Eighteenth Century English Poetry

Nalini Jain, John Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780745016078
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315504711
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This anthology of 18th-century English poetry is extensively annotated for a new generation of readers. It combines the scope of a period anthology with the detailed annotations of an authoritative single-author edition. Selected poets include John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope and William Cowper. The guiding principle of the annotation is one of thoroughness: the editors concentrate on works where the meanings have changed, on primary allusions and on relevant details of social and political history.

ALEXANDER POPE

(1688–1744)

The literary career of Alexander Pope can be divided into three parts. Precocious in his youth, he established himself as probably the foremost poet of his generation well before he was 30, producing in this period such works as An Essay on Criticism (1711), Windsor-Forest (1713) and The Rape of the Lock (1712 & 1714). Having made his name as a poet, he turned to translating Homer, a task which occupied him for thirteen years (1713–26) during which he wrote very little original work. With Homer finally out of the way, he entered the third stage of his career with the publication of the first Dunciad in 1728 within days of his fortieth birthday. In his remaining years, he wrote most of his finest poetry, including the revised Dunciad (1742), the Epistles to Several Persons (1731–5), the Imitations of Horace (1733–8), to which series Arbuthnot belongs, and the philosophical Essay on Man (1732–4).

Although a highly successful poet and the friend of many of the most prominent men and women of his age, Pope remained always something of an outsider. Tuberculosis of the spine, contracted when he was a child, left him stunted, deformed, and the victim of precarious health throughout his life. His religion also tended to cut him off from his contemporaries for he was a Roman Catholic, which meant that he was excluded from public office, from university education and from residence in London. Finally, he spent his last years as a bitter opponent of Robert Walpole’s administration and of what he saw as the general drift of society away from its traditional values.

Pope’s reputation as a poet declined rather drastically with the rise of Romanticism at the end of his century, and although many readers in our century have found much to admire in his work, his standing is probably still less high than it was in his own day.

Further Reading

The standard edition of Pope’s poetry is the eleven-volume Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope edited by John Butt and others (London: Methuen, 1939–69). Good single-volume editions are also available, among them a condensed version of the Twickenham edition. Herbert Davis’s Pope: Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966) provides reliable texts, and early as well as late editions of The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad. Rather less authoritative, but still usable and cheap, is Bonamy Dobrée’s Alexander Pope: Collected Poems (London: J.M. Dent, 1924). The editors also wish to acknowledge use of the following: Francis Howes’ translation of Horace, Epistle VI, in The Complete Works, ed. C.J. Kraemer (New York: Random House, 1936); H. Caplan’s translation of Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herrenium (London: Heinemann, 1936); B. Radice’s translation of Pliny, Epistles (London: Heinemann, 1942); H.E. Butler’s translation of Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria (London: Heinemann, 1920); and Niall Rudd’s translation, The Satires of Horace and Persius (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).

The standard biography is Maynard Mack’s Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Pope’s poetry has been more thoroughly discussed by modern critics than that of any other writer in this volume. Geoffrey Tillotson’s On the Poetry of Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938) is still useful, and Reuben Brower’s Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (London: Oxford University Press, 1959) remains an essential statement of the poet’s method. A comprehensive account of the poetry is also attempted, though perhaps less successfully, by David B. Morris, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). Dustin H. Griffin’s interesting book, Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), considers the self-expressive qualities of Pope’s poetry, while Laura Brown’s Alexander Pope (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985) is one of a number of attempts to read it in the light of recent critical theory. A valuable introductory account of the late satires is provided by Peter Dixon, The World of Pope’s Satires: An Introduction to the Epistles’ and ‘Imitations of Horace’ (London: Methuen, 1968).

Articles on all aspects of Pope are legion. One of the most influential, which focuses upon the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot in order to make a general point, is Maynard Mack’s ‘The Muse of Satire’, Yale Review 41 (1950–1): 80–92. The new student is perhaps best advised to turn to collections of essays in order to gain a sense of different critical perspectives. John Dixon Hunt’s The Rape of the Lock: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1968) is still useful, as are Maynard Mack (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1964), and Maynard Mack and James A. Winn (eds), Pope: Recent Essays by Several Hands (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1980). A sense of how Pope has been differently regarded in different periods is provided by John Barnard (ed.), Pope: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). The editors are indebted to John Butt’s The Poems of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647–80)
• John Dryden (1631–1700)
• Matthew Prior (1664–1721)
• Isaac Watts (1674–1748)
• Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
• Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720)
• Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
• John Gay (1685–1732)
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762)
• Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
• James Thomson (1700–48)
• Samuel Johnson (1709–84)
• Charles Wesley (1707–88)
• Thomas Gray (1716–71)
• William Collins (1721–59)
• Mary Leapor (1722–46)
• Christopher Smart (1722–71)
• Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74)
• George Crabbe (1754–1832)
• William Cowper (1731–1800)
• Index of Titles and First Lines