Transitions and Digressions in the Eighteenth-Century Long Poem

Abstract

Among the most influential dicta thrown up by recent critical theory is that literary works can be understood as aligning themselves either with or against dominant cultural ideologies. Those texts which seem to be largely corroborative of the strong ideologies of their day have met with a brand of modern criticism which addresses itself to pointing up the inconsistencies and nonsequiturs which all hegemonic viewpoints are supposed to contain. Let me begin by giving one eighteenth-century example of such poems and such a critical response. The first part of the century witnessed the unquestionable take-off of a new sort of consumer economy, distinguished by the manipulation by a buoyant supplyside of consumer demand and by a significant rise in middle-class purchasing of nonnecessaries.' These new conditions of market activity were not lost on contemporary commentators, and numerous Augustan poems show signs of grappling conceptually with the new realities of social economy. Recent criticism of poems such as Pope's Epistle to Bathurst and John Gay's Trivia, works which are informed by these social facts, has detected aesthetic tensions arising from the poems' desire to sustain within themselves two antithetical cultural discourses.2 These were, first, the Mandevillian discourse which maintained that the private appetites of individuals were publicly useful in stimulating the market activity necessary for an ultimately broader economic dividend; and, second, the Christian and humanist belief that