(1728) Literary Theory Established by the English poet and critic Alexander Pope (1688–1744), parodying Longinus’s On the Sublime (1st century AD).
A mishandled attempt at an elevated style, flopping from a rhetorical height to a ludicrous anticlimax.
A Pope, Peri Bathous: Or, Martinus Scriblerus, His Treatise Of the Art of Sinking in Poetry [1728], The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, R Cowler, ed., vol II (Oxford, 1986), 171–276
RF