Tradition and Emancipation in Horace and Alexander Pope

In Tradition and Emancipation, Japanese scholar Megumi Ohsumi explores the mimetic encounters of classical material across Alexander Pope’s poetry. Focusing particularly on Pope’s Horatian Imitations, Ohsumi attempts to identify the extent to which mimesis plays a role in Pope’s oeuvre. Horace has remained one of the central Roman figures in classical tradition, and Renaissance humanism propelled Western European writers to explore his life and career and weave them into their own creative accounts. Poets could easily identify with Horace, and they turned to him for channels through which to intimate ideological strife and vicissitudes of life, often as dislocated individuals in their native lands. While retaining interauthorial quality in his textual output, Pope metamorphoses into his own independent self as artist and poet as he evinces a renewed hope for his contemporary England. Ohsumi attempts to maintain a phenomenological outlook in delving deeper than surface appearance, so as to avoid reductionism in the endeavor to penetrate Pope’s intentions and perceptions.