Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry

Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry is a short essay by Alexander Pope published in 1727. The aim of the essay is to ridicule contemporary poets.

Content

The essay is a blow Pope struck in an ongoing struggle against the "dunces." It is a parody in prose of Longinus' Peri Hupsous (On the Sublime), in that he mitates Longinus's system for the purpose of ridiculing contemporary poets.

With this essay, Pope introduced the use of the term Bathous as meaning the combination of the very high with the very low.

Although Pope's manual of bad verse offers numerous methods for writing poorly, of all these ways to "sink," the method that is most remembered now is the act of combining very serious matters with very trivial ones. The radical juxtaposition of the serious with the frivolous does two things. First, it violates "decorum," or the fittingness of subject, and, second, it creates humor with an unexpected and improper juxtaposition.

Comic use of the Figures of speech

In chapter X, titled Of Tropes and Figures: and first of the variegating, confusing and reversing Figures, Pope explain the comic use of the tropes and figures of speech.^[1] This part is continued in chapter XI, titled The Figures continued: Of the Magnifying and Diminishing Figures. Among the figures covered are: Catachresis.

Models of reference

The nearest model for Pope's essay is the Treatise of the Sublime by Boileau of 1712. Pope admired Boileau, but one of Pope's (and Swift's) literary adversaries, Leonard Welsted, had issued a "translation" of Longinus in 1726 that was merely a translation of Boileau. Because Welsted and Pope's other foes were championing this "sublime," Pope commented upon and countered their system with his Peri Bathos in the Swift-Pope-Gay-Arbuthnot Miscellanies. Whereas Boileau had offered a detailed discussion of all the ways in which poetry could ascend or be "awe-inspiring," Pope offers a lengthy schematic of the ways in which authors might "sink" in poetry, satirizing the very men who were allied with Ambrose Philips. Pope and Philips had been adversaries since the publication of Pope's Odes, and the rivalry broke down along political lines.

One example of Pope's style and satire shows in his description of sinking in painting. In the commonplace Augustan hierarchic ranking of pictorial genres, still life ranked the lowest. However, Pope describes how it might fall and, with the single word "stiffen," evokes the unnatural deadness that is a mark of failure even in this "low" genre:

Many Painters who could never hit a Nose or an Eye, have with Felicity copied a Small-Pox, or been admirable at a Toad or a Red-Herring. And seldom are we without Genius's for Still Life, which they can work up and stiffen with incredible Accuracy. ("Peri Bathous" vi).

Notes and references

Bibliography

• Alexander Pope The Major Works Oxford University Press, 2006. Contains Pope's Peri Bathous at pp.195-238

See also

• 1727 in poetry