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The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings is a collection of
Alexander Pope's greatest works, edited with an introduction by Leo
Damrosch in Penguin Classics. Alexander Pope 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. This edition contains a wide-ranging
introduction that elucidates Pope's life, poetic art and
contemporary contexts, as well as separate introductions to each
piece, a chronology, further reading, a biography and extensive
notes. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was born in London in 1688, the
son of a well-to-do Roman Catholic cloth merchant. In 1709 he
launched his career with a set of four pastorals, followed by An
Essay on Criticism, Windsor Forest and the mock-epic Rape of the
Lock, which cemented his reputation as the greatest poet of the
age. Later works included the Dunciad, Epistles to Several Persons
and the ambitious Essay on Man. If you enjoyed The Rape of the
Lock, you might like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, also
available in Penguin Classics.
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