WARTON LECTURE ON ENGLISH POETRY

Dulness and Pope

Professor David Womersley, St Catherine's College, Oxford

11 May 2004, 5.30pm
The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

It has long been recognised that Pope's emotions for those he stigmatised as ‘dunces’ went beyond mere dislike, and that his attitude towards what he called ‘dullness’ included an awareness of its attraction and an acknowledgement of its power. Emrys Jones and Howard Erskine-Hill have discussed with great sensitivity those moments in The Dunciad when the allure - even, fleetingly, the beauty - of dullness makes itself felt. What has not been attempted, however, is any contextualised explanation of why it was that Pope's poetry of literary excoriation found itself so compromised. Why was Pope unable simply to condemn the dunces? Was this simply a foible on his part, or should we try to explain the dividedness of Pope's poem by reference to factors outside the poet himself?

Professor Womersley’s lecture explores the filiations between The Dunciad and the literary culture it condemns through a reading of Sir Richard Blackmore's The Kit Kats (1708), a neglected poem by the man Pope placed in the front rank of the dunces which, however, has interesting affinities to Pope’s own poem. On the basis of what emerges when these two poems are juxtaposed the lecture reaches towards some broader conclusions as to why early eighteenth-century languages of literary praise and blame are so unstable.

About the speaker
David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge before taking up a Junior Research Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge and subsequently becoming a Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Leeds. In 1984 he became Fellow and Tutor in English at Jesus College, Oxford, where he remained until 2002. He has published widely on English Literature from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on the work of Edward Gibbon, whose History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he edited in 1994, and on whom he has published two monographs. He is also an editor of The Review of English Studies

Lecture Chair: Professor H H Erskine Hill FBA.

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