“Oh grant an honest Fame, or grant me none!”: The Ethics of Memorialization in Pope’s Archives of Dulness

Unlike Milton, who suffered throughout his creative life from a terrible sense of belatedness, Pope was one of the most precocious of English poets, not simply finding a place in literary society while still a teenager and being celebrated as an author in his early twenties—as magisterial a work as An Essay on Criticism was published in his twenty-third year—but self-consciously experimenting with the drama of a poetic career from the moment he first thrust himself onto the London stage. Pope’s wary and ambivalent conclusion to The Temple of Fame—“Unblemish’d let me live, or die unknown, / Oh grant an honest Fame, or grant me none!”1—seems to register an apprehension of danger and temptation remarkably similar to that found in Milton’s declaration that “Fame is the last spur that the clear spirit doth raise / (That last infirmity of noble mind),” and it dramatizes Pope’s incessant struggles as a literary careerist to avoid moral contamination. Yet Pope insists on the possibility of an authorial purity that Milton’s lines emphatically deny: the desire for fame may be the last, or, in the example provided by the Oxford English Dictionary, the only remaining “infirmity of noble mind,” but in Milton’s rigorous formulation infirmity and nobility, like good and evil, cannot be separated: “Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably.”2 Pope, however, attempts to have his ethical cake and eat it too, to locate a privileged position from which moral deformity can be cast out and “an honest Fame” exemplified by the upright poet.