Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose

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Notes ODE ON SOLITUDE Pope said that he wrote this poem when he was not yet 12 years old. The first copy dates from 1709 and the ...

The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, vol. I, pp. 149–50 and pp. 159–60. The poems were first printed in 1730, the second having ...

35 Waller Edmund Waller (1606–87) often regarded as a precursor of the Augustans in his management of the heroic couplet. 47 cou ...

reputed to have started upon an historical poem before reverting to myth in the Aeneid which, loosely based upon the Odyssey (I– ...

361 Denham...Waller Sir John Denham (1615–69) and Edmund Waller (1606–87) often called precursors of the major Augustans because ...

552 Titans giants who rebelled against the rule of Olympian Zeus, here representing deistic writers who were often thought of as ...

the Roman empire) and the medieval inheritance (here associated with monkish ignorance). 693 Erasmus Desiderius Erasmus of Rotte ...

whom Pope submitted his early work for comment and who put Pope on the road to ‘correctness’. EPISTLE TO MISS BLOUNT WITH THE WO ...

from WINDSOR FOREST The poem was first written in 1704 and substantially revised in the year 1713 when it was published just bef ...

1642 containing the celebrated lines on the Thames which in their arrangement and sense represent an ideal to which the Augustan ...

expanded the poem adding the divine machinery, and in 1717 the speech of Clarissa in canto V in response to criticism that the p ...

today; see III, 27ff, below. This couplet recalls Virgil’s description of the classical underworld as translated by Dryden (Aene ...

105 Diana’s law Diana was the goddess of chastity. 113 drops diamond ear-rings. 119 seven-fold fence Shields in epic are invaria ...

106 berries coffee berries, first roasted then ground. 107 shining altars of Japan lacquered tables. 110 China’s earth porcelain ...

71 airy horns horns, a conventional image suggesting adultery; airy because they are imaginary here. 82 Ulysses Homer’s hero who ...

messenger of the gods; Jove’s weapon is the thunderbolt; Neptune is god of the sea and causes earthquakes; the pale ghosts inhab ...

136 Rosamonda’s lake a pond in St James’s Park. 137 Partridge the absurd John Partridge, a contemporary astrologer who repeatedl ...

his pupils. She has just come upon a letter talking of their love written by Abelard to a third person. 20 horrid bristling. 64 ...

extract, unless otherwise stated, are those given by Pope himself to the books from which the extracts have been taken. from the ...