Selected Poetry

by Martin (ed) Price

Though critical opinion on Alexander Pope has frequently been divided, he is now regarded as the most important poet of the early eighteenth century. An invalid from infancy, he devoted his energies towards literature and achieved remarkable success with his first published work at the age of twenty-one. A succession of brilliant poems followed, including An Essay on Criticism (1711), Windsor Forest (1715), and his masterpiece, The Rape of the Lock. A second period of great poetry was begun in 1728 with the appearance of the first Dunciad. All these works—which exhibit Pope's astonishing human insight, his wide sympathies, and powers of social observation (displayed to greatest effect in his talent for satire)—are included in this selection of his poetry. It has been compiled by the distinguished Pope scholar and editor Pat Rodgers, who also provides an indispensable introduction that offers a new interpretation of Pope's poetry, and the philosophical ideas behind it.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, British Literature, English Literature

252 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1954

Reviews

[Robyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the density of this poetry and I dig a lot of his critiques. I like when I see Milton peeking through. And I especially like how important Pope makes the role of the critic. But I have the hardest time knowing what the hell is going on, for like the first five stanzas or so. Where are we? Who the hell are you talking to? Too much ceremony, apostrophe? I don't know. And I read for a living.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very much a product of his time. This is a selected collection of Pope’s poems. He is clearly very intelligent, educated and well read. Classic and biblical allusions scatter about his poetry galore. His translations of the Iliad and Odyssey stand up well.

But frankly its form and rhythm is boring. Despite the sarcasm and jibes that sometimes made me crack a smile, the sing-song rhythm and the constant rhyming couplet bored me. It almost felt amateurish. That may say more on the lasting effect the couplet has had on English poetry throughout the centuries.

So it’s ok, but best in bits.

[Zeke Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Couplet rhyming was refreshing. Along with his wisdom and humor.

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here I am, as much as I'm going to read.
There, I've read enough!

[Alex]

I actually liked most of the poems that Pope wrote, even if some of them were problematic (although said sections usually resulted in him getting roasted by other Contemporary poets or figures, which honestly was quite funny). If someone is interested in reading some poetry from this time period, I would definitely recommend reading Pope: his technical abilities combined with a sharp wit make the poems entertaining to read and also interesting to analyze, even if his ego is the size of the sun in some of them.

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pope ranks third behind Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible when it comes to familiar lines in our language. This addition of Pope, while not having all of his poems (it lacks the Essay on Man), does have several masterpieces, notably Essay on Criticism and the Rape of the Lock.

Rape of the Lock

This is very near to the perfect piece of poetry. Indeed, what glory could have come by writing a true piece of heroic poetry in this style?! C. S. Lewis once said that reading Spenser is to grow in mental health. I suggest something similar with Pope: to read him is to be healed in one’s moral imagination. The following scene is poetry at its finest:

While thro’ the press enraged Thalestris flies,
And scatters death around from both her eyes,
A Beau and Witling perish’d in the throng,
One died in metaphor, and one in song:
60 ‘O cruel Nymph! a living death I bear,’
Cried Dapperwit, and sunk beside his chair.
A mournful glance Sir Fopling upwards cast,
‘Those eyes are made so killing’—was his last.
Thus on Mæander’s flowery margin lies
65 Th’ expiring swan, and as he sings he dies.

Epistle to a Lady (on how not to be a thot)

In satirizing the English upper class, Alexander Pope predicted our Kardashian, Katy Perry style America:
"The wit of cheats, the courage of a whore
Are what ten thousand envy and adore."
Why pique all mortals, yet affect a name
A fool to pleasure, yet a slave to fame.

The Dunciad
This was hard reading. Pope doesn’t quite rise to the glorious couplets of Lock. I think too much is lost in introduction and exposition. Further, even then, it isn’t always clear who his target is. Nonetheless, Book IV comes very close to the prior glory.

Conclusion
Reading Pope is like feasting on beams of golden light. When you read Pope you hear the golden trumpet and see the bright light.

[Milo · Rating 3 out of 5]

It does occasionally occur, while in the midst of some ancient text, the feeling that one had to be there. The off-hand gags in Aristophanes, or the unreadable jokes in Shakespeare: it is often the low (and very rarely the high) material that becomes indistinct in these later years; or worse: just not funny. These points make no claim to the universal in themselves; they do not look to explain what is, in that instant, so blitheringly obvious. Alexander Pope seems especially vulnerable to this direction of attack. On first reading The Dunciad I was bewildered by the sheer account of names – it seems Pope was in perpetual war with nearly the entire literary establishment – and this bewilderment soon morphed into alienation. A long, winding diss-track, whose targets I have never heard of (in almost every case), wound about increasingly daedal biblical and classical parodies. At a certain point I began to glaze, and the remainder was read in rigid obligation. I could concede: indeed I would trumpet the voices that state Pope is much less the poet than his faded reputation might suggest. It looked rather like a once hearty man, whose blush had diminished in each intervening century. Now he looks to be a corpse, though a corpse we could accept – based on all the context – was once a bold and merry fellow. Similar, if less harsh feelings fall upon Pope’s other famous poem: The Rape of the Lock. There are degrees of distancing: immediate familiarity with the persons in question; an impersonal familiarity; a general understanding that, at some point, such things occurred; and then the generations in whom social concord was of such a make as to find in The Rape of the Lock some degree of mutual feeling. All these possibilities have now expired. It is trivia that The Rape of the Lock is based on a true event: the thing becomes wholly fictive. But I did not take Pope at his first, absent blush. I struck again into The Dunciad (which, in concept, is so attractive), but on the second attempt I did not read the version of this edition, but rather the free Gutenberg text online. This has a distinct advantage: the inclusion of Pope’s notational apparatus totally cut from what is a slim and somewhat compromised selection. In taking the text carefully, in understanding not the whole nature of these endless names but at the least their representative features (and at the very least their occupation), the text is suddenly set aflame. Certainly it cannot be so bright, and much less fierce – here it is contained and observed – as in its day, but there is a magnificence that emerges in this poem. A universal stupidity that begins as a series of names to be tossed off bridges (particularly in the Second Book), but then ends in far less personal, far more allusive terms: a kind of Hieronymus Bosch in which the whole universe is consumed by Dulness, all things take their inverted course, and all the literati have been rendered not merely pompous and moronic, but the agents of a cultural force set to destroy all things bright and pleasant. Perhaps there is a bleakness here that somewhat overwhelms itself; perhaps all eras need a similar signal of downfall. Certainly: it is proof that stupidity in content need not equal stupidity in lampoon; it seems almost that the poetic force of the extended joke is born in-process – much as the Lock grew in process – and a unique artefact is ushered out of so much bile. The Rape of the Lock itself also benefitted from a revisit; it is perhaps the less satisfying and the less complete of the pair, in that its narrative and structure flits more frequently and does not necessarily fulfil its every promise – I think to the long introduction of the Sylphs, who largely vanish by the ending; or the failure to introduce in any major role the other to Rosicrucian beings; or the quite unfortunate insistence of using Nymph and the uncapitalized nymph as two conceptually separate ideals. But it is, most of all, a supreme commitment to the bit: a work whose own improper scale seems to justify itself by its impropriety. The more grandiose, the more long, the more expansive this poem is, the more it must become inherently funny. (And while The Dunciad is frequently funny in its own horrible procession, The Rape of the Lock is perhaps funnier as an object in total rather than line for line; though it is not without its moments.) These revisits then, as some small kernel of me suspected, restore Alexander Pope to previous heights. My own disquisition against the man is cured in a second innings. He remains, it should be reiterated, diminished in these works: they must necessarily be diminished. But perhaps in the irrelevance of so many of the participants my eyes are better able to peel back its other substance; in whatever case, they have no other choice. What of the other selections? Certainly this can be said: while Pope’s star does not shine so brightly, the vestige of his sun has burnt well the English language. His quotations survive as commonplaces, though of which ever attributed finding origin in Shakespeare or the Bible: I should expect he would have had something very funny to say of that. ‘An Essay on Criticism’ is, in general, an excellent poem, and one littered with at least three of English’s most repeated phrases. ‘To a Lady’ is perhaps thrown up by changing social mores, and certainly it seems a rabid and zig-zag affair, but contains in it one of the great couplets of English poetry, which has again found a life of its own quite outside the context of gender evaluation. I find the redux Horace satires a little limp, but then I didn’t think altogether too much of the originals: a satire which is largely concerned with justifying satire is not unlike poetry that spends every line in praise of poetry: be that I agree, where is the thing itself? His poems on wealth are both sharp; ‘Windsor Forest’ is suddenly too earnest; ‘Abelard and Heloise’ is wonderful, straight-faced, tragic – in much of Pope’s comedy he occasional veers into abstract or striking beauty, and here he dedicates to it his full power. It would be remiss to not mention the rhythmic inevitabilities: a body of work in which the heroic couplet is the only means of communication. Pope is not the only poet so bitten by that asp, but he is bitten the same. I say this having read – and much enjoyed! – his Iliad; but if a poem begins to try the patience, the endless singsong of pentameter rhymes is surely to kill what remains of goodwill. But it seems mine is not easily slain. In the marble block, a block that appears a long list of forgotten names, can be found the poet.

[Emma Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pope is irrefutably an intellectual poet and commands his verse form, rhyme scheme and metrical rhythm with arresting ease; I especially loved his peppered inclusion of classical allusions and imagery which added much to his satirising of contemporary sophistication and decorum. Although his most renowned poem now The Rape of the Lock actually pales for me in comparison with both his Dunciad and my personal favourite Eloisa to Abelard. While not his forte I think Pope's rhyming couplets so perfectly compliment his romantic subject matter as to elevate the intensity of his rich luxuriant language. Indeed it was Pope's more implied meanings that interested me most such as his more muted commentaries concerning religion as well as the post structuralist potential reading given towards his scepticism to science. Pope is undoubtedly a master poet as demonstrated by his peerless navigation of both a verse dialogue in his Epilogue to the Satires and his notorious epigrams; as mentioned previously I enjoyed the suggestion of continuity in his work to that of Swift and Defoe and that his poetry forms part of a wider movement.

[luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus)]

Pope...what to say...

In his 'An Essay on Criticism' Pope transpires his dislike for 'excessiveness' in poetry, stating that good poetry should be 'understated', he then outlines a standard of what 'is' good taste by using an authoritative tone that condemns his peers while also putting himself into a superior position. And yet, his poems are convoluted and far from 'understated'. He does not really demonstrate any of the skills – of his so admired – classical authors whose work cleverly show wit and reason.
Also, more irritating than all was his 'Epistle to a Lady'.


Mary Leapor's responds to this, in her 'Epistle to a Lady', is a much better example of 'good poetry'. Read that instead, Pope can suck it.

[GONZA · Rating 3 out of 5]

.............
How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
Labour and rest, that equal periods keep;
"Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep;"
Desires compos'd, affections ever ev'n,
Tears that delight, and sighs that waft to Heav'n.
Grace shines around her with serenest beams,
And whisp'ring angels prompt her golden dreams.
For her th' unfading rose of Eden blooms,
And wings of seraphs shed divine perfumes,
For her the Spouse prepares the bridal ring,
For her white virgins hymeneals sing,
To sounds of heav'nly harps she dies away,
And melts in visions of eternal day.
.....................

[Joseph Adelizzi, Jr. · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I’ve always appreciated poetry I haven’t memorized too much of the poetry I’ve read. If pressed right now to recite every line of poetry I’ve memorized in my life I could stutter through parts of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Ozymandias,“ “Eldorado,” and a couple Shakespeare sonnets, not to mention a few saucy limericks. I’d ace "Purple Cow," though I’d swear it was written by Ogden Nash - sorry Gelett Burgess. And I’d proudly recite my favoritest couplet of all time:

“True Wit is nature to advantage dress’d,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d;”

That couplet, of course, is from Alexander Pope’s “An Essay of Criticism.” And now after having read this selection of Alexander Pope poems, I can complete that favorite fragment:

“Something, whose truth convinc’d at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.”

I won’t equivocate - this was a difficult read. Most of the poems were either beyond me or of little interest to me, but still I did come away with quite a few gems which are sending me to the drug store to pick up a bottle of Prevagen so that I can memorize and flawlessly recite them to my great-great-great-grandchildren so many years down the road, or at least to my wife tomorrow morning.

I’ll close this review by listing a few of those gems - that way I can have a readily available cheat-sheet should the Prevagen fail me.

“Be not the first by whom the new are try’d,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”

“Be silent always, when you doubt your sense;
And speak, tho’ sure, with seeming diffidence:
Some positive, persisting fops we know,
Who, if once wrong, will needs always be so;
But you, with pleasure own your errors past,
And make each day a Critique on the last.”

“Fear not the anger of the wise to raise;
Those best can bear reproof, who merit praise.”

“Learning and Rome alike in empire grew;
And Arts still follow’d where her Eagles flew;”

“And wretches hang that Jury-men may dine;”

“Yet still her charms in breathing paint engage;
Her modest cheek shall warm a future age.”

“Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night:
God said, Let Newton be! And all was Light.”

“Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,
Thus unlamented let me die,
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.”

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul uneasy, and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”

“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of Mankind is Man.”

[ronny · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Essay on Criticism" is all you need.

[Ari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alexander Pope is very philosophical, but i liked his romances.

[Markus Whittaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rhyming couplets shit me to tears. The stilted nature of much of Pope's poetry, the forced rhyme, the incessantly repetitive metre - it lack imagination by todays standards. But one can't judge these works by todays standards, Pope was clever, sublime, and incredibly perceptive for his time. There are some eloquent phrases, and some eloquent verses. Not my cup of tea, but I am a big believer in trying everything once.

The notations and footnoting were a bloody shambles as well.

[Hayden · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not a fan of poetry but I have to read this for university so I decided to suck it up and have a go. The Rape Of The Lock and Eloisa and Abelard were brilliant, but honestly I didn't really understand the rest. A lot of Pope's poems satirise prominent members of the time so most of the references went completely over my head. But I'm actually looking forward to studying it to actually understand the poems and maybe even enjoy them a lot more.

[Lydia Hughes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for my university course. I found the satirical language of ‘The Rape of the Lock’ to be quite charming and amusing, the mockery of standards of civility rather refreshing when juxtaposed with the heroic meter. ‘An Essay on Criticism’ was interesting, if a little dry, although that’s to be expected of such a piece, I suppose.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like Pope well enough, but I have a special fondness for him for one odd reason - a former mentor of mine, Dr. Suter, read some of my poetry and wrote to some of her colleages about how much my verse adaptations of ancient poetry resembled Pope. I've never forgotten the compliment.

[Rachel Brand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for:
EN1004: Explorers and Revolutionaries - Literature 1680-1830

Technically I only read "The Rape of the Lock." It was interesting enough, after I went to the lectures and understood it better, but it's difficult to grasp if you don't know much about the texts he's parodying. 7/10

[James Schwartz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classic! There are not many poets "above" Pope!

[M.I. Lastman · Rating 5 out of 5]

After Shakespeare, Pope is surely the most influential writer in the English language, he is also the funniest.

[Michael Arnold · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Pope, but I think that there will be a better selection of his poems out there. This is more like a taster, or an introduction to him I think. It even feels incomplete - somehow.

[Thoughtdome225 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would love him if not for the rhyming couplets. They get irritating after about four lines (I'm not exaggerating)