The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings

The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings is a collection of Alexander Pope's greatest works, edited with an introduction by Leo Damrosch in Penguin Classics. 
 
Alexander Pope was the greatest English poet of his age, whose acerbic insights into human nature have entered the language, and whose verse still astonishes with its energy and inventiveness centuries after his death. This new selection of Pope's work follows the path of his poetic genius over his lifetime. It contains early poems including the masterly mock-epic 'The Rape of the Lock', which satirizes a notorious society scandal through glorious heroic couplets, the brilliantly aphoristic 'An Essay on Criticism' and excerpts from his translation of the Iliad. Later poems represented include Pope's ironic adaptations of Horace's Epistles, Satires and Odes, and the remarkable 'Dunciad', a stinging attack on his literary rivals and the mediocrity of Grub Street hacks. Here too are selected prose works and letters from Pope to his contemporaries such as John Gay and Jonathan Swift. 
 
This edition contains a wide-ranging introduction that elucidates Pope's life, poetic art and contemporary contexts, as well as separate introductions to each piece, a chronology, further reading, a biography and extensive notes. 
 
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was born in London in 1688, the son of a well-to-do Roman Catholic cloth merchant. In 1709 he launched his career with a set of four pastorals, followed by An Essay on Criticism, Windsor Forest and the mock-epic Rape of the Lock, which cemented his reputation as the greatest poet of the age. Later works included the Dunciad, Epistles to Several Persons and the ambitious Essay on Man. 
 
If you enjoyed The Rape of the Lock, you might like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, also available in Penguin Classics.

ALEXANDER POPE was born in London in 1688, the son of a well-to-do Roman Catholic cloth merchant. In 1709 he launched his career with a set of four pastorals, followed by An Essay on Criticism, Windsor Forest and the mock-epic Rape of the Lock, which cemented his reputation as the greatest poet of the age. Later works included the Dunciad, Epistles to Several Persons and the ambitious Essay on Man. Pope died in 1743. 
 
LEO DAMROSCH, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, is the author of eight books on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and culture, including The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope, God's Plot and Man's Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the greatest English poet of his age, whose acerbic insights into human nature have entered the language, and whose verse still astonishes with its energy and inventiveness centuries after his death. This new selection of Pope's work follows the path of his poetic genius over his lifetime. It contains early poems including the masterly mock-epic 'The Rape of the Lock', which satirizes a notorious society scandal through glorious heroic couplets, the brilliantly aphoristic 'An Essay on Criticism' and excerpts from his translation of the Iliad. Later poems represented include Pope's ironic adaptations of Horace's Epistles, Satires and Odes, and the remarkable 'Dunciad', a stinging attack on his literary rivals and the mediocrity of Grub Street hacks. Here too are selected prose works and letters from Pope to his contemporaries such as John Gay and Jonathan Swift.

The Rape of the Lock

'[It is] a whimsical piece of work...a sort of writing very like tickling' Alexander Pope

Brilliant... triumphant. Never has so great a poem emerged from so trivial a cause

Alexander Pope was born on 21 May 1688. He was brought up a Roman Catholic at a time where the laws of England were prejudicial towards Catholics. He suffered tuberculosis as a child and as a consequence never grew taller than 4'6". He first published The Rape of the Lock when he was twenty-three years old in 1712. Its success made him a celebrity in polite society. He later added to it in 1714 and 1717. It was written to reconcile two families who had fallen out over a similar incident where a Lord Petre had cut off a lock of hair from Arabella Fermor's head. Pope went on to translate the works of Homer and produce The Dunciad and An Essay on Man. He died on 30 May 1744.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SOPHIE GEE 
 
A hideous crime is committed at a fashionable London society gathering. The victim is the beautiful, innocent Belinda, her attacker is the dastardly Baron, and his weapon of choice is a pair of scissors... 
 
Pope's mock-epic is the sharp and witty tale of the most famous bad hair day in the history of literature.

Alexander Pope

Readers and writers today can't, of course, share Pope's certainties of taste. But we can apply some of his principles, the most important of which is, perhaps, that principles are necessary.

For us, satire is merely being rude about people, in the manner of Private Eye or Spitting Image. For Pope, satire meant not only denigrating some values, but suggesting what other values might stand in their place: George II is an idiot, but a good monarch would support the arts and literature as the emperor Augustus did. The key to Pope's art is the ideal of balance, and it is a mistake to isolate one moment without seeing how he brings a counter-element into play.... On a larger scale, Pope often uses an alternative way of thinking to create what later thinkers would call an epiphany.

As a young man Pope shot to fame with The Rape of the Lock, a light-hearted mock-heroic poem about a trivial society scandal, still his best remembered work. Wit and irony, dazzling technical mastery - he perfected the English heroic couplet - acute social observation and insight into human nature were to become the hallmarks of his verse. 
 
Pope is one of the most quoted of English poets - 'For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread', 'A little learning is a dangerous thing', 'To err is human, to forgive, divine', all originate from his pen. While his poetry generally has suffered some neglect in recent decades, Professor Claude Rawson's selection persuasively demonstrates why it should be back in fashion. 
 
He aspired to make out of verse satire a serious and dignified form, and his culminating work, The Dunciad, achieves a tragic gravity which transcends its satirical mockeries. An elevated and ironic reflection on culture, it created a new genre which led eventually to the modern masterpiece of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. 
 
Pope was a precocious talent and anxious to advertise the fact, inserting such subtitles as “Done by the Author at 12 years old” into his early published poems. He adopted many poetic forms, and this anthology includes graceful and witty lyrics, verse letters to friends in the Horatian mode, a number of devotional poems, and a variety of important discursive poems on literary and political themes, including An Essay on Criticism, Windsor-Forest, and An Essay on Man. 
 
This edition uses the text of the Oxford Standard Authors edition by Herbert Davis of Pope’s Poetical Works, 1966. Complete poems rather than excerpts have been selected. The beautifully typeset text is enhanced by illustrations by William Kent from the first edition of The Dunciad.

Alexander Pope Poems

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Alexander Pope

Praise for Alexander Pope Poems

Readers and writers today can't, of course, share Pope's certainties of taste. But we can apply some of his principles, the most important of which is, perhaps, that principles are necessary.

For us, satire is merely being rude about people, in the manner of Private Eye or Spitting Image. For Pope, satire meant not only denigrating some values, but suggesting what other values might stand i ...

Books by Alexander Pope

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