Either way, Swift and Dryden don’t look to be convincing sources for Pope’s durable phrase. Is it from Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, which Swift had by heart, or did Pope get it from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, or from a sermon by Donne or Jeremy Taylor, or from John Locke? (“Locke’s reasoning may indeed be said to pervade every part of the Essay on Criticism,” writes Courthope, another nineteenth-century Pope commentator.) And, more elementarily — before we get too carried away in our snuffing for sources — what exactly does the word “lumber” mean in Pope’s poetry, and in poetry generally? Do we really understand what Pope has in mind, metaphorically, when he refers to “Loads of Learned Lumber”? What might these loads look like? Edwin Abbott’s Concordance to the Works of Alexander Pope (1875) helpfully gives, in addition to the “learned” line, three later settings for “lumber,” all from The Dunciad, two of which employ the word nominatively, in the relevant anti-pedantic sense:
Lumber
.
Dropt the dull
l
of the Latin store
D
iv. 319
With loads of learned
l
in his head
E. C
613
Thy giddy Dulness still shall
l.
on D
iii. 294
A
l.-house
of books in ev’ry head D
iii. 193
Edwin A. Abbott writes, in his introduction to the concordance his father compiled, “I venture to commend the following pages to all those who wish to be able to know at any moment how Pope used any English word in his Original Poems.” And who would not want to know at any moment how Pope, of all poets — one of the most skilled word-pickers and word-packers in literary history — used any English word? Who does not feel an inarticulate burble of gratitude toward the senior Mr. Abbott (1808–1882; headmaster of the Philological School, Marylebone) for the enormous manual labor he expended in copying and sorting Pope’s lines, creating a book that, though few will read it cover to cover, selflessly paves the sophomore’s strait path to pedantry? Concordances are true triumphs of what Michael Gruber, a pseudonymous thriller writer and marine biologist, recently called “siftware”8—they are quote verifiers and search engines that in an ardent inquirer’s hands sometimes turn up poetical secrets that the closest of close readings would not likely uncover.9
But grateful though we must always be to Edwin Abbott, the truth is that in the case of lumber, at least, his grand Victorian concordance fails us — fails us because it indexes only from the revised, final version of The Dunciad (1743). It does not include a more revealing use of lumber that appears in the first, and at times superior, Dunciad of 1728.
The searcher will find this particular couplet, though, in the beautiful, blue Concordance to the Poems of Alexander Pope, in two volumes, by Emmett Bedford and Robert Dilligan, produced in 1974 with the help of a Univac 1108 and an IBM 370 computer, using optically scanned microfilm images of the Twickenham edition.10 Alternatively, you can find the couplet that Abbott omitted as I first found it, by peering into the greatest lumber-room, or lumber-ROM, ever constructed: the all-powerful, manually keyed English Poetry Full-Text Database, released in June of 1994 on four silver disks the size of Skilsaw blades by the prodigious Eel of Science himself, Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey.
Chadwyck-Healey’s forces are responsible for a variety of CD-ROM power-tools: they have brought us the National Security Archive Index of previously classified documents; the catalog of the British Library to 1975; full texts of The Economist, The Times, The Guardian, Il Sole 24 Ore, and works of African-American literature; indexes of periodicals, films, music, and French theses; the full text of the nine-volume Grand Robert de la Langue Française; United Nations records indexed or in full text, auction records, Hansard’s record of the House of Commons, a world climate disk, and British census data; all 221 volumes of Migne’s Patrologia Latina; on and on. But nothing can remotely compare, in range and depth and tantric power, with their English Poetry Database, which promises, and moreover delivers, something like 4,500 volumes of liquidly, intimately friskable poetry by 1,350 poets who wrote between A.D. 600 and 1900.
Not that it is all English poetry: “all” is a meaningless word to use in connection with so sprawling a domain. “Nowhere in our publicity do we say that we are including every poem ever written or published in the English language,” writes Alison Moss, Chadwyck-Healey’s editorial director, in a news-letter; and the project consciously sidestepped certain squishy areas: American poetry, drama, verse annuals and miscellanies (with some important exceptions), and poems by writers not listed or cross-referenced as poets in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The project’s heavy reliance on this last-mentioned work has led to some puzzling exclusions. While the English Poetry Database includes a truly astounding and thrilling number of minor poems by minor poets, it is unreliable in its coverage of minor poems, and in some cases major poems, by major prose writers.
“I shall not insult you by insinuating that you do not remember Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in the top margin of page 37 of his teaching copy of Madame Bovary11; but Walter Scott’s poem is not to be found in the English Poetry Database.12 The poem by the nineteenth-century Erewhon-man, Samuel Butler, about a plaster cast of a Greek discus-thrower kept prudishly in storage,
Stowed away in a Montreal lumber room
The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face to the wall
is not in the Database, even though it was good enough for Auden’s Oxford Book of Light Verse and for a number of editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. (Inexplicably, Bartlett’s doesn’t index it under “lumber” or “room” in the current edition, as it has in the past, but it is still stowed away in there.) George Meredith is listed as a mid-nineteenth-century novelist in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature and not cross-referenced as a poet, so none of his poetry is on Chadwyck-Healey’s disks, though Meredith is part of nearly every anthology of Victorian poetry. Benjamin Disraeli’s blank-verse epic, called The Revolutionary Epic, conceived, according to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, as a “companion to the Iliad, the Divina Commedia, and Paradise Lost,” was skipped over by the databasers, evidently simply because Disraeli is classed as a novelist; while five poems by his less famous father, author of Curiosities of Literature, made the grade, including these lines from the end of “A Defence of Poetry” addressed to James Pye, the poet laureate: