Mock-Epic Poetry: Pope to Heine

Ritchie Robertson. Mock-Epic Poetry: Pope to Heine. New York: Oxford, 2009. Pp. xvi + 441. $110.

I have never been completely satisfied by schema that attempt to clarify the various modes of mockery-parody, travesty, mock-heroic, and the others. We know how satire works, though we may labor to explain its species. Mr. Robertson's argument hinges on the idea that there is a constant if uneven development in satire that begins with mock-heroic and develops a greater and greater amorphous realism, which leads in the end to a blurring of genre. The first great break in the progress of satire in the eighteenth century came with the extended mock-epic poem, and The Dunciad is the great exemplar. Pope moved from the elegant contrast between epic conventions and the quotidian world of Belinda in The Rape of the Lock to the heteroglossic tangle of The Dunciad. Mock-heroic here constitutes "a frigidly correct neoclassical poem," while The Dunciad is an explosion of new imaginative energy. Pope's battle with his enemies becomes an all-encompassing and obsessive project. It unconsciously elevates the lower register of satire-tradesmen, bookdealers, editors, astrologers, projectors, and the whole carnival of Grub Street. The line between high and low is obscured. Sometimes (we are told) the mock-epic grows up beside the older epic and sometimes it challenges its authority.

I have one disagreement with this treatment of mock-heroic. As I have claimed elsewhere, The Rape of the Lock includes within it the romance...