truths, one has to keep in mind that creating necessary infrastructure is essential for the growth of a nation. For this, it is inevitable to acquire land from the land owners. This kind of inconveniences is to be tolerated in the interest of the growth of the nation.