職業作家ポウプ? : カールとの対比から見える新しい詩人観

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Pope belonged to the class of gentleman poet, who despised making money through the literary profession. The bookseller Curll was a striking opposite to him, not hesitating to publish spurious biographies or piratical editions of letters of authors. He saw to it that a biography of a late author was published soon after he was dead, because he knew the commercial value of a biography depended chiefly on the freshness of the hero in people's minds. Therefore, he had to collect material in a short time about the hero for the book to be bulky enough. Contemporary feelings towards these instant biographies by Curll were well expressed in Arbuthnot's words: "a new terror had been added to death." Actually Curll under the pseudonym of William Ayre wrote a biography of Pope and published it the year after the poet's death. Expectedly enough, it contains a lot of irrelevant accounts just to make it bulkier and raise its price. Hence comes the view that Curll was a mortal enemy to Pope, as well as other writers. Recent studies show, however, that there was a symbiotic relationship between them. Pope actually availed himself of "curlicism" (Defoe's coinage) in several ways. For example, he added a vast number of notes to his version of The Iliad, as Johnson pointed out, "to swell the volume." Besides, Pope traded upon Curll's mercenary mind to publish a manipulated version of his own letters in 1737. In this paper I would like to compare the poet's career with that of Curll, thereby revealing Pope as a commercial writer.
2011-03-01

職業作家ポウプ? : カールとの対比から見える新しい詩人観

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