Complete Works of Alexander Pope: Illustrated

• Book ID: 126204338
• Publisher: Delphi Classics
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 445 KB
• Category: Standards

✦ Synopsis

Alexander Pope was one of the most estimable poets and satirists of the English Augustan period, best known for his poems An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), The Dunciad (1728), and An Essay on Man (1733–34). He is one of the most epigrammatic of all English authors. Pope was a precocious boy, eagerly reading Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, which he managed to teach himself, and an incessant scribbler, turning out verse upon verse in imitation of the poets he read. The best of these early writings are the "Ode on Solitude" and a paraphrase of St. Thomas à Kempis, both of which he claimed to have written at age 12.

Pope's favourite metre was the 10-syllable iambic pentameter rhyming (heroic) couplet. He handled it with increasing skill and adapted it to such varied purposes as the epigrammatic summary of An Essay on Criticism, the pathos of "Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady," the mock heroic of The Rape of the Lock, the discursive tones of An Essay on Man, the rapid narrative of the Homer translation, and the Miltonic sublimity of the conclusion of The Dunciad. But his greatest triumphs of versification are found in the "Epilogue to the Satires," where he moves easily from witty, spirited dialogue to noble and elevated declamation, and in "An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," which opens with a scene of domestic irritation suitably conveyed in broken rhythm and closes with a deliberately chosen contrast of domestic calm, which the poet may be said to have deserved and won during the course of the poem.

Pope's command of diction is no less happily adapted to his theme and to the type of poem, and the range of his imagery is remarkably wide. He has been thought defective in imaginative power, but this opinion cannot be sustained in view of the invention and organizing ability shown notably in The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad. He was the first English poet to enjoy contemporary fame in France and Italy and throughout the European continent and to see translations of his poems into modern as well as ancient languages.

CONTENTS:

The Poetry Collections
EARLY POEMS
PASTORALS
WINDSOR FOREST
AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM
POEMS, 1708–17
THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
ELOISA TO ABELARD
POEMS: 1718–27
THE CURLL MISCELLANIES
POEMS SUGGESTED BY GULLIVER
LATER POEMS
EPIGRAMS AND EPITAPHS
AN ESSAY ON MAN
MORAL ESSAYS
SATIRES
THE DUNCIAD
THE ILIAD
THE ODYSSEY

The Poems
LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Play
THREE HOURS AFTER MARRIAGE by John Gay, Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot

The Biographies
ALEXANDER POPE by Leslie Stephen
THE AGE OF POPE by John Dennis
BRIEF LIFE OF POPE by Thomas De Quincey

✦ Subjects

Биографии и Мемуары