Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose

elevated note is sustained in the fifth line to be punctured in the sixth by a zeugma and neat antithesis as statesmen foredoom ...

Such moments as these, however, are rare in the poem as a whole for Pope views the objects of his satire with genial good humour ...

Some with pomatams paints and slops And ointments good for scabby chops. (ll. 19–22, 33–6) The advice of Clarissa had been good- ...

Johnson’s description a mind ‘active, ambitious and adventurous, always investigating always aspiring’, conceived the ambitious ...

brings to bear a traditional perspective upon the new science of his day. Pope is sometimes thought of as the poet of the Enligh ...

in which wit is not indulged in to delight itself but is subject to restraint and serves a moral purpose. In pursuit of such an ...

Observes how much a chintz exceeds mohair! Forbid it, Heaven, a favour or a debt She e’er should cancel... Safe is your secret s ...

declamatory tirade which is deliberately indiscriminate and extreme (for he has not a good word for any member of the sex) and i ...

To defend himself against attacks made upon his satire in The Moral Essays, Pope turned directly to his Roman predecessor in The ...

Horace, but perfectly adapted to the requirements of his own defence in 1733 (ll. 55–70). And when Horace later points out that ...

Epistle I, i (imitated by Pope and included here) he dedicates himself late in life to the task of achieving wisdom, but recogni ...

Some admirers of his earlier poetry felt that he was now cultivating the least attractive of the Muses. Others thought satire un ...

times in which he lived. In his Life, Johnson, while admiring Pope’s art and applauding his genius, does not gloss over what he ...

Even the best lives are deceptive: Unthought-of frailties cheat us in the wise. (l. 128) This is part of the more general puzzle ...

and humbled Milton’s strains’ (IV, 212), the formidable classical scholar and Master of Trinity.^31 Here is Bentley’s comment on ...

3 ibid., p. 407. 4 ibid., p. 520. The selection from volume two covers pp. 508–20. The comment on An Essay on Man cited above co ...

25 From a letter to John Murray, 1821; see Bateson and Joukovsky, pp. 203–4. 26 An adaptation of Pope’s lines on Timon in the ‘E ...

Select Bibliography THE LIFE AND BACKGROUND Greene, Donald (1970) The Age of Exuberance. Backgrounds to Eighteenth-Century Engli ...

Goldgar, Bertrand A. (ed.) (1965) Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope, Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press. A useful c ...

Allusion, Oxford: Clarendon Press; paperback, 1968. A lively and wide-ranging book written for the general reader relating Pope’ ...