Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift both believed, with varying degrees of self-assuredness, that some part of themselves would outlast their lives. They differed, however, as to precisely what would or could endure. From their earliest works, including Swift's A Tale of a Tub and Pope's Pastorals, through their joint efforts as members of the Scriblerus Club, and on to later achievements, such as The Dunciad, Pope's Imitations of Horace, and Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, they executed strategies of authorial identitycreation and control designed to achieve ends in purposeful contradistinction. Whereas Pope's belief in the redemptive potential of his own poetic prowess—a belief not always unwavering in the face of the cultural decline he set out to combat—compelled him to give the model of Pope-as-author pride of place in future memory, Swift tended to emphasize the expedient at the expense of textual self-memorializing. This essay examines how their nuanced but fundamental disagreements about the purpose of writing, the value of authorial “remains,” and the nature of possible futures constitute the subject of a dialogue that takes place not only in their “private” correspondence, but also through their public poetry and prose.

Epic poetry has long enjoyed a critical association with various manifestations of encyclopedic learning. The reputation of Homer and Virgil’s comprehensive knowledge in antiquity and the Middle Ages — a reputation neither always unchallenged nor entirely defeated, even as late as the early eighteenth century — helped make epic an enduring signifier of great magnitude and longevity, if no longer one of truly universal scope. This article traces the trajectory of the changing status of epic in the late seventeenth century through the eighteenth-century encyclopedia. The treatment of established commonplaces about epic and knowledge and the continued pursuit of “completeness” by Francis Bacon, Alexander Pope, Ephraim Chambers, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert furthered a process of generic differentiation that contributed to the separation of encyclopedias from epic poems, literature from Literature, and the sciences from the humanities.

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