Alexander Pope: Selected Letters - Hardcover

Pope, Alexander

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198185650 ISBN 13: 9780198185659

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2000

Synopsis

Pope's letters are fascinating documents, apart from his importance as a poet. Highly revealing of his remarkable character–ambitious, dangerous, trimming, ridiculous, intelligent, generous yet antagonistic–they also comprise a body of writing of extraordinary interest for an understanding of his times: its personalities, its plots, its tragedies and exiles, its loves, its scandals, the movement of its religious, political, and philosophical ideas, its sense of poetry, and its notions of poetic craft and genre. Moreover, Pope published a collection of his own letters: a selective and highly edited collection, in which (having retrieved the originals from some recipients) he revised their texts and on occasion claimed they had been written to other people. This came to light with the nineteenth-century discovery of transcripts of the original letters, made for Pope's correspondent Lord Caryll. Other letters preserved in the British Library's Homer MS are clearly ones the poet would not have chosen to keep, since he used their backs for drafts of his Iliad translation.

George Sherburn's scholarly five-volume Collected Correspondence (Oxford, 1956) is the necessary basis for any new edition. The collection presented here is in the first place a balanced and varied selection from Sherburn. Since 1956, however, many new letters have been discovered, and this volume includes most of them. Many are among Pope's best, though they have till now been scattered in learned journals.

This selection supplies an introduction, a commentary on each letter identifying allusions and quotations (with translations where necessary), and thematic and biographical indexes.

About this title

Review

The best thing to come from this collection is a sense of Pope less as a combative satirist than as a private and religious individual, whose love of "romantic" (his word) landscapes infused much of what he wrote (David Nokes, Times Literary Supplement)

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198185650
• ISBN 13: 9780198185659
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432
• Editor: Erskine-Hill Howard