SOURCE: "The Inspiration of Pope's Poetry," in Essays on the Eighteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 1945, pp. 65-79.

In the essay below, Butt examines the inspiration behind Pope's poetry, including "the inspirations drawn from fancy, morality, and books."

The twentieth-century reader is beginning to discover that there is enjoyment to be obtained from the poetry of Pope, but he is still in danger of misunderstanding what Pope was trying to express and the methods he used. The radical misunderstanding is that though the meaning of Pope's poetry seems so easy to grasp, it requires as active and intelligent co-operation from the reader as the work of more recognizably difficult poets. Many poems—many great poems—require in the first place little more than the reader's sympathy, his receptivity, his power of experiencing normal human emotions. We need only to have been glad at the sight of a field of...