Alexander Pope

Pope, Alexander 

Born May 21, 1688, in London; died May 30, 1744, in Twickenham. English poet.

Pope received his education at home. In 1711 he published the Essay on Criticism, the manifesto of British Enlightenment classicism. He applied classicist principles in the narrative poem “Windsor-Forest” (1713). In the mock-heroic narrative poem The Rape of the Lock (1712; second version, 1714), he humorrously depicted the way of life and mores of worldly society. Working from the standpoint of conventional “good taste,” Pope emended the “coarse” passages in Homer, producing new translations of the Iliad (1715–20) and the Odyssey (1725–26). He also devoted his energy to “clearing the vulgarity” from Shakespeare’s works (1725 edition).

Pope’s satires the Dunciad (1728) and The New Dunciad (1742), which were directed againt his literary opponents, castigated ignorance and stupidity. In the philosophical narrative poems “Moral Essays” (1731–35) and Essay on Man (1732–34; Russian translation, 1757), Pope glorified the harmony of all that exists. The Essay on Man met with great success in 18th-century Russia, despite the censor’s distortions of the text. Among those who translated Pope’s works into Russian are I. I. Dmitriev and V. A. Zhukovskii.

WORKS

The Works, vols. 1–10. London, 1871–89.
Literary Criticism. Edited by B. Goldgar. Lincoln, Neb. [1965].
In Russian translation:
“Pokhishchenie lokona.” In Khrestomatiiapo zapadno-evropeiskoi literature XVIII v. Moscow, 1938.

REFERENCES

Istoriia angliiskoi literatury, vol. 1, fasc. 2. Moscow-Leningrad, 1945.
Sitwell, E. A. Pope. New York, 1962.
Spacks, P. M. An Argument of Images: The Poetry of A. Pope. Cambridge, Mass., 1971.
A. Pope. Edited by P. Dixon. London, 1972. (References, pp. 311–21).
Griffith, R. H. A. Pope: A Bibliography. Austin, Tex., 1922–27.