Similar Attitudes Toward Machinery, Language, and...

Similar Attitudes Toward Machinery, Language, and Substance in Wordsworth, Pope and Dryden William Wordsworth’s â€Å"Preface to Lyrical Ballads† is from the Romantic Period of British literature, while Alexander Pope’s â€Å"The Rape of the Lock† and John Dryden’s â€Å"Mac Flecknoe† are both from the Neoclassical Period; â€Å"The Rape of the Lock† is from the Augustan Age, while â€Å"Mac Flecknoe† is from the Restoration (â€Å"Literary†). Despite these discrepancies in the time periods that their respective works were produced, however, Wordsworth, Pope, and Dryden express similar attitudes toward machinery, language, and substance. Their works evidence their agreement that machinery is a destructive force of serial production and repetition; good poetic†¦show more content†¦/ For this with fillets strained your tender head, / And bravely bore the double loads of lead?† (Canto 4, lines 99-102) Paper durance, irons, fillets, and lead are cited as tools and machinery that bind and strain Be linda and other women. When Pope writes, â€Å"Parent of vapors and of female wit,† he indicates that he equates a female mind to insubstantial vapor (Canto 4, line 59). Dryden draws the same connection between machinery and a lack of substance in â€Å"Mac Flecknoe,† when he writes, â€Å"Let ‘em all by thy own model made / Of dullness, and desire no foreign aid: / That they to future ages may be known, / Not copies drawn, but issue of thy own† (lines 157-160). The text’s footnote indicates that the word â€Å"issue† is â€Å"[a] pun [that indicates] both progeny and printing,† and a printing layout is referred to as a â€Å"mechanical;† therefore, Dryden sarcastically expresses his disgust at the thought of machinery being used to repetitively produce writing that is dull, meaningless, and insubstantial (â€Å"Mechanical†). In addition to making commentaries about the repetitive, insubstantial qualities of machinery in their three texts, Wordsworth, Pope, and Dryden denounce the use of language that is mechanical. For example, in â€Å"Preface to Lyrical Ballads,† Wordsworth writes, â€Å"I have endeavoured utterly to reject [personifications] as a mechanical device of style, or as a family language which Writers in metre seem to lay claim to by prescription. I have