The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Pope, Alexander

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140423508 ISBN 13: 9780140423501

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2011

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0140423508
• ISBN 13: 9780140423501
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 528
• Editor: Damrosch Leo