SOURCE: “Hierarchies of Kind and the Gardening of Alexander Pope,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Vol. 303, 1992, pp. 149-53.

In the following essay, Aubrey suggests that Pope's landscaping at Twickenham reflects an overarching principle that informs his poetic oeuvre, namely, the traditional literary theory that ranks genres of poetry.

Historians of landscape gardening agree that Alexander Pope is an influential figure, but how to account for his various practices and pronouncements is less certain. Labels such as ‘inconsistent’, ‘eclectic’, and ‘transitional’ have been offered. Morris Brownell calls Pope's garden at Twickenham a perfect paradigm of the picturesque garden that would come into fashion later in the century. Others see Pope's practices more as an extension of classical and Renaissance gardens, as Pope understood them.

An idea from traditional literary theory, that there is a hierarchy of kinds, or genres of poetry, may have enabled Pope to...