Books by Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope's letters are fascinating documents, revealing his remarkable character. This selection of his letters comprises a body of writing of interest for an understanding of his times, its personalities, scandals, religious, political and philosophical ideas and its sense of poetry.

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.

A series featuring a contemporary poet selecting and introducing a poet of the past. It, by choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions expressed in prefaces, offers insights into the poets' own work as well as providing an introduction to some of the greatest poets of literature.

This selection includes The Rape of the Lock, Eloisa to Abelard, and extracts from The Dunciad and the translation of Homer.

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.