Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on October 27, 2007
Literary Imagination 2008 10(2):152-164; doi:10.1093/litimag/imm102
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Echoes of Sound and Sense: Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism and Ben Jonson's "Eupheme"
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While still a very young man, Alexander Pope owned a copy of Ben Jonson's Works,1 in which he inserted numerous markings and marginalia: some of these appear within the poem "Eupheme," in a passage in which the poet describes a voice so beautiful that it seemed to caress the air, and "when the Sound had parted thence, / Still left an Echo in the Sense." Pope's markings of these lines thus suggest that his own famous phrase from An Essay on Criticism—"The Sound must be an Eccho to the Sense"—is, in fact, itself a sort of "echo." Yet not just an echo, Pope's phrase is simultaneously an evocation, calling up new or forgotten meanings in Jonson's poem. As John Hollander has noted about the metaphor of intertextual "echo," "What is interesting and peculiar about this [metaphor] is that whereas in nature, the anterior source has a stronger presence