Summary
Book 1 of The Dunciad begins by establishing its mock-heroic style through an invocation, much the way a classical epic would. The speaker calls to "The Mighty Mother and her son who brings / The Smithfield Muses to the ear of Kings" and establishes that they were called to this work by "Dulness, Jove, and Fate." These three figures establish three keys to Pope's work: the first being the mythological representation of England's intellectual culture and values ruled over by Dulness, the second being the classical allusions and poetic structure of ancient Greece and Rome that Pope replicates, and the third being Fate, which becomes a major theme within the work, forcing the reader to question whether anything might now be done about the spread of Dulness.
Pope gives us a description of Dulness as an immortal anarchic Goddess exerting control over the minds of writers, artists, and intellectuals. Pope also provides a series of names of writers who serve Dulness, mocking and criticizing the works by authors like Cervantes, Swift, and Rabelais. We are told that Dulness means to begin a "new Saturnian age of Lead," or a gloomy, slow, and heavy period for the minds of Britain.
A mythological world meant to introduce us to the plagues upon the literary world of England begins to take shape next in Book 1. Folly holds a throne, Poetry and Poverty share a cave out of which dull poets flood the literary landscape with new printed works, and Dulness has a college for nurturing these poets. She sits here on a throne surrounded by the four "guardian Virtues" of Fortitude, Temperance, Prudence, and Poetic Justice. Folly, subordinate to the Goddess of Dulness, supervises the four guardians: Virtue supports the throne, Fortitude knows no fear of bad reputation, and Calm Temperance and Prudence have their own specific roles to play. Last, there is Poetic Justice, who weighs truth with gold, which means he transforms lies into truth and takes gold for bribes. Within this world, it is not only the writers of Pope's time that are vivid characters; so are the various facets of writing, such as Metaphors, Tragedy, Comedy, Farce, and so on—all of which are illustrated as amassing into one chaotic and confusing force under the influence of Dulness.
Dulness, shrouded in clouds with a veil of fog over her face, now takes us to the mock-heroic's first conflict: she must pick a successor for Eusden, the aging poet-laureate. Though she has many poets who serve her whom Pope lists and of whom she is deeply proud, she sets her sights on a poet named Bayes as her choice. Bayes, however, is deep in conflict. While his works certainly serve Dulness and "Nonsense precipitate," he is struggling to finish works and around "him much Embryo, much Abortion lay, / Much future Ode, and abdicated Play." In his library, he looks around and thinks of all of the writers he has plagiarized, including Shakespeare and Molière. The rest of the great books in his library have largely remained unread, used merely as decor and "serve (like other fools) to fill a room." Many of these have been spared from Bayes' touch, according to Pope, lying outside of his mental or physical reach, closed and protected on the highest shelves.
Now, however, Bayes seizes twelve of these from the shelves and takes his own folio of work to use as the base for building an altar to Dulness. He cries out the Goddess, expressing his disillusionment. He has served her well, but wonders if it is time to move on to other pursuits. He describes how once a demon stole his pen and "betry'd [him] into common sense," but aside from this incident, his writing has been purely loyal to Dulness. He asks the Goddess if his work did not please her, and feeling lost, he wonders what other professions he might take up in place of being one of Dulness' poets. He considers entering the Church, taking up gambling or "gaming," or becoming a party-writer. He comes to no conclusion and decides to burn his altar as an effigy, sending his unpublished works out into the world untouched or tarnished by England's printing world, London's in particular.
Dulness is awakened by the light and takes "a sheet of Thule from her bed," referring to a sheet of an unfinished poem whose ink is still wet or whose writing was too cold and heavy to complete. She flies down to Bayes and uses the sheet to put out the fire, rescuing the works. She takes him back to the most sacred hall of her college and declares the place his home. She anoints him with opium and puts the symbol of her sacred bird upon a crown which she places on Bayes' head. Eusden, Dulness' poet-laureate, is dead, the Goddess announces, and Bayes is made King of Dulness and is now referred to as Cibber, after Pope's real-world object of criticism, Britain's poet laureate at the time. This news is met with much chaotic noise and celebration as "the hoarse nation croak'd, 'God save King Log!'"
Analysis
This section expertly established Pope's ability to mimic the writers he is critiquing while simultaneously producing a deeper literary meaning in his own writing. As critic William Kinsley points out, in Book I, Pope writes that under Dulness and Chaos, Epic and Farce "get a jumbled race" (ln. 70) even as Pope himself writes a farcical epic (29). Pope chooses this style intentionally, and his knowing artfulness makes his work both impactful and canonical. In Book I, Pope uses a variety of literary devices to establish that the writers he critiques are, in caving to Dulness, less human than his own masterful speaker. In doing so, he provides a roadmap for understanding the text and the world it creates.
Early on in this work, we are provided with language both beautiful and grotesque to describe this new period in England's literary and intellectual life. Scholar Edward Thomas describes the world of Dulness as "full of monstrous distortion," and this certainly rings true in the diction and the imagery we are provided (448). We are told that the poet servants of Dulness are "momentary monsters" (ln. 83), "brazen, brainless brothers" (ln. 33) who breed "spawn, scarce quick in embryo" (ln.59), "new-born nonsense" (ln. 60), and "Maggots, half-form'd" (ln. 61). Though the language used here clearly communicates a disturbing realm full of inhuman creatures, the construction of this language within the poem tells a different story. Most of the above examples showcase the speaker using alliteration to create repetitive sounds that are pleasing to the ear. They create consistency within the text rather than the distortion the images seem to imply. Also, while the images of half-formed maggots and newborns are meant to convey that the works of these poets are not fully or effectively shaped, they exist within a predetermined pattern: ten-syllable lines paired into rhyming couplets, often following iambic pentameter in metric structure. This would suggest that this poem has, in fact, always been fully formed or fully imagined. Both of these details tell us that though the speaker wishes to convey the dark side of Dulness' reign and her army, he cannot help but write with skill and even beauty. As readers, we see that this speaker cannot be simply another Dunce.
The personification of any number of abstract concepts within this first book acts as a foil for the monstrous nature of Dulness' army of Dunces, a juxtaposition that makes this degradation of humanity seem all the more extreme. Dulness' throne is surrounded by four guardian Virtues who are given strikingly human descriptions like these:
Fierce champion Fortitude, that knows no fears
Of hisses, blows, or want, or loss of ears:
Calm Temperance, whose blessings those partake,
Who hunger and who thirst for scribbling sake:
Prudence, whose glass presents th' approaching jail:
Poetic Justice, with her lifted scale,
Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs,
And solid pudding against empty praise. (ln. 47-54)
These are figures we can picture and imagine quite clearly in human form. Similarly, literary devices become anthropomorphized as well. Readers see a "Mob of Metaphors" (ln. 67), "Tragedy and Comedy embrace" (ln. 69), and "Time himself [stand] still at [Dulness'] command" (ln. 71). Meanwhile, what human actions we are given in this book are often dehumanized. Take our protagonist, Bayes. The speaker tells us that Bayes "gnaw'd his pen" (ln. 117), "Plunged for his sense" (ln. 119), and "flounder'd on in mere despair" (ln. 120). These are all animalistic actions, some of which conjure up the sense that, at least mentally, Bayes seems to exist in a watery world in which humans could not survive. These categorizations of mythological, abstract, and human figures align in many ways with the classical mythology that Pope is alluding to and drawing from in his work. In many Greek and Roman tales, it is gods and demigods who are depicted as fully human and who often turned humans who had committed wrongs in the gods' eyes into animals, such as Acanthus, Aedon, and Cereus. Pope's writing, therefore depicts an intellectual, cultural, and historical depth in drawing these connections between classical works and his own mock-epic.
The speaker's point of view is also incredibly telling here. Within Book I, we see the speaker take us through the world of Dulness, her college, her Empire, and then to the world of Bayes in his library. We see references to important, albeit infamous, areas in the English literary and artistic world, including Grub-Street and Drury-lane (ln. 44). The scope of the speaker's understanding and vision is broad in this Book. Readers are able to see early on that the perspective presented by the speaker is far different from the "bards, like Proteus long in vain tied down" (ln. 37) who dwell and creep out of the "cave of Poverty and Poetry" in the world of Dulness (ln. 34). Contrast this with Bayes, who readers are told has not read the most important works buried within his library (ln. 145-151), and we see a different picture. Bayes is described as "sinking from thought to thought," plunging "for his sense, but [finding] no bottom there" (ln. 119). If Bayes has any perspective that can compete in power with the speaker's, it is one that is very deep, dark, and suffocating, revealing little to nothing to reader. Pope kills two birds with one stone in this approach: we are given a broad understanding of the mock-heroic's geography and scope, and we are given additional reason to believe that the speaker of this work is himself no Dunce blinded by Dulness.
Between Book I's structure, diction, imagery, and allusions, we are given a firm understanding of what, according to the poem, is at stake for humanity, as well as what is at stake for Pope. In creating a mock-epic of this nature, Pope risks being aligned with the very behavior he so loathes. But by studying the details he gives the reader in contrast with the creatures populating his epic, he encourages the reader to trust that his choices are intentional and multi-faceted, mocking and sophisticated. It is essential for Pope to establish this early on, and it is why this must be a critical focus in analyzing Book I and understanding how the rest of the epic reinforces and builds upon this initial part.
