3 Review(s)

The major works of the greatest English poet of his age. The energy and inventiveness of Alexander Pope's verse still astonish centuries after his death. This new collection follows the path of Pope's poetic genius over his lifetime, featuring early poems such as the masterly mock-epic "The Rape of the Lock," which satirizes a notorious society scandal in glorious heroic couplets, and excerpts from his translation of the Iliad. Later writings include Pope's ironic adaptations of Horace's Epistles and a stinging attack on his literary rivals and the mediocrity of Grub Street hacks. Collected here, too, are selected prose works and letters to such contemporaries as John Gay and Jonathan Swift.