In the poetry of nature, and the poetry of
passion, he was altogether impotent. His _Windsor Forest_ and his
_Pastorals_ are artificial and false, not written with "the eye upon the
object." His epistle of _Eloisa to Abelard_ is declamatory and academic,
and leaves the reader cold. The only one of his poems which is at all
possessed with feeling is his pathetic _Elegy to the Memory of an
Unfortunate Lady_. But he was a great literary artist. Within the
cramped and starched regularity of the heroic couplet, which the fashion
of the time and his own habit of mind imposed upon him, he secured the
largest variety of modulation and emphasis of which that verse was
capable. He used antithesis, periphrasis, and climax with great skill.
His example dominated English poetry for nearly a century, and even now,
when a poet like Dr. Holmes, for example, would write satire or humorous
verse of a dignified kind, he turns instinctively to the measure and
manner of Pope. He was not a consecutive thinker, like Dryden, and cared
less about the truth of his thought than about the pointedness of its
expression. His language was closer-grained than Dryden's. His great art
was the art of putting things. He is more quoted than any other English
poet but Shakspere.
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