The Yard of Wit. Raymond Stephanson

      Preface

      Pope’s penis: to suggest that the yard of Alexander the Little reveals something important about the culture of eighteenth-century male creativity will doubtless strike some readers as a preposterous and needless prurience. Yet it is clear that the links between male writing and contexts of masculinity and the male body—particularly genitalia—played a significant role in the self-fashioning of several generations of male authors from ca. 1650–1750. This book is about the collective structures of male creativity for the period—particularly its somatic and sexual discourses—with Alexander Pope as primary example.

      My project started out as a study of how Pope fashioned his own poetical sensibility as a man: Why were his comments about poetry and creativity so often associated with sexuality? What impact did his many friendships, especially with older men, have in shaping his sense of himself as a poet? Why did his self-conscious dramatizations of the poetic imagination gravitate toward the body (Belinda’s and Eloisa’s, for example, or his own twisted frame)? What methodology might explain his investment of eros in both his male friends and his poems? What was one to make of the fact that his enemies so often attacked his writing and personality through ritualistic castration gestures or scathing belittlement of his genitals, and why did modern scholarship largely ignore this side of the Pope quarry? What was one to make of his handling of sexualized female Muses which he often projected onto himself or male friends, and why did he use tropes of the creative brain as womb? What did it mean for this diminutive man to say that “he pleas’d by manly ways,” and what sort of phallic strut might inform his public self-portraiture? What were the cultural subtexts of Colley Cibber’s embarrassing anecdote in 1742 about Pope’s supposed visit to a whorehouse as a young man? I wanted a clearer sense of the connections between Pope’s creativity and his masculinity.

      Before long it was clear that such questions were related to the larger literary culture of other writers, that how Pope fantasized the symbolic landscape of male writing in his most self-conscious moments—both the interior site of creativity as well as his public status within the literary marketplace—was inescapably embedded within the collective norms and attitudes of male literary culture understood in its broadest sense. The scope of my book changed accordingly, and I sought answers to a question deceptively simple and yet richly entangled within deeper paradigms: how did male writers of the period, not just Pope, imagine the origins, nature, and structures of their own creativity, or what William Collins referred to as the “poetical character” (the phrase comes from his pindaric “Ode on the Poetical Character,” that beautiful mid-century lyric about the origins and mythopoeic properties of the creative imagination)?

      One answer is that male literary culture of the period depended on a shared