Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose

(Tina Meador) #1

‘Imitation of Horace’ addressed to Bolingbroke c. 1737. Pope
published his Works in 1717 and took up the task again in



  1. Temperamentally he was a perfectionist, as an artist his
    method was perpetually to refine his first thoughts (see
    Critical commentary, pp. 218–23), and as a professional man
    of letters he had an intense concern for his reputation. All
    these factors led him to take an active interest in successive
    editions of his poems, which he constantly revised.
    Sometimes the changes are major. The Rape of the Lock
    was expanded from two to five cantos between the first and
    second editions, and the speech of Clarissa in canto V was not
    added until 1717. The ‘Epistle to a lady’ was considerably
    expanded in later editions. The Dunciad was radically
    rewritten with a new hero and the addition of a fourth book
    in 1743.
    In most other poems there are some changes, and even
    though the general reader might consider the majority of
    them to be minor, since these later revisions have usually been
    incorporated into the text, it should be borne in mind that the
    dates of composition and publication given after each poem
    cannot be taken as absolute.
    In his own arrangement of the poems, Pope did not follow
    a strict chronological plan, but grouped together, for example,
    the Epistles to Several Persons (later to be called The Moral
    Essays) and The Imitations of Horace without regard to dates
    of publication. Editors have generally followed his example
    here. The order of the poems in this selection is the traditional
    one, roughly but not strictly chronological. Readers assessing
    the shape of Pope’s career should note that, although all the
    extracts from The Dunciad are placed at the end of this
    volume since they are taken from the substantially revised
    edition of 1743, the first Dunciad appeared in 1728 not long
    after the completion of the Homer translation.
    In his last years and in declining health Pope fell under the
    influence of William Warburton, who prevailed upon him to
    make changes in some of his texts and whom Pope made his
    literary executor. After the poet’s death, Warburton published
    an influential edition of his Works in 1751. The influence of
    Warburton on the text of Pope has only recently been
    unscrambled by the editors of the Twickenham edition, which

Free download pdf