Though the Dunciad was first published anonymously in Dublin , its authorship was not in doubt. Pope pilloried a host of other "hacks", "scribblers" and "dunces" in addition to Theobald, and Maynard Mack has accordingly called its publication "in many ways the greatest act of folly in Pope's life. It brought the poet in his own time the hostility of its victims and their sympathizers, who pursued him implacably from then on with a few damaging truths and a host of slanders and lies.
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According to his half-sister Magdalen Rackett, some of Pope's targets were so enraged by The Dunciad that they threatened him. Although he was a keen participant in the stock and money markets, Pope never missed an opportunity to satirise the personal, social and political effects of the new scheme of things. From The Rape of the Lock onwards, these satirical themes are a constant in his work. In , Pope published his "Epistle to Burlington ," on the subject of architecture, the first of four poems which would later be grouped under the title Moral Essays — In the epistle, Pope ridiculed the bad taste of the aristocrat "Timon.
Though the charge was untrue, it did Pope a great deal of damage. An Essay on Man is a philosophical poem, written in heroic couplets and published between and Pope intended this poem to be the centrepiece of a proposed system of ethics that was to be put forth in poetic form. It was a piece of work that Pope intended to make into a larger work; however, he did not live to complete it. The poem is an attempt to "vindicate the ways of God to Man", a variation on Milton's attempt in Paradise Lost to "justify the ways of God to Man" 1.
It challenges as prideful an anthropocentric world-view. The poem is not solely Christian, however; it makes an assumption that man has fallen and must seek his own salvation. It consists of four epistles that are addressed to Lord Bolingbroke. Pope presents an idea on his view of the Universe; he says that no matter how imperfect, complex, inscrutable and disturbing the Universe appears to be, it functions in a rational fashion according to the natural laws. The natural laws consider the Universe as a whole a perfect work of God. To humans it appears to be evil and imperfect in many ways; however, Pope points out that this is due to our limited mindset and limited intellectual capacity.
Pope gets the message across that humans must accept their position in the "Great Chain of Being" which is at a middle stage between the angels and the beasts of the world. If we are able to accomplish this then we potentially could lead happy and virtuous lives.
The poem is an affirmative poem of faith: In Pope's world, God exists and is what he centers the Universe around in order to have an ordered structure. The limited intelligence of man can only take in tiny portions of this order and can experience only partial truths, hence man must rely on hope which then leads into faith. Man must be aware of his existence in the Universe and what he brings to it, in terms of riches, power, and fame. It is man's duty to strive to be good regardless of other situations: The Imitations of Horace followed — These were written in the popular Augustan form of the "imitation" of a classical poet, not so much a translation of his works as an updating with contemporary references.
Pope used the model of Horace to satirise life under George II , especially what he regarded as the widespread corruption tainting the country under Walpole's influence and the poor quality of the court's artistic taste. Pope also added a wholly original poem, An Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot , as an introduction to the "Imitations". It reviews his own literary career and includes the famous portraits of Lord Hervey " Sporus " and Addison "Atticus". In he wrote the Universal Prayer. After , Pope wrote little.
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He toyed with the idea of composing a patriotic epic in blank verse called Brutus , but only the opening lines survive. His major work in these years was revising and expanding his masterpiece The Dunciad. Book Four appeared in , and a complete revision of the whole poem in the following year.
In this version, Pope replaced the "hero", Lewis Theobald, with the poet laureate Colley Cibber as "king of dunces". But the real focus of the revised poem is Walpole and all his works. By now Pope's health, which had never been good, was failing.
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When told by his physician, on the morning of his death, that he was better, Pope replied: He was buried in the nave of St Mary's Church, Twickenham. Pope had been fascinated by Homer since childhood. In , he announced his plans to publish a translation of the Iliad. The work would be available by subscription, with one volume appearing every year over the course of six years. His translation of the Iliad appeared between and It was acclaimed by Samuel Johnson as "a performance which no age or nation could hope to equal" although the classical scholar Richard Bentley wrote: Pope, but you must not call it Homer.
Encouraged by the success of the Iliad , Pope published a translation of the Odyssey in with the help of William Broome and Elijah Fenton. Broome translated eight books 2, 6, 8, 11, 12, 16, 18, 23 , Fenton four 1, 4, 19, 20 and Pope the remaining 12; Broome provided the annotations.
It did some damage to Pope's reputation for a time, but not to his profits. In this period, Pope was also employed by the publisher Jacob Tonson to produce an opulent new edition of Shakespeare. When it finally appeared, in , this edition silently "regularised" Shakespeare's metre and rewrote his verse in a number of places.
Pope also demoted about lines of Shakespearean material to footnotes, arguing that they were so "excessively bad" that Shakespeare could never have written them. Other lines were excluded from the edition altogether. In , the lawyer, poet and pantomime deviser Lewis Theobald published a scathing pamphlet called Shakespeare Restored , which catalogued the errors in Pope's work and suggested a number of revisions to the text.
The second edition of Pope's Shakespeare appeared in , but aside from making some minor revisions to the preface, it seems that Pope had little to do with it. Most later 18th-century editors of Shakespeare dismissed Pope's creatively motivated approach to textual criticism. Pope's preface, however, continued to be highly rated. It was suggested that Shakespeare's texts were thoroughly contaminated by actors' interpolations and they would influence editors for most of the 18th century.
By the midth century new fashions in poetry emerged. A decade after Pope's death, Joseph Warton claimed that Pope's style of poetry was not the most excellent form of the art. The Romantic movement that rose to prominence in early 19th-century England was more ambivalent towards his work. Though Lord Byron identified Pope as one of his chief influences believing his scathing satire of contemporary English literature English Bards and Scotch Reviewers to be a continuance of Pope's tradition , William Wordsworth found Pope's style fundamentally too decadent a representation of the human condition.
In the 20th century Pope's reputation was revived.
Pope's work was, of course, full of references to the people and places of his time, and these aided people's understanding of the past. The postwar period stressed the power of Pope's poetry, recognising that Pope's immersion in Christian and Biblical culture lent depth to his poetry. For example, Maynard Mack, the great Pope scholar of the mid- to late twentieth century, argued that Pope's moral vision demanded as much respect as his technical excellence.
In the years — the definitive Twickenham edition of Pope's poems was published in ten volumes, including an index volume. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Not to be confused with Pope Alexander. At the… More about Alexander Pope. The Alley Earl of Dorset: Artemisia Earl of Dorset: Gay Mary Gulliver to Capt. To a Lady Epistle to Dr. Poems A beautiful hardcover Pocket Poets selection of the works of Alexander Pope, the greatest English poet of his age.
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Alexander Pope
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