Matthew Prior's Alma: Affecting the Metaphysics

This essay provides the first full descriptive and analytical account since 1946 of Matthew Prior's poem Alma: or The Progress of the Mind (1719), which Alexander Pope described as a master-piece'. Connections are developed between Prior's use of effervescent figures of speech and narrative tricks, and uses of figurative metaphysical language in Isaac Newton's Opticks, the Principia Mathematica, and the Leibniz-Clarke' controversy of 1715-1716. It emerges that the poem's main subject is figurative language and the arguments it serves. Alma is a very unusual critique of aspects of Newtonian thought, employing techniques of metaphysical' poetry to poke fun at Newtonian metaphysics.