Book Description

Alexander Pope was the foremost poet of early eighteenth-century England, but he was also a prolific prose writer. This anthology is intended to make Pope's major prose work more widely available. It includes the critical prefaces to his own work, to Homer, and to Shakespeare; the mock-critical treatises, A Key to the Lock and The Art of Sinking in Poetry which deride the poetry and criticism of Pope's opponents, and raise important questions about the principles of writing and interpretation; maliciously comic pamphlets attacking John Dervis, Stephen Duck, Edmund Curll, and Lord Hervey; and a selection from Pope's wide-ranging correspondence, which illustrates his genius for friendship, and his opinions on literature, politics, and religion. The volume complements the critical and moral concerns of Pope's poetry, documenting the controversies in which he was continuously engaged. Pope emerges as a gifted critic and a complex mixture of integrity and deviousness, a man concerned both for the culture of his day and for his public image.