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Issue of Bad Writing in Swift and Pope
Issue of Bad Writing in Swift and Pope
With the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 there was a marked
growth in the publishing business . There was a increase in journalism and new
magazines like ‘The Spectator’ ‘The Tatler’ ‘The Guardian’ came up . There was a
new tone in the writing and Addison puts the new fashion in his own admirable
way – ‘I Shall endeavor to enliven morality with wit , and to temper wit with
morality’
‘The Battle of the Books’ published along with the ‘A Tale of tub’
(1704) speaks of how a battle was fought between the ‘Antients and the Modern
Books in St. James’s Library’ . Loosely based on Boileau's ‘Le Lutrin’ , the satire
contains an excellent interpolated allegory of the spider and the bee . The bee
symbolises the ancients who used to draw inspiration from the nature while the
spider is like the modern hack-writing who can only criticise and build its web
(books of criticism) from the taint of its own body digesting the viscera.
“He (a patron) chinks his purse, and takes his seat of state…
And (among the poets) instant, fancy feels th' imputed sense"
The dunce booksellers trick and counterfeit their way to wealth , and his dunce
poets wheedle and flatter anyone for enough money to keep the bills paid .
Dustin H. Griffin points out that Pope did not view dullness with
unequivocal disgust . just after the publication of the first Dunciad , Pope wrote in
a letter to swift “…every stick you plant , and every stone you lay , is to some
purpose; but the business of such lives as theirs [the scribblers] is but to die
daily , to labour , and raise nothing”
Tathagata Dutta
(M.A., English Literature,
University Of Delhi)
BIBLIOGRAPHY