Alien voices, ancient echoes: Bakhtin, dialogism, and Pope's Essay on Criticism

Not so sympathetic to the excessive or less excusable errors of "some" or "other" poets and critics is yet another voice that identifies itself with an implied "we," an audience of apparently savvy poets and critics. This voice directs the attention of the in-crowd to another group, cataloguing its mistakes:

Some have at first for Wits, then Poets past, Turn'd Criticks next, and prov'd plain Fools at last; Some neither can for Wits nor Criticks pass, As heavy Mules are neither Horse nor Ass. (36-39)

Some to Conceit alone their Taste confine, And glitt'ring Thoughts struck out at ev'ry Line; Pleas'd with a Work where nothing's just or fit; One glaring Chaos and wild Heap of Wit[.] (289-92)

Following the latter passage is an extended discussion about mistaken emphasis on the superficialities of versification: "Others for Language all their Care express" (305); "Some by Old Words to Fame have made Pretence" (324); and "most by Numbers judge a Poet's Song" (337). As solutions to these problems the voice offers practical wisdom--e.g., true expression is appropriate to the subject and occasion, like proper dress; the poem's sound should be an echo to the sense--and expects its audience to discern and affirm these maxims' rightness. By displacing the errors onto a detached group of "them," Pope saves his audience from shame or embarrassment in case the errors are in fact its own, nudging and winking while instructing on how to avoid being one of "them." Thus he practices a version of the diplomatic didacticism he espouses for critics: "Men must be taught as if you taught them not;/And Things unknown propos'd as Things forgot" (574-75).

Pontificating, cajoling, reasoning, Pope's varying voices experiment with degrees of detachment and involvement, authority and conciliation, seeking (or claiming) to offer advice, chide foolishness, and restore grace and tolerance to criticism. Ultimately, though, the collective Popean voice is not detached from but entangled with the audience as it participates in the very follies it purports to criticize. "Fear most to tax an Honourable Fool," the poem advises (588), immediately after poking fun at John Dennis, the Appius who "reddens at each Word you speak,/And stares, Tremendous! with a threatning Eye" (585-86). The poem is not above making fun of "half-learn'd Witlings" (40), "tuneful Fools" (340), and the "Bookful Blockhead, ignorantly read,/With Loads of Learned Lumber in his Head" (612-13). Does Pope follow his own advice of speaking, "tho' sure, with seeming Diffidence" (567)? Evidently not, and so he seeks to make amends by adopting a final voice in the concluding apostrophe to William Walsh; this is the young poet who offers "humble Praise" to the "lamented Shade" of his mentor (733) and suggests that his "tender Wing" is among those that need to be "prun'd" (736)--at the same time disingenuously claiming with a final wink that his wing "no more attempts to rise" (737). In surprisingly Bakhtinian fashion, then, the Essay presents us with an elaborately jumbled utterance in which no one voice prevails. The humane peacemaker and the indignant judge of bad writing, Pope the poet's apologist and Pope the sensible critic--all anticipate the "answer-words" (Bakhtin, Discourse 280) of their variously-construed audiences.