Byron, Pope, and the Mock-Epic

AbstractThis chapter analyses mock-epic as Byron and Alexander Pope understood it, examining their different approaches and unpacking the way each poet subverts the host material shelled for its creation. It argues that a distinction between ‘mock-heroic’ and ‘mock-epic’ is critical when considering Byron’s and Pope’s separate achievements, and that by charting the movements of both poets within (and against) the expected heroic, satiric, and social parameters of what mock-heroic and mock-epic were taken to be by contemporary audiences, we arrive at a better appreciation of the distance travelled from the ultimate source of these closely related genres – Homer and the classical ‘type-scene’ set piece as represented by katabasis and aristeia. The energies generated by mock-epic and mock-heroic are thereby seen to differ, the former being fundamentally centrifugal, the latter centripetal, but both are energies against which Pope and Byron employ three distinct bathetic registers: the inflationary, the deflationary, and, more rarely, the phantasmagorical. Don Juan, The Rape of the Lock, and The Dunciad are our guides.