Abstract: A walk through Timon's estate in Alexander Pope's Epistle to Burlington presents the reader with vivid images of inverted Nature: a summerhouse that knows no shade, a fountain that has stopped playing, and a drooping, unwatered seahorse. While Pope's manner of satirizing in this epistle has regularly been characterized as Horatian, owing to his mild tone, this article draws attention to the poem's central preoccupation with the notion of indignity, which it shares with Juvenal. The targets of Pope's and Juvenal's satire are people, animals, and objects that have lost their authentic purpose, often through the vice of luxury. In these poems, luxuria leads to what might be termed the dislocation of nature . Through human action, nature is ejected from its rightful place, which results in displays of incongruity. Refocusing critical attention onto the cause of Juvenal's indignation rather than his incensed tone highlights the similarities between Pope's and Juvenal's strategies, which include the literary perambulation and the three-dimensional quality of the kinetic scenes. While Juvenal helps illuminate Pope's method, Pope is no less useful for moderating the deeply entrenched binary between the "Horatian" and the "Juvenalian."
Ivana Bicak (Sun,) studied this question.