I hope, you think me none of those
Who shew their Parts as Pentlow does,
I but lug out to one or two
Such Friends, if such there are, as you. (Corr. 1: 26, 12 or 13 July 1707)
In this cheeky analogy, questions of manliness, friendship, and poetry are tumbled into an outrageous scenario of Pope’s well-hung wit which is lugged out only for close male friends who can appreciate the difference between small and large Wits, between “remarkable … Virile Parts” promiscuously displayed to all or privately unbuttoned for friends only. The lines contain a bawdy and impolite mélange of penises, wit, male friends, genital exhibitionism, and an implied hierarchy within male literary communities. Together, both examples reflect in their different ways a convergence of masculinity, homosocial relations, sexuality, and cultural constructions of male creativity. One can approach these metaphors as instances of Pope’s personal difference, marshaling biographical facts which link the sexual content of the tropes to his impoverished sex life, unfortunate physical limitations, unmarried status, or other aspects of his apparent marginalization; and of course about the uniqueness of Pope in many of these respects there can be little doubt.29 But I want to suggest that what we often view as most unique about Pope can also be understood as intensified or exaggerated symptoms of underlying cultural structures. The two deployments above are of course intimately tied to Pope’s idiosyncratic interest in matters sexual—both his lifelong penchant for erotic subject matter as well as his heterosexual disappointments as he aged—but they are not wholly exclusive to Pope, being also representative of similar rhetorical equations used by his contemporaries.
This fortuitous convergence of the biographically unique but culturally exemplary Pope is most helpfully present in the ways he located his eroticized creativity in the homosocial context of male friends, especially in his teens and early twenties. As is now generally accepted, the story about Pope and poetry and sex goes far beyond his experience of heterosexual fantasies and disappointments, and must include discussion of relationships with the men he loved—usually older men (Caryll senior, Garth, Wycherley, Walsh, Trumbull, Cromwell) who offered the young poet another context through which the male creativity-sexuality conjunction would be voiced. In these relationships we can see an older model of masculinity dependent on rank and reputation, one in which young Alexander’s entries into manhood and the public realm of male authorship were interconnected. The patronizing and protective milieu of older male friends provided the young poet a means of approaching a world of manly competence at a time when his adolescent sex-drive was beginning to be linked closely to his budding literary ambitions. Aspects of male friendship, that is, compensated the absence of wife or lover, but they also affected the ways Pope understood his creativity as a sexualized energy. And in the male culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—when Pope grew up and entered the republic of letters—the power relations and social hierarchy which were so important to collective notions of both manliness and male authorial stature were often characterized by eroticized metaphors and narratives, part of an older cultural model of male friendship which encouraged sexualized locutions and gestures of narrative transvestism between men. Writers of Pope’s day incorporated certain of these epicoene and homosocial elements in their self-conscious remarks about male creativity and in allegories about the poetical character. One result can be seen in sometimes elaborate figurative gesturing and eroticized rhetorical flourishes, as in the following letter to Pope (in his early twenties) from the older Cromwell, who explains that Wycherley feels particular affection for Pope—whom he has not seen for some time—and is keen to receive his young friend:
Mr. Wycherley has, I believe, sent you two or three letters of invitation; but you, like the Fair, will be long sollicited before you yield, to make the favour the more acceptable to the Lover. He is much yours by his talk; for that unbounded Genius which has rang’d at large like a libertine, now seems confin’d to you: and I shou’d take him for your Mistress too by your simile of the Sun and Earth [i.e., in an earlier letter, Pope said that he was to Wycherley as the earth to the sun: “the Earth … is clearer, or gloomier, just as the Sun is brighter, or more overcast”]: ’Tis very fine, but inverted by the application; for the gaiety of your fancy, and the drooping of his by the withdrawing of your lustre, perswades me it wou’d be juster by the reverse. Oh happy Favourite of the Muses! how per-noctare, all night long with them? but alas! you do but toy, but skirmish with them, and decline a close Engagement. (Corr. 1: 136, 7 December 1711)
Cromwell’s epistolary wit may be exaggerated, combining an older rhetorical posturing with the locker-room strut of the libertine, but the passage contains a typical intersection of discursive elements which shaped collective constructions of male creativity. First, the beloved male friend as mistress or female lover, here twice used—initially, Wycherley the lusty libertine returning to his lover, the feminized Pope; then Wycherley-as-Mistress to the masculinized but stand-offish Pope. Second, the male writer as phallus-poet, as sexual favorite of the female Muses—here, the endless staying power of poet-Pope is flatteringly presented as a copulatory tease. Third, a clear articulation of masculine hierarchy, with Wycherley (in his early seventies) given preeminence as older male to feminized mistress-Pope, but the younger poet’s brilliant wit still acknowledged.
What we are seeing here are revealing aspects of the male literary community into which Pope sought entry, and of the ways he experienced the reception of his poetic creativity as an eroticized feature of masculinity and its hierarchies. For Wycherley and his contemporaries, poetic energies and ambitions were effortlessly coupled with a variety of libidinal analogies and sexual tropes, thus encouraging an epicoene banter between males when they talked about their authorship or writing. For young Pope, these discursive repertories must have provided some compensation for his increasingly doubtful heterosexual accomplishments, but they also reinforced the connection of his poetry to his masculinity, sexual competence, and relative position in a male hierarchy. Homosociality, sex, and the poetical character converged again and again in Pope’s early exchanges about his own poetic practice, as they do in this example, providing us an important glimpse into the historical conjunction of male creativity and masculinity. But while the status of young Alexander’s auspicious wit was subject to the power dynamics of rank and homosocial connections, his stature as a male would also be heightened by an impressive literary debut whose genius was metaphorized as a type of manliness or a potent form of sexual energy. My point about this kind of evidence is that Pope’s early career especially reflects an older model of masculinity as reputation and rank, and that his exchanges with other men underscore the importance of homosocial contexts within which a sexualized male creativity was fashioned and articulated.
Finally, as exemplary of sexualized male creativity, Pope’s body was turned into a commodity, an item for sale and also a symbolic imaging of his creativity. Although we are more accustomed, perhaps, to thinking of this gifted hunchback as sadly unique or unfortunately deformed, in fact Pope’s dwarfed body and literary fame became emblems of the new marketplace of letters. Helen Deutsch has shrewdly described the complex interface of Pope’s body and his authorial power, and of the textual struggle to control representations of the relationship of his deformity and poetry. Describing Pope’s references to his own deformed body as a kind of pre-emptive strike against a public pruriently keen about the connections between physical deformity and human character, Deutsch reminds us that “the market for Pope’s poetry was inseparable from a thriving market for images of the poet. Portraying Pope was something of a national pastime.” In a capitalist market where physical images of Pope’s head and ideas of his body were of interest to consumers, the poet waged “war with a contemporary reading (and lampooning) public … for the power of self-representation,” and he did so not by trying “to write himself out of his body, rather