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Kairoff, Claudia Thomas. "Living on the margin: Alexander Pope and the rural ideal." Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 38, no. 1, 2005, p. 15+. Student Resources in Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A143216116/SUIC?u=j243905&xid=cb447983. Accessed 4 Jan. 2018.

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Pope's reiterated claims to superiority argue against his insecurities or his ambivalence and "championed liberty and friendship from his seclusion".

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"Pope was understood by contemporaries to address the aristocracy from a lower social position.......was charged repeatedly with lack of gratitude to his superiors and patrons,"

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. "Proceed!" the poet commands the wealthy and powerful (line 191), from their preoccupation with gardens to the sponsorship of public architecture and to facilitating transport. The "Genius of the Place" enables the poet to envision an England landscaped with churches, bridges, harbors, and roads, a vision that the great landlords must fulfill in the absence of a king imbued with this prophetic sense. Pope implies subtly that if all the gentry fulfilled their social obligations, the presence or absence of an exemplary king would be irrelevant."

The poet wanted the rich to help better their town, meaning he did not like the greed of the wealthy and powerful (common for the Augustan era).

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Pope consistently envisioned nature as a backdrop for the reflections of a cultured observer, a backdrop to be manipulated by the poet or garden designer (what his father worked as when they lived in the Windsor Forest).

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to Pope this obvious duplicity was improved by Bolingbroke's political rhetoric, which upheld the value of the retirement ethic and was, in fact, so utopian as to bridge "the gap between private and public life that was apparent to Pope"

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Hammond has cited this letter as an example of Pope's skepticism about Bolingbroke's (his mentor) posturing as a gentleman farmer, when "few contemporaries doubted that Dawley was a base for journalistic guerilla warfare" (48). Hammond implies that Pope's satiric response to Bolingbroke's pose arose from his distress that the statesman was adopting a rural way of life as a disguise, an ideal essential to the poet's imagination.

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Pope adopted the urbane and often snobbish tastes of some of his aristocratic patrons. He was disappointed when his mentor, Bolingbroke, assumed the guise of a farmer on his estate at Dawley.

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Due to these contrasting behaviors, it appears that Pope contradicted his attitudes in various works of his.

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Pope could create memorable glimpses of nature, such as the dying pheasant in Windsor Forest, because, as his elderly friends often reminded him, the country was his principal home through early adulthood. But his poems and letters confirm Pope's preoccupation with his literary craft and professional aspirations rather than with any attempt to record accurately the rural scene

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Pope's father had metamorphosed from a London merchant to a rural gentleman, but his son admired the men of taste and means with whom he associated in town. Pope adopted their attitudes toward the country that dominate his early poetry.

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He portrayed himself as both passionately attached to the country and detached from its boorish inhabitants. As Pope wrote to Wycherley in 1705, rural gentlemen "live much as they ride, at random; a kind of hunting Life, pursuing with earnestness and hazard, something not worth the catching.... I can't but prefer Solitude to the Company of all these"

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Pope adopted the persona of humble rustic shepherd, singing "Sylvan Strains" (Pastorals: Spring, line 1; TE 1: 59) to field-laborers, in both the Pastorals and Windsor Forest.

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Though he was from a suburban villa, he also spoke from that deal as he lived between nor city and country but in the margins of both.

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Despite his behavior, he clung to his outlawed religion.

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Pope  betrayed his squeamishness about hunting and his condescension toward actual rural life in many of his writings.

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Critic Donna Landry doubts that Pope, despite his references to sport in other poems, cared much for hunting, if indeed he did more than ride along when aristocratic friends engaged in a chase.

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Pope's house was not a country house but a suburban villa

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Malcolm Kelsall condemns Pope's hypocrisy in celebrating the virtues and taste of landowners who were almost indistinguishable

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Pope's praise of rural dwellers has attracted two negative perspectives.