A D Hope, Dunciad Minor: An heroick poem (Melbourne University Press 1970)
This book is an oddity which had its origins in a private joke between A D Hope and his friend and fellow literary critic A A Phillips. In 1950, Phillips gave a radio talk in which he attacked Alexander Pope, a poet much admired by Hope. The attack was exaggerated and at least partly tongue in cheek, but it got Hope’s dander up, and he wrote a Pope-like mock-heroic satire in which the goddess of dullness elevates Phillips to be king of dunces. He sent the poem to Phillips and that would have been the end of it, except that photocopies circulated in Australian literary circles, and the work acquired a kind of underground classic status. Twenty years later, Hope decided to re-establish authorly control and agreed to have it published in a lavish edition by Melbourne University Press. He used the occasion expand the poem and broaden the target of its satire by adding two sections.
At the time it was written, Dunciad Minor, a long poem in rhyming couplets, bristling with references to Ancient Greek mythologies and 18th century English literature, was already an anachronism. Even the sections added in 1970, which referred mainly to literary criticism written between 1930 and 1950, were out of time: who now has heard of Blackmur, or Henn, or Christopher Caudwell? And now, though maybe it’s a case of Too Late Too Soon, the whole thing is like a piece of rusty artillery from an almost forgotten war, covered in weeds and forgotten in a cow paddock. And insofar as we remember the war, most people nowadays would think of Hope as having been on the wrong side. (For instance, Pope and his friends in heavcen look at a piece of 20th century poetry::
Verse without number, statement void of sense,
Flat verbiage and verbal flatulence,
Called Four Quartets, it kept no time or tune.
Pope thought it a political lampoon
Writ by some parson much bemused in beer)
But I did remember the poem, and reread it today on a bus ride, and enjoyed it. A long work in rhyming couplets runs the risk of monotony. This one avoids that thanks to a) Hope’s technical virtuosity and b) the joyful malice of his satire. It speaks volumes that it was probably Phillips, whom it maligns mercilessly, who put copies into circulation.
On the back endpapers I found two little poems in my own handwriting. Perhaps I’m only blogging about this book so I can share them:
Alec Derwent Hope
should have his mouth washed out with soap
for writing nothing Striner
than the Dunciad Minor.
and
A poet named Alec D Hope
was in love with another called Pope
When Phillips on air
to Pope was unfair
Hope took six books to call him a dope.
But let Hope have the last word. In his 1970 Preface he suggests that the poem is ‘the protest of a poet against the arrogance of the professor who shares his body’. The two sections added in 1970, in which critics of many stripes compete for who can produce the most stultifying machine, take that protest to extremes. Here’s Book V lines 286, featuring US poet and critic Allen Tate:
His poems are golden but his prose is lead; In Labyrinthine coils it crowds and squirms With knotted syntax and entangled terms, Strangles each poem, as the serpents once Laocoön and his unhappy sons, Enfolds and squeezes, crushes and extracts Small crumbs of meaning and vast files of facts; The poet crumbles and the reader nods Yet on and on and on and on he plods. The tulip's streaks are numbered, all admit, But is the poem illumined? Not a whit; For all his purpose is to demonstrate The sensibilities of Allen Tate.
I can’t help but wonder what Hope would have done with academic prose in the days of Theory.
Me fail? I fly! 