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Chapter 1

Introduction: Male Creativity and Its Changing Contexts

Discourses about male creativity were fundamentally influenced by three historical transformations: (1) a revised cultural understanding of masculinity as an interiorized sexual identity; (2) a new kind of interest in the male body as the site where masculinity would be registered, with particular emphasis on the connections between the organs of generation and the mind; and (3) the commodification of the literary in an emergent capitalist print culture. The most significant result for ideas of male creativity and the poetical character was that male genitalia were increasingly seen as the symbolic commodities of both masculinity and male literary labor. More specifically, traditional creativity/procreativity tropes were affected by these transformations, and cultural understanding of the literal and figurative connections between creative male mind and reproductive systems—both male and female—were rewritten in ways that reflected newer physiological theories as well as the new economic value of literary production. The same is true for non-procreative, eroticized tropes for creativity—sexy female Muses, erections—which became rhetorical markers for the inner site of one’s inspiration as well as the public status of one’s writing in the literary marketplace. These collective metaphorical equations played a significant role in establishing widespread associations of the male mind as sexualized body, which in turn became rhetorical commodities very likely to yield a profit for authors and booksellers. Pope became the first public emblem of these developments, symbolizing the new commercial traffic in the yard of wit.

New Commodities: Masculinity, Male Bodies, Literary Labor

How we understand the links between creativity and manliness has everything to do with basic assumptions about the defining features of masculinity for this period, which were far from stable. As scholars know, histories of Enlightenment men and maleness are about masculinities rather than a single universal type; about fluid and often permeable gender boundaries; about social, economic, and political forces as well as sexual behavior; about transitions and consolidations of the categories of maleness rather than transhistorical modes; and about the relationship between public representations and actual behavior. Historians seem agreed that eighteenth-century maleness was subject to a variety of new configurations and developments. Perhaps the most difficult question of all has been the debate about when and how there might have been a shift from “masculinity” understood and experienced as social reputation to “masculinity” as an interiorized sense of personal identity defined increasingly by sexuality. John Tosh has framed the historical question and its interpretive difficulty concisely:

All that can be said with confidence is that a fundamental shift occurred between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries masculinity was regarded as a matter of reputation; it had first to be earned from one’s peers and then guarded jealously against defamation…. In the twentieth century, by contrast, masculinity has come to be experienced as an aspect of subjectivity, sensitive to social codes no doubt, but rooted in the individual’s interiority; an “insecure” masculinity is one which is assailed by inner doubt (particularly about sexuality) rather than by threats and aspersions from other men…. Was the period 1750–1850, so crucial for the development of class identities, also critical in the gradual transition from masculinity as reputation to masculinity as interiority?¹

At first glance, one might be tempted to say “yes,” and then look for specific discursive evidence and individual case studies which would substantiate the general claim that the eighteenth century witnesses the emergence of a new configuration for masculine identity in which selfhood becomes an internalized sexual identity variously construed across a range of acceptable and transgressive modes. Anthony Fletcher has made such arguments easier by pointing out “that the word masculinity, meaning ‘the quality or condition of being masculine,’ had its first recorded usage in England in 1748.” His acknowledgment that “New words enter the language as people feel the insufficiency of current speech to express something they want to encapsulate” might suggest that the word enters common usage precisely in order to name this new sense of interiority. But Fletcher also cautions us about the difficulties of proof: “How far among men living in the Victorian period, let alone during the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, it [masculinity] involved an internalised identity—an interiority of the mind and emotions—as opposed to a sense of role-playing—is very hard for the historian to judge.”² Tosh goes so far as to suggest that, even by the nineteenth century, “It is hard to see compelling evidence for a new sense of interiority.”³

A different reservation has been issued by Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen in the introductory essay to their important collection of studies of Enlightenment maleness. The historical development of masculinity in this period, they say, is as complex, contradictory, and variable as that of femininity, and therefore is not well-accounted for by simplistic models of historical change:

The model of a straightforward transition from a single early modern masculinity based on social reputation to a modern version in which men defined themselves through sexual behaviour (both heterosexual and homosexual) and through their control of women (newly confined to the domestic sphere) can now be seen to be inadequate. Such a model assumes that the main problems masculinity engages with are sexual and patriarchal in nature and that there exists a single unified masculinity available for historical analysis.⁴

The question then: is there sufficient evidence to mark the eighteenth century as the period when masculinity moves from social to internal positioning, and how might this be reflected in self-conscious literary commentary? The cautions and reservations of these prominent social historians are especially important challenges because the work of the majority of scholars in the field has assumed there is considerable evidence for such claims.

Indeed, a good deal of scholarship in the last decade has tried to recover and describe the subjectivities or internalized identity-markers of various kinds of men and masculinities. Although there are now too many good publications to provide an assessment of each, the following brief selection will give some sense of how vigorously scholars have proceeded under the assumption that a newer sense of an internalized sexual identity explains much about the history of Enlightenment masculinities. First, there are those historians after Foucault whose work has helped to frame fundamental questions about categories, cultural paradigms, and historical contexts, and without which much subsequent scholarship might have been inconceivable. The work of Randolph Trumbach, for instance, has been important for providing a significant array of empirical, archival data about the new-style sodomite-molly which has made possible more nuanced readings of the subjective space of individual self-identification.⁵ G. S. Rousseau, likewise, has opened up significant conceptual questions about gender identification and sexual identities in the past, offering a powerful counter-balance to heterosexist assumptions about history, biography, and sexual stereotypes.⁶ One of the foundational claims of Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud⁷—that the idea of “sexuality” as a fundamental constituent of identity does not become a particularly meaningful concept until the eighteenth century—has convinced many that the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the birthplace of an interiorized, sexualized sense of a masculine self. Also important is Michael McKeon’s “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760,”⁸ whose astute theoretical observations on the historical overlap and differences of male sexual identity and class identity have prevented an over-simplified isolation of sex and gender matters from other material contexts within which identity-questions are inevitably embedded.

These influential conceptual assessments of the historical terrain are widely referred to and have, in different ways, encouraged more specific reconstructions of internalized male identities, either of individual men or of homosocial sub-sets. Kristina Straub’s important study, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology,⁹ is in part an examination of the problematic ways in which discourses about the sexuality of male actors was a site of cultural struggle over how normative and transgressive male sexual identities would come to be defined. Jill Campbell has written persuasively about gender and identity in Fielding’s writing, arguing that his contemporaries were “engaged in a process of reformulating the import of gendered identity in the course of the eighteenth century,” and that Fielding himself harbored a suspicion “that the apparently most personal and essential aspects of identity may be revealed as artificial and contingent constructs.”¹⁰ Straub’s and Campbell’s studies are useful reminders of the complex and self-conscious responses by individual male authors and actors whose lives appear to have been suspended between old and new paradigms for acceptable masculine self-identification. In an earlier essay of my own, I tried to account for the ways in which the apparently sexualized rhetoric between predominantly heterosexual male friends might have been part of how an internalized masculine identity was experienced—a male subjectivity, in other words, whose nuances were recognizable in the eighteenth century and before but which are now lost to us.¹¹ More recently, Shawn Lisa Maurer has done much to explain how the domestication of masculinity in the new social periodical helped to provide the contexts which would lead to the internalization of “the bourgeois family man … as the prototype of desirable masculinity.”¹² In his impressive reading of male-male relationships and identities in eighteenth-century homoerotic culture, George Haggerty has made a convincing case for “how sexuality became a feature of Enlightenment subjectivity and why gender codification became the central marker for difference, the central dichotomonic legacy of early modern culture.” In a subtle discussion of Beckford, Haggerty argues “that we can discover in this case—in Beckford’s writing, in the press, and in the popular response to his situation—the beginnings of a particular kind of male homosexual sensibility.”¹³ Philip Carter’s recent essay on Boswell examines “the various styles of manliness that Boswell was keen to develop, and some of the personality types that he was eager to impersonate,” such as “sense, self-control, moderation, independence, refinement and sentiment.” Carter suggests that while “Boswell considered sex an important part of his adult identity and his understanding of manliness, both as a universal and personal category…. he did not do so to the exclusion of other manifestations of manly behaviour.” Carter concludes that “the value of the case study is not just in setting out what ideals were to be emulated, but also how effectively these were either put into practice or complicated by other forms of social identification.”¹⁴

Whatever masculinity-as-identity might have been as it left social markers to become an interiorized mentality, studies such as these—written mainly by literary critics—claim that the period roughly 1650–1800 was developing a new idiom, new discourses, new stereotypes and prejudices about how maleness and masculinity were to be defined, understood, represented, or how they might have been experienced and internalized as identity. This is not to say that such studies ignore the social and reputational dimensions of what “masculinity” might have meant, but rather they emphasize that being “manly” and exhibiting a masculine character were increasingly derived from a sexualized inner self. Still, the cautions of social historians are salutary, I think, because they warn us of the dangers of oversimplification and the subtle anachronisms that can be brought about by an over-magnification of a single facet such as sexual identity. Such cautions also remind us that what we actually mean by “masculinity” itself as a changing historical thing still needs further elaboration.

My own position is that an interiorized sense of maleness-as-sexualized-identity is emerging at this time, although still informed variously by older paradigms based on social hierarchy and reputation. I agree with David M. Halperin’s point that the large-scale cultural transformations and reorganizations which accompanied the shift to industrialization and the emergence of a capitalist economy also had significant impact on “the various relations among sexual roles, sexual object-choices, sexual categories, sexual behaviors, and sexual identities in bourgeois Europe between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Sex takes on new social and individual functions, and it assumes a new importance in defining and normalizing the modern self.”¹⁵ However, because the period is clearly one of changing sex and gender attitudes, one must approach questions of identity with an awareness that such a concept is likely in transition as well, and our readings of the evidence must therefore allow for the play of older modes and stereotypes as they are modified, blended with the new, or finally eliminated. On shifting ground of this sort, the subject “masculinity” becomes particularly difficult to come at or catch, and certainly easy to oversimplify. The main challenge right now, as it seems to me, is to incorporate the best macro- and micro-studies of this complex history—both the social, hierarchical, reputational structures and the interiorized sexual, psychological self-identificatory evidence—in order to chart a history which can simultaneously reveal older and newer modes, eclectic blends and mixes, the variable relationship of sexual acts and sexual identities, and the uneven shifts and accommodations which can make it difficult to differentiate between older and newer discourses.

In his study of masculinity in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Mark Breitenberg has spoken of the difficulty which faces the social or literary historian in sketching what he calls a “nascent interiority.” While his remarks are about the need to historicize or translate psychoanalytical approaches—which see identity as mental or psychic conditions—into Renaissance social phenomena, his distinction is helpful to the point I want to make about the period which concerns this book:

While psychoanalysis locates subjectivity in the individual’s psychic struggle, the early modern period discovers identity in the more public context we associate with shame cultures, where such factors as property, reputation and status are pre-eminent. Indeed, quite possibly psychoanalysis articulates what was only beginning to emerge, or perhaps, submerge, in the early modern period. Hamlet is a useful figure for this nascent interiority: his dilemma is surely the result of social factors (loss of place, public title), but his response appears to us as familiar for its interior manifestations.¹⁶

Breitenberg’s “nascent interiority” is a useful heuristic device for imagining a flexible model of historical transition which embraces both macro- and micro-approaches to Enlightenment masculinities, as well as acknowledging the nearly always psychologized and sexualized conceptualization of such matters as the historically-inherited norm of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In other words, for studies of Enlightenment masculinities to progress we need to balance the modern psychological privileging of subjective individualism in the history of selfhood—an assumption Roy Porter has described as the “question-begging and self-serving leftover of Victorian fanfares of progress” which discovers “an ascent from some primordial collective psychological soup to a sharply defined individual identity”¹⁷—with the ways in which masculinity, to quote sociologist R. W. Connell, is always “deeply enmeshed in the history of institutions and of economic structures. Masculinity is not just an idea in the head, or a personal identity. It is also extended in the world, merged in organized social relations. To understand masculinity historically we must study changes in those social relations.”¹⁸ The history of masculine identity, then, must be wary of some exclusive interpretive attachment either to external pressures of rank, reputation, and shame, or to newly fashioned internal self-identifications based on sexual character. The historical record points to a far more complex reality.

David Halperin has framed the interpretive difficulty and challenge in a slightly different manner, but one which similarly recognizes the anachronistic and transhistorical tendencies of much recent work. Our modern model of identity—tied, he says, to a notion of a psychologized sexual subjectivity—is one which “knits up desire, its objects, sexual behavior, gender identity, reproductive function, mental health, erotic sensibility, personal style, and degrees of normality or deviance into an individuating, normativizing feature of the personality called ‘sexuality’ or ‘sexual orientation.’ ” Such a model, he writes, “is inconceivable” before the nineteenth century, but he hastens to add that this does not mean that it was impossible “for sexual acts to be linked in various ways with a sexual disposition or sexual subjectivity well before the nineteenth century.” What we must bring to our studies of these pre-1800 historical matters, he suggests, is a far more nuanced sense of the wide array of possible relationships between sexuality and notions of identity:

What my argument does do, I hope, is to encourage us to inquire into the construction of sexual identities before the emergence of sexual orientations, and to do this without recurring to modern notions of sexuality or sexual orientation and thereby contributing to a kind of antihistoricist backlash. Perhaps we need to supplement our notion of sexual identity with a more refined concept of, say, partial identity, emergent identity, transient identity, semi-identity, incomplete identity, proto-identity, or sub-identity. In any case, my intent is not to reinstall a notion of sexual identity as a historical category so much as to indicate the multiplicity of possible historical connections between sex and identity, a multiplicity whose existence has been obscured by the necessary but narrowly focused, totalizing critique of sexual identity as a unitary concept.¹⁹

The value of Halperin’s “partial identity” and Breitenberg’s “nascent interiority” is that they foreground the problems of historical variability, fluidity, and unevenness in the very categories we attempt to grasp. As current scholarship tries to trace the various ways an interiorized sexuality-as-self emerged, we must be wary of simplistic before-and-after concepts: i.e., before 1800 sexual acts did not necessarily reflect a sexual identity or orientation, and after 1800 they did; or, before 1700 or 1750 or 1800 male identity was social and reputational, and after one of these dates it was interiorized. Even the common-sense position that male identity always has and continues to reveal a dynamic rather than stable exchange between external and internal identificatory structures is also prey to sophisticated anachronism which assumes there is a core identity inside. Such assumptions must also be tested against the fact that eighteenth-century notions of selfhood and identity, as E. J. Hundert has argued, also included analogies of the self as actor, masquerading theatrically in a newly commercialized world which offered a variety of moral and psychological roles to be enacted: “Eighteenth-century thinkers were thus faced with the argument that character itself was in essence a social artifact, a construct existing in an intersubjective space of the demands of others, and within which a person’s identity was of necessity devised.”²⁰

I set forth these complex historical issues at some length because a study of male discourses about the poetical character can contribute to our understanding of developments and changes in Enlightenment masculinity. A working assumption of this book is that the “literary” does not merely issue from or come after “history,” the text-world of the creative imagination serving as convenient mirror or second-order reflector of a historical real-world. And male literary communities—whether high or low, Scriblerian or Grubstreet, Whig or Tory—are no more separable or sealed off from the making of cultural history than scientific, political, religious, or military communities. Both the poetical character and the male writerly cadres with which I am concerned were in some important ways constitutive of cultural reality and its most typical habits of perception, and we do well not to underestimate the anthropological evidence which resides in the literary record. What remains still largely unexplored territory are the ways in which male literary communities reveal (perhaps more clearly than other homosocial groupings) the dynamic interplay of socially- and internally-located concepts of masculinity and manliness. Because male creativity itself was already conceptualized as having the double aspects of interior mental activity and public status, the links between notions of creativity and masculinity were situated at the nexus of social and psychologized constructions. That is, the poetical character was collectively understood as both an internal site of creativity within the male writer’s mind, as well as a commodity within the competitive marketplace of letters which situated and ranked authors publicly in hierarchies of worth or monetary value. In turn, this double sense—of internal and reputational status—was accompanied by a parallel formation in which the interior place of male creativity was imaged primarily as a sexual site, and one’s relative position in the public hierarchy of male authors was importantly connected to one’s perceived manliness as a writer within a network of homosocial connections. For historians of the Enlightenment, these collective representations of the poetical character as an aspect of masculinity offer a rich archive about how male identity, sexuality, homosocial relations, and creativity intermingled in the cultural imaginary both as social and interiorized realities.

One of the most far-reaching implications of the gradual shifting from masculinity as reputation to masculinity as sexualized interiority is the new importance of the male body. There is perhaps nothing surprising in this: as notions of masculine identity were increasingly derived from constructions of a sexualized inner self, the male body and its sexuality became more than ever the sites where masculinity would be registered. And yet there is an astonishing lack of work on these issues, which seems clearly related to the general academic reluctance to make the history of the male body a legitimate scholarly subject. Taken for granted in ways the female body never is, and too often dismissed or reduced to simplistic notions of embodiment-as-patriarchy, the male body would appear not to have had a history at all until very recently; or so the academic record would imply. An emerging scholarship has already begun to fill in some of the blanks,²¹ although very little work has been done on the reconfigured links and widespread associations between genital physiology and male mind—newer associations that Chapter 2 will explore. The ways in which young men learned to acquire a masculine identity involved many contexts of experience, behavior, and appropriate social interaction; maleness depended on one’s birth, economic station, and on one’s work status or professional pursuit. Increasingly, however, a newly-sexualized brain or male character would supply an important marker of masculinity as well, but one understood as an interiorized identity dependent on a specifically male physiology which originated in a revised set of cultural symbols for the male organs of generation, sexual and erotic inclination, and reproductive potency. The shift in the ways male genitalia were understood helps to explain why a sexual sensibility came to be seen as a dominant category of mind or a masculine identity. In short, the constitution and condition of the male body itself came to be increasingly essential categories in how maleness and masculinity were defined, and have much to tell us about the historical transition from primarily social and reputational contexts to internal identifications of the uniquely sexualized male self.

The new physiology, as Laqueur and others have shown, intensified the connections between masculinity and male sexual function. At the heart of this historical reconstruction is the claim that it is not until the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that a biological notion of male sexuality was widely imagined as constitutive of masculine psychological reality. Reproductive biology, in other words, appeared more than ever one of the primary sites of an essentialized maleness whose consciousness and experiential history might be understood as linked to the condition and activities of the sexual parts. This gradual reconceptualization of masculinity in relation to the male body is evident not only in the histories of medicine ca. 1650–1750—both scientific and popular manifestations—and in pornography,²² but also in self-conscious commentary about male creativity. Detailed analysis of these somatic and sexual discourses will be offered in Chapter 2, where a handful of important historical questions will be answered: How were male organs of generation understood in medical traditions and in the non-scientific population at large? Were the cultural associations and symbols for this period different from earlier cultural systems? In what specific ways were male genitalia linked to the brain and ideas of masculinity? Why is there such a remarkable increase in public references to male genitalia in this period, especially to the penis? Is there an underlying logic or single structure to this period’s literal and symbolic use of male genitalia?

That the very seat of male thought or identity could be shaped by a man’s physical condition or sexual organs is arguably one of the most significant results of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century medical and non-medical developments, not least because it helps to explain the early formation of the concept of an essentialized male consciousness as sexually defined—the model inherited by modern western culture. The refashioned links between male brain/mind and body were part of the newer symbolic terrain within which one might have internalized one’s sense of identity as a man or imagined such an interior identity in other men, and these Enlightenment equations reflect a variety of reorganizations of the concept of masculinity as a biological and social entity. However, male mind/male genitalia associations were no simple matter. Newer notions of masculinity-as-sexualized-embodiment were characterized by ambiguity and differential symbolizing, especially when it came to the penis, or, what the period also called the yard, the privy member, tarse, pintle, or pego. Medical, pornographic, legal, and other non-literary discourses tell a similar story, that there was a perceived instability of male subjectivity as it might be grounded by reference to “the yard.” The penis-mind connection was especially vexed, being understood as either a direct or an inverse relationship, with mental capacity either the result of genital capacity or of genital deficiency. Even physiological accounts of the causes of erections made connections of a sexualized male body and masculine identity a troublesome issue, with tumescence often the result of imaginative caprice or mechanical/biological triggers rather than the will. The most striking development was that the yard was often viewed as a separate symbolic commodity even while attached to real men. The historical record suggests that the Enlightenment yard was often a problematic emblem of male identity because its function could be related either to a collective uneasiness about mind-body relationships or to the psychological complexities of individual male will and the instability of the conditions of desiring.

If newer notions of masculine identity and sexualized male bodies were important in the cultural landscape affecting literary discourses, there was another historical development whose impact was monumental, forever altering the very idea of the “literary.” I mean the commodification of literature which characterizes the history of print culture for this period—that well-known gradual shifting from older forms of male patronage to a literary marketplace in which writers and their books were being newly defined as consumer products with a potential economic value. In this newer capitalist milieu the dignity of male authorship and the enigmatic nature of the imaginative act would be sorely tested and modified, subject increasingly to a commercialized evaluation which affected the ways in which the poetical character was understood and represented. The fascinating history of the relationship between notions of the author as materially transcendent creator-genius and author as cultural commodity whose imagination was for sale has received a variety of excellent analyses.²³ The explanations are now familiar ones: with the professionalization of imaginative writing from the late seventeenth century, the image of the independent author-gentleman was now also reducible to crass commercial object. The poetical character was for sale, too, victim of a meteoric literary capitalism whose effects are still evident in notions of aesthetic value today. Different explanations have been offered for how various kinds of writers responded to the commodification of their own works and status as authors, but a common thread of argument is that male writers combatted their entry into the marketplace of letters by differentiating their own creative genius from the hirelings, hacks, and literary prostitutes who depended on a paying public. However, little work has been done on the connections of literary commodification and masculinity or male bodies. While important studies have been published on the interrelationship of female authorship, female bodies, female sexuality and literary commodification, there exists no comparable body of scholarship for the men who were affected by the new economy of letters.

The important exception is Linda Zionkowski’s Men’s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660–1784,²⁴ an enormously helpful account of the shift from late seventeenth-century notions of the male poet as the materially aloof or self-indulgent aristocrat to mid-and later eighteenth-century models of the poet as the professionally-engaged author in the marketplace. What particularly distinguishes her book are carefully reasoned accounts of how changing concepts of the poet were also linked to maleness and rank:

the period saw the emergence of a new “stereotype of manliness” that took as its reference point the market rather than the court, the bourgeois or economic man rather than the gentleman or aristocrat…. whether these poets viewed themselves as professionals engaged in commercial literary culture or vehemently rejected that identification, their verse constituted an important arena for conflicting definitions of masculinity—definitions that, in turn, legitimized particular forms of literary production and certain configurations of literary careers. (5)

In eloquent chapters about Rochester, Oldham, Dryden, Pope, Gray, and Johnson, Zionkowski convincingly shows “the extent to which a change in idealizations of manhood accompanied the shift toward the market in literature” (98), so that by mid-century writers had begun “to associate masculinity and cultural power with commercial success, while characterizing poets’ detachment from the market [her prime example is Gray] as an infantile, or effeminate, dependence upon others” (132). By the time we get to Samuel Johnson, she argues, “the gentleman writing from idleness and leisure inhabits a category separate from and inferior to that of the professional man of letters, who lives upon his talents” (182). Her book also examines some aspects of how these important transitions were accompanied by sexual and eroticized tropes about the male poet’s relationship to his readers or an emergent capitalist marketplace of letters.

My interests are similar to Zionkowski’s, but our emphasis and angle of perspective are very different. I am much more interested in how the sexualized male body and issues of masculinity-as-embodiment are related to redefined notions of the literary and of male creativity. Indeed, I want to suggest that there is an important historical convergence, a double commodification of literature and of masculinity as the sexualized male body. My book will argue that the perceived conjunction of the “literary” and the “manly” was being refashioned at a time when masculinity and literary labor were both becoming commodities—as ideas, discourses, processes. As male minds, brains, characters—literary or otherwise—came to be associated more intensely with the male reproductive system, men found themselves the object of a synecdochic gesture in which they were reduced to and commodified as their genitalia, most often “the yard.” At the same time, idealized notions of male authors and their books were being reduced and commodified as economic items in a literary marketplace where male creativity in turn could also be represented as genitalia in a kind of cultural shorthand. Both the “literary” and the “manly” circulated in a newer economy where they were being given a revised cultural capital as things. The two kinds of commodification are clearly homologous and related in the sense that male genitalia became the essentialized commodity—literal and symbolic—of both masculinity and male creativity.

Heads and Groins

These changing cultural equations had important implications for discourses of male wit and literary production, especially for the traditional creativity/procreativity tropes which so dominate the history of metaphors for mental invention. The parts and organs of the human body have always been objects of metaphorization, reflecting not only specific historical conceptualizations of the physiological interrelatedness of body systems, but also culturally specific ideas about religious, social, political, or gender hierarchies.²⁵ But it was the figurative conjunction of heads and groins which were most congenial to ideas of literary activity. Head-groin associations had been around since classical times, but unlike other tropes for creativity, the connections of these two highly symbolic body parts called attention to the ways in which creative energies might be embodied or contain a sexual element. Such was the case with the head and brain of Enlightenment male writers, whose creativity—both as an internal mental event, and as a textual product increasingly located in a public print culture—was often imagined and written about as though it were akin to a sexual or reproductive act, something that might be explained with reference to genitalia or one of several theories of generation. Heads and groins, that is, became a heavily freighted cultural imagery for notions about male creativity and sexuality, and Chapter 3 examines their rhetorical traffic.

A pre-Enlightenment history of procreative motifs associated with mental labor and creative invention is easy enough to find, well known to scholars, and I need not itemize its most famous examples here. As is well known, from classical times the male’s fertile intellect or imagination had been likened to the fecund female, whose pregnant womb became a metaphor for male creativity. But while the conjunction of the sexually-procreative and mentally-creative is hardly new, there is in the Enlightenment a unique reconfiguration of these traditional discourses which depended on newer embryological debates (especially ovist versus animalculist preformationism, and preformationism versus epigeneticism) and on the newer conceptual associations of male brain and sexualized male body. That is, the metaphors of embodiment used to characterize creative acts no longer relied so exclusively on hackneyed classical myth or quaint poeticisms but now grounded themselves in revised physiological assumptions which were quickly entering the wider domain of public thought and stereotypes. The best known of these analogies—the idea of pregnant male poets and their brain-wombs (with the book or work of art as child)—is prominent in self-conscious literary commentaries written by men during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but has received only limited attention despite the rich anthropological evidence it includes.²⁶ Classical creativity/procreativity tropes had encouraged the connection of male brains and female groins, thereby sexualizing the male creative principle as both a heterosexual idea and a transvestite embodiment. The transgendered dramatization of male wit as pregnant woman or eroticized female Muse included a misogynistic gesture, certainly, in which female as fleshy materiality, passive reproductive vessel, or prostitute could reflect the new literary commercialism. But these transvestite renderings enabled other discourses about the traffic in male creativity, especially in erotically-charged, epicoene exchanges between men when they discussed the nature or status of literary endeavors.²⁷ Part of an older rhetoric of male friendship, the presentation of self as a sexy or fecund female was a convenient vehicle for reflecting one’s homosocial status among friends or male competitors where one’s value as a writer could be voiced as a type of female objectification or passive sexuality; in this sense, male author as reproductive female Muse served as a marker of one’s masculinity. The heterosexual aspect of the trope—male poet’s erotic relationship with his female Muse—also called attention to the conjunction of the male body and creativity by making a successful imaginative outcome dependent on male sexual ability. These head-groin associations would be much affected by the historical transformations I sketched above, particularly when it came to representations of the economic value of literary “labor.”

More specifically, the first two sections of Chapter 3 examine the cultural underpinnings which might explain why the inner site of male creativity was so frequently imagined as a uterus, and why the male author’s entrance into, and public status within, the republic of letters was so often metaphorized as a young lady’s precarious position in a male sexual economy. Indeed, reproductive tropes—whether of pregnant male brains, the birth of the child-book, the begetting and birthing of the male writer himself—are so common that their presence has been largely taken for granted. Similarly, male self-projection as female—whether as woman about to give birth, eroticized Muse, chaste or prostituted young country lass—is so frequent and casual a rhetorical gesture in the period as to seem trite and without significance, except perhaps as evidence of a thoughtless male appropriation of matters female, or worse, of a systemic misogyny. I will be arguing instead that the implications of these well-known tropes and analogies have much to tell us about the deep-level constructions of male creativity as cultural subject within a newly-commodified world of letters, as well as about the competitive structure of male literary communities. These two sections will offer a variety of answers to a difficult question: why is the female Other in her reproductive and erotic capacities so often the metaphorical terrain onto which an entire male literary culture would map a symbolic understanding of itself? As we will see, these related metaphors allowed male writers to articulate a positive identity about themselves, their art, and their relationship to literary traditions and readers. But in a rapidly expanding print culture in which devaluation of various kinds was frequently decried, these metapoetic narratives were also used to sustain and dramatize a hierarchy among male writers, providing familiar allegorizations and rhetorical codes by which a logic of inclusion and exclusion would prevail. I will argue that tropes of male brain-wombs and female Muses allowed several generations of writers to respond to changed perceptions of the value and status of their literary labor.

The companion trope—the male mind as somehow about male reproductive parts—is so much a part of our own gender slang and stereotypes about men today (“dickhead,” “he’s got balls,” to take two examples) that one might assume the Enlightenment conjunction has been well studied. And yet, curiously, it has so far not engaged serious or sustained scholarly attention despite the fact that cultural connections of male imagination, wit, fancy, the poetical character and the genitals—especially the penis—constituted one of the most important revised and expanded discourses on male creativity as it was conceptualized in the period. Classical images associating mental creation with male genitalia are outnumbered by brain-womb/Muses before the seventeenth century, but the newer physiological models explaining male mind/body interrelationships would dramatically open up the ways the poetical character would be seen as an aspect of male embodiment. The last three sections of Chapter 3 are about the literal and figurative uses of male genitalia to characterize something about the male imagination, a male writer’s public status, or his response to his own commodification in a newer, capitalist print-culture. Self-conscious narratives about the poetical character were frequently invested with yard-wit equations or with reference to the stones or seed and, not surprisingly, these links were part of the larger set of cultural formations and reflective of its ambiguities. The creative imagination as yard could take several forms: wit could be metaphorized variously as getting it up, as coitus, masturbation, ejaculation; the male poet’s head might be imaged as a displaced privy member; the written work could be figured as male genitalia, something subject to expurgation which in turn was figured as a castration; pens and quills could be hard or soft yards spilling ink, semen, or urine; occasionally, the underlying subject of male writing itself was represented as a non-procreative phallus. Complex exchange principles sometimes prevailed in which yards had to be traded, lost, or denied for male wit to appear at all. Male writing might be linked to a heterosexual copulatory power or an apparently homoerotic exchange. In some instances, poet-yard equations provided an idealized mythos of an independent creative power under the sign not of Apollo and the Muses but of Priapus or some heightened epicoene begetting. In others, poet-yard tropes might circulate within the larger literary community as a kind of rhetorical prop or identifying shorthand which could be purloined maliciously or used combatively to enter the lists in which hierarchy, reputations, and collective standards among male writers might be fashioned and fought over. Tropes of poet-as-pintle or wit-as-yard were also used to figure an autonomous, self-generating male creativity which sometimes replaced heterosexual myths of the creative act with an exclusive homosocial drama which included ideas of autogenesis, autoeroticism, or male-male begetting. And of course male genitalia were used literally or figuratively in disputes between literary antagonists in the public realm, providing an accessible vehicle for sometimes preposterous comedy or vicious humiliation, as for instance in Colley Cibber’s whorehouse anecdote which so deeply embarrassed Pope in the early 1740s. Predictably, the record of literary usage is varied and often contradictory, reflecting the differential equations and oppositions of non-literary discourses.

Heads and groins: associations of the two constitute an important rhetorical record of the collective response by authors to the history of their own commodification. What is striking about an inventory of creativity-sexuality conjunctions for male writing is the breadth and variety of vehicles drawn from contexts of masculinity and the male body. Genitalia, reproductive function (or dysfunction), transvestite gestures, birthing tropes, sexual engagements with Muses, erotic inclination, urinary flow, emasculation, libidinal deviance, and so forth—all these embodiments played a role in an authorial self-fashioning that informed the response of several generations of male writers who defended the idea of authorial independence and dignity while at the same time serving a newer capitalist mode which committed them to debased notions of literary value. Taken together, however, these collective narratives reflected a variety of ambiguities, not only about the cultural position of literature, authors, and literary tradition in the new marketplace, but also about the semiotic landscape which defined and, in a sense, normalized the perceived connection between male body and mind.

The two metaphorical economies organized around female wombs/Muses and male genitalia had complex and differential functions. The most obvious was in gender matters, where the heterosexual model apparently resident in tropes of creative male brain as female groin was really about homosocial realities for male writers, with femaleness only temporarily appropriated. That is, the female principle—whether literal or figurative, whether female Muse, pregnant womb, male poet as young virgin, male friend as epicoene lover—was simultaneously deployed, appropriated, and disposed of by male writers whose eye was on the peer group of other men. The two economies were different schema for arriving at the same result: a collective mythologizing of the poetical character which served as the underlying appeal to the community of other male writers for inclusion, approval, and authentication. But other functions reveal collective anxieties, especially when it came to ideas of the transfer of creativity from the interior mental place to its plight in the public domain—a source of considerable ambiguity when it came to sexual metaphors. With the inner site of creative energy characterized as somehow equivalent to genitalia, the public circulation of oneself as male poet was also represented as a symbolic circulation and potential loss of one’s sexuality. Just as the male poet’s entry into the literary community could be likened to the plight of the young virgin who entered an adult world where sexual compromise and violation were likely, so too with the wit-yard tropes, where such entry was metaphorized as equivalent to putting one’s privy member in public circulation where it could be bought and sold, laughed at or admired, figuratively castrated, and owned by others.

One result was that head-groin associations changed over time. For example, the shift from ideas of autonomous gentleman author to professional writer in the marketplace was accompanied by a changing figurative embodiment: that is, the new traffic in male creativity was less frequently imaged as an immaculate patriarchal birthing or phallic self-sufficiency, and more often reflected by an imagery of precarious and painstaking reproductive “labor” or of potentially defective male genitalia. Chapter 3 will also investigate how tropes linking brains and genitalia sometimes reflected desires for a transcendent autonomy or independence from the emerging economic realities of the literary marketplace; at other times they offered metaphorical props perfectly suited to the new exchange principles. These two metaphorical systems thus served a double function, both as markers of a newer literary commercialism as well as an idealized resistance to the capitalist milieu where the status of literary labor was in transition. Often these competing functions clashed within the same work, signs of a larger ambiguity about the changing socio-economic position of authors and their writing.

Another result was that male writers such as Pope sometimes represented the poetical character as simultaneously about male sexual power and loss, as both an eroticized prowess and a sexual vulnerability. Head-groin metaphors contained contradictory possibilities about sexualized wit, presenting its origins as an erotic energy but often portraying its manifestation as an erotic depletion. The links between a writer’s brain and his genitalia were sometimes characterized as forms of exchange, displacement, or compensation, which in turn might dramatize his imagination as an instance of stifled or rejected sexuality, or of missing yards. With male genitalia as the essentialized commodity of both masculinity and male creativity, the shifts from conception to execution, from private site to public expression, or from inner creative autonomy to marketplace dependency could be represented as a sexual depletion and loss, despite collective myths and meta-narratives to the contrary.

There was another sense in which connections of creative male mind and organs of generation harbored a significant ambiguity, and that was in the relative sway which either the symbolic head or groin might have over the other. In a culture for which mind and personality were seen to reside in the brain, the inclusion of another body part as symbolic site of male essence—whether yard, stones, or seed—always entailed a potential instability or splitting of selfhood because the part in question might be either synonymous with soul/mind/will or somehow at odds. The possibility of such alienation or disjunction played a role in how masculinity-as-sexualized-interiority was understood, and the underlying genital source of male identity was sometimes represented as a threat to traditional mind-body hierarchies, and in the literary realm as an anxiety that the groin’s influence on the creative mind might issue in an unthinkable transgression.

Associations of the male writer’s skull with male and female groins became a convenient token for his status in the literary world, a symbolic commodity in an increasingly commercialized publishing realm where literature and authors alike were being bought and sold. The author’s head was subjected to a cultural metaphorization which articulated not one but a variety of collective formations ranging from the internal site of mental creativity to the sometimes fractious position of the writer in the public domain of literary hierarchies and marketplaces where the figure of the professional writer was emerging. Clustering around references to the male writer’s head and brain was a collective sexualized vocabulary signaling a variety of important differences—of talent, homosocial rank, and relative position and value as a commodity. In the new marketplace of literary labor, poets’ heads and groins were becoming things of commercial traffic.

The Exemplary Pope

Alexander Pope is my touchstone for these historical developments, and his example will haunt the conceptual parameters of this book just as his life, reputation, and writing forever changed and defined the eighteenth-century literary realm. Pope’s impact was enormous, influencing the scene of professional writing during his lifetime and well into the nineteenth century. He was in many ways symbolic of the poetical character itself, a public icon exemplifying male genius, literary fame and wealth, and the cultural status of the new professional author. No wonder eighteenth-century readers and writers referred to him more often than any other of their contemporaries. True, he cannot be perfectly typical of the several generations of male writers that this book is about, writers whose status, interests, peer group, subject-matter, nationality, profession, education, and age are in many instances quite different. Still, Alexander the Little, in some ways so very different—an unmarried, four-foot six-inch hunchback, denied so many official possibilities because of his Catholicism, and yet the most famous eighteenth-century poet—is in other ways exemplary of the new convergence of masculinity, sexuality, and male creativity.

What makes Pope so important to a study such as this is that, perhaps more than for other writers of the period, his creativity was experienced by him and perceived by others as a palpable aspect of his masculinity—physical, social, sexual. And because his life and career straddled the historical transition from older to newer notions of masculinity, his correspondence, poetry, and comments by contemporaries allow us to see how the maleness-creativity conjunction was defined both by one’s rank and homosocial connections—that is, manliness as public, reputational—as well as by an interiorized masculinity-as-sexual-embodiment. Pope’s body is also immensely important because his anatomical predicament called special attention to the reconfigured connections between male mind and body, which in turn were often projected onto his creativity as sexual or genital conditions. Indeed, Pope himself eroticized the poetical character almost obsessively, using the head-groin metaphors I have sketched above as well as other sexual gestures. Most important, his historical role in the gradual commercializing of the literary domain had a double aspect: not only was he one of the first professional writers to benefit hugely from the new marketplace of letters he so often derided, but he became an object of commodification himself, not only as target of a Pope-bashing industry which made money for others, but also as a cultural emblem of the male author whose creativity and masculinity both were defined against his sexualized body. This book will use a wide variety of men to make my case about the history of male creativity for this period—from friends of Pope such as Wycherley and Cromwell to enemies like Curll, Cibber, or Ned Ward; from important figures on either side of Pope such as Oldham and Dryden or Wilkes and Sterne—but I use Pope’s example as primary evidence, especially in Chapter 4, because he is so often paradigmatic of the complex intersection of male bodies, sexuality, and the poetical character.

Saving specific analysis of Pope and his contemporaries for the last chapter, I extend these preliminary observations about where his cultural exemplarity as sexualized male author can be discovered: (1) in his use of the two metaphorical economies; (2) in eroticized discussions of poetry in his correspondence with older male friends; and (3) in the literal and figurative function of Pope’s head and groin when they were publicly associated with his writing.

Sexual matters were often located by Pope at the site of creativity and in commentary about the poetical character, where ideas of the eroticized male body and genital urges were significant adjuncts of how he imagined the nature of his own poetic inspiration and output. Two brief examples will illustrate. First, in his earliest letter to the aging William Wycherley, the sixteen-year-old Pope applied a traditional reproductive trope to the poetical character, using the well-worn association of mental creativity with birthing: “True Wit,” he writes, “may be defin’d a Justness of Thought, and a Facility of Expression; or (in the Midwives phrase) a perfect Conception, with an easy Delivery.”²⁸ Second, in the summer of 1707, when he was nineteen, Pope addressed and mailed a verse epistle to his friend Henry Cromwell (London dandy and rake, cousin of Oliver, and nearly thirty years older than the young poet). The poem was published piratically by Edmund Curll in his Miscellanea (postdated 1727, but published in 1726) and then again in 1735 in his unauthorized Mr. Pope’s Literary Correspondence, although Pope never acknowledged it as his own. Humorously distinguishing himself from the poetasters whose rhymes would offend the hard-of-hearing Cromwell, the teenaged Alexander makes his mock-humble case, comparing himself to one Pentlow, who was, according to Curll’s 1735 note, “A Gamester remarkable for his Virile Parts, which he us’d to be fond of Shewing”:

I hope, you think me none of those

Who shew their Parts as Pentlow does,

I but lug out to one or two

Such Friends, if such there are, as you. (Corr. 1: 26, 12 or 13 July 1707)

In this cheeky analogy, questions of manliness, friendship, and poetry are tumbled into an outrageous scenario of Pope’s well-hung wit which is lugged out only for close male friends who can appreciate the difference between small and large Wits, between “remarkable … Virile Parts” promiscuously displayed to all or privately unbuttoned for friends only. The lines contain a bawdy and impolite mélange of penises, wit, male friends, genital exhibitionism, and an implied hierarchy within male literary communities. Together, both examples reflect in their different ways a convergence of masculinity, homosocial relations, sexuality, and cultural constructions of male creativity. One can approach these metaphors as instances of Pope’s personal difference, marshaling biographical facts which link the sexual content of the tropes to his impoverished sex life, unfortunate physical limitations, unmarried status, or other aspects of his apparent marginalization; and of course about the uniqueness of Pope in many of these respects there can be little doubt.²⁹ But I want to suggest that what we often view as most unique about Pope can also be understood as intensified or exaggerated symptoms of underlying cultural structures. The two deployments above are of course intimately tied to Pope’s idiosyncratic interest in matters sexual—both his lifelong penchant for erotic subject matter as well as his heterosexual disappointments as he aged—but they are not wholly exclusive to Pope, being also representative of similar rhetorical equations used by his contemporaries.

This fortuitous convergence of the biographically unique but culturally exemplary Pope is most helpfully present in the ways he located his eroticized creativity in the homosocial context of male friends, especially in his teens and early twenties. As is now generally accepted, the story about Pope and poetry and sex goes far beyond his experience of heterosexual fantasies and disappointments, and must include discussion of relationships with the men he loved—usually older men (Caryll senior, Garth, Wycherley, Walsh, Trumbull, Cromwell) who offered the young poet another context through which the male creativity-sexuality conjunction would be voiced. In these relationships we can see an older model of masculinity dependent on rank and reputation, one in which young Alexander’s entries into manhood and the public realm of male authorship were interconnected. The patronizing and protective milieu of older male friends provided the young poet a means of approaching a world of manly competence at a time when his adolescent sex-drive was beginning to be linked closely to his budding literary ambitions. Aspects of male friendship, that is, compensated the absence of wife or lover, but they also affected the ways Pope understood his creativity as a sexualized energy. And in the male culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—when Pope grew up and entered the republic of letters—the power relations and social hierarchy which were so important to collective notions of both manliness and male authorial stature were often characterized by eroticized metaphors and narratives, part of an older cultural model of male friendship which encouraged sexualized locutions and gestures of narrative transvestism between men. Writers of Pope’s day incorporated certain of these epicoene and homosocial elements in their self-conscious remarks about male creativity and in allegories about the poetical character. One result can be seen in sometimes elaborate figurative gesturing and eroticized rhetorical flourishes, as in the following letter to Pope (in his early twenties) from the older Cromwell, who explains that Wycherley feels particular affection for Pope—whom he has not seen for some time—and is keen to receive his young friend:

Mr. Wycherley has, I believe, sent you two or three letters of invitation; but you, like the Fair, will be long sollicited before you yield, to make the favour the more acceptable to the Lover. He is much yours by his talk; for that unbounded Genius which has rang’d at large like a libertine, now seems confin’d to you: and I shou’d take him for your Mistress too by your simile of the Sun and Earth [i.e., in an earlier letter, Pope said that he was to Wycherley as the earth to the sun: “the Earth … is clearer, or gloomier, just as the Sun is brighter, or more overcast”]: ’Tis very fine, but inverted by the application; for the gaiety of your fancy, and the drooping of his by the withdrawing of your lustre, perswades me it wou’d be juster by the reverse. Oh happy Favourite of the Muses! how per-noctare, all night long with them? but alas! you do but toy, but skirmish with them, and decline a close Engagement. (Corr. 1: 136, 7 December 1711)

Cromwell’s epistolary wit may be exaggerated, combining an older rhetorical posturing with the locker-room strut of the libertine, but the passage contains a typical intersection of discursive elements which shaped collective constructions of male creativity. First, the beloved male friend as mistress or female lover, here twice used—initially, Wycherley the lusty libertine returning to his lover, the feminized Pope; then Wycherley-as-Mistress to the masculinized but stand-offish Pope. Second, the male writer as phallus-poet, as sexual favorite of the female Muses—here, the endless staying power of poet-Pope is flatteringly presented as a copulatory tease. Third, a clear articulation of masculine hierarchy, with Wycherley (in his early seventies) given preeminence as older male to feminized mistress-Pope, but the younger poet’s brilliant wit still acknowledged.

What we are seeing here are revealing aspects of the male literary community into which Pope sought entry, and of the ways he experienced the reception of his poetic creativity as an eroticized feature of masculinity and its hierarchies. For Wycherley and his contemporaries, poetic energies and ambitions were effortlessly coupled with a variety of libidinal analogies and sexual tropes, thus encouraging an epicoene banter between males when they talked about their authorship or writing. For young Pope, these discursive repertories must have provided some compensation for his increasingly doubtful heterosexual accomplishments, but they also reinforced the connection of his poetry to his masculinity, sexual competence, and relative position in a male hierarchy. Homosociality, sex, and the poetical character converged again and again in Pope’s early exchanges about his own poetic practice, as they do in this example, providing us an important glimpse into the historical conjunction of male creativity and masculinity. But while the status of young Alexander’s auspicious wit was subject to the power dynamics of rank and homosocial connections, his stature as a male would also be heightened by an impressive literary debut whose genius was metaphorized as a type of manliness or a potent form of sexual energy. My point about this kind of evidence is that Pope’s early career especially reflects an older model of masculinity as reputation and rank, and that his exchanges with other men underscore the importance of homosocial contexts within which a sexualized male creativity was fashioned and articulated.

Finally, as exemplary of sexualized male creativity, Pope’s body was turned into a commodity, an item for sale and also a symbolic imaging of his creativity. Although we are more accustomed, perhaps, to thinking of this gifted hunchback as sadly unique or unfortunately deformed, in fact Pope’s dwarfed body and literary fame became emblems of the new marketplace of letters. Helen Deutsch has shrewdly described the complex interface of Pope’s body and his authorial power, and of the textual struggle to control representations of the relationship of his deformity and poetry. Describing Pope’s references to his own deformed body as a kind of pre-emptive strike against a public pruriently keen about the connections between physical deformity and human character, Deutsch reminds us that “the market for Pope’s poetry was inseparable from a thriving market for images of the poet. Portraying Pope was something of a national pastime.” In a capitalist market where physical images of Pope’s head and ideas of his body were of interest to consumers, the poet waged “war with a contemporary reading (and lampooning) public … for the power of self-representation,” and he did so not by trying “to write himself out of his body, rather he silences his audience by making his body visible.”³⁰ G. S. Rousseau has more recently argued how Pope must have painfully felt the parallels of his own deficient body to the castrato of Italian opera—symbol of both feminized sexual deficiency and of a commercial star-culture in the burgeoning world of consumerist leisure: “opera’s sexual symbols and … its sexual politics … particularly spoke to the dwarfish Pope of impaired genitals who saw, or was forced to see, himself reflected in its eunuchs and castrati.”³¹ Deutsch and Rousseau both recognize the powerful connections among Pope’s body, creativity and market forces, reading his literal and symbolic deformity in poems and letters as acts of controlled self-exposure, over-compensation, internalized self-hatred, or masculine self-possession. But to these eloquent readings of Pope’s body and culture I want to add that associations of his physical condition and creativity, especially later in his life, were used publicly by others to gain profit or fame in ways that suggest the newer model of masculinity as sexualized interiority. The head and groin of Alexander the Little, that is, served as an exemplary association of the male mind as sexualized body; and in turn, the public conjunction of his poetry and penis also represented the commercialization of the association itself, the commodification of the discourse equating male sexuality and creativity.

And indeed Pope’s head and groin were used variously by others for profit. In the summer of 1735 when Edmund Curll moved his printing shop to Rose Street in Covent Garden, his new shop sign was “Pope’s Head,” a sarcastic business gesture signaling the wily Curll’s commercial investment in his enemy, whose head represented a significant source of Curll’s profit. But the most famous example came in 1742, when Cibber’s published account of a sordid whorehouse visit was followed quickly by several engravings and other pamphlet satires. Cibber’s comic tribunal brought Pope’s penis into the public glare—as did rumors of his urinary stricture—throwing into relief the cultural linkage of male genitalia and male creativity as interrelated print-culture commodities. I can think of no author before Pope whose poetic stature, reputation, and accomplishment were publicly imaged as questions about his privy members, with public speculation about the actual condition of his yard. Having tried all his life, not always successfully, to control images of his physicality, the ailing Pope was now faced with the prospect that his public image as poet, as a man, would be contaminated and rent by a crude equation with his pego. In a literary-historical moment of unusual spectacularization, the literal and figurative cultural connections of male genitalia and male creativity were made clear, and publicly situated on the body of England’s best-known poet. More dramatically than other writers in the period 1650–1750, Pope is exemplary of the double commodification of the “manly” and the “literary” as yard.