Selected Bibliography:
Alexander Pope
(1688-1745)

By Frans De Bruyn,
University of Ottawa

Last revised 3 June 2001

Bibliographies

• Primary Works

  • Reginald Harvey Griffith, Alexander Pope: A Bibliography, 2 vols. (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1922-27). A bibliography of Pope's published writings, from his earliest publication in 1709 to the posthumous appearance in 1751 of his collected Works, edited by William Warburton. Considered a landmark in bibliographical scholarship, but limited by the state of bibliographical knowledge in Griffith's day and by the great complexity of the many editions of Pope's works. Should be supplemented by Foxon, Kowalk, and the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC).
  • David Foxon, English Verse 1701-1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975). Pope's publications are covered in vol. 1, pp. 613-35. Because the scope of this bibliography goes well beyond Pope, it is not as detailed as a descriptive bibliography, but it contains a wealth of information that supplements and supersedes Griffith.
  • English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC). This electronic catalogue, retrievable on CD-ROM and in other electronic forms, aims "to provide a comprehensive bibliography of the printed output of the hand-press era," from approximately 1473 to 1800. Entries in the bibliography list library locations of copies and note the existence of facsimiles, including microfilm copies. Lists over 700 texts and editions by and about Pope.
  
  

• Secondary Works

  • J. V. Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope 1711-1744: A Descriptive Bibliography (London: Methuen, 1969). A valuable biographical and critical source, in view of the fact that Pope was profoundly influenced by attacks on him in the contemporary press. Not fully comprehensive, as Guerinot omits attacks on Pope published only in newspapers. Each item listed is accompanied by a summary of its contents.
  • Wolfgang Kowalk, Alexander Pope: An Annotated Bibliography of Twentieth-Century Criticism 1900-1979 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1981).
  • Cecilia L. Lopez, Alexander Pope: An Annotated Bibliography (Gainesville, Univ. of Florida Press, 1970). Entries are annotated, and reviews of books and articles, where available, are noted.
  • Donald C. Mell, Jr., "Alexander Pope (1688-1744)," in English Poetry, 1660-1800: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research, 1982), pp. 282-334. A selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources, with helpful annotations and comments. Includes bibliographies of other eighteenth-century British poets and background materials for the student of eighteenth-century poetry.
  • David Nokes, "Pope, Alexander (1988-1744)," in An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Augustan Poetry (New York: St. Martin's; Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1989), pp. 109-29. A selected bibliography. Helpful annotations included with most entries. Covers both primary and secondary sources. Also includes selected bibliographies of critical studies focusing on the "Augustan Context" and on "Eighteenth-Century Poetry."
  • J. E. Tobin, Alexander Pope: A List of Critical Studies Published from 1895 to 1944 (New York: Cosmopolitan Science and Art Service, 1945).
  
  In addition to these bibliographies, students of Pope may wish to consult the following surveys of critical writings on Pope, in which major critical studies are described and reviewed.
  
  
  • G. S. Rousseau, "On Reading Pope," in Alexander Pope: Writers and Their Backgrounds, ed. Peter Dixon (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1972), pp. 1-59.
  • Howard Erskine-Hill, "Introduction," Alexander Pope: World and Word, Proceedings of the British Academy, 91 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998). Surveys Pope scholarship from 1972 onward. A continuation of Rousseau's survey.

Editions

• Collected Works

  • The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Whitwell Elwin and W. J. Courthope, 10 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871-79). Though now superseded by the Twickenham edition (see next entry), this edition remains a useful reference for advanced students of Pope.
  • The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939-69). The standard edition, with copious annotations and extensive, informative introductions. This edition is also available (without the translations of Homer) in a one-volume format: The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotation, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963).
    • Vol. 1, Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (1961). Also contains Windsor-Forest.
    • Vol. 2, The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (1940). Also contains Eloisa to Abelard and Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady.
    • Vol. 3.1, An Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack (1950).
    • Vol. 3.2, Epistles to Several Persons (Moral Essays), ed. F. W. Bateson (1951). Includes epistles to Cobham, Bathurst, Burlington, and a Lady.
    • Vol. 4, Imitations of Horace and An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot and The Epilogue to the Satires, ed. John Butt (1953).
    • Vol. 5, The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland (1943).
    • Vol. 6, Minor Poems, ed. Norman Ault and John Butt (1954).
    • Vol. 7, The Iliad of Homer, Books I-IX, ed. Maynard Mack (1967).
    • Vol. 8, The Iliad of Homer, Books X-XXIV, ed. Maynard Mack (1967).
    • Vol. 9, The Odyssey of Homer, Books I-XII, ed. Maynard Mack (1967).
    • Vol. 10, The Odyssey of Homer, Books XIII-XXIV, ed. Maynard Mack (1967).
    • Vol. 11, Index, ed. Maynard Mack (1969).
    
    
  • The Prose Works of Alexander Pope: The Earlier Works, 1711-1720, ed. Norman Ault (Oxford: Blackwell, 1936). Includes Pope's contributions to The Spectator and The Guardian; his Preface to his translation of The Iliad (1715); his Preface to The Works of 1717; and A Discourse on Pastoral Poetry (1717).
  • The Prose Works of Alexander Pope: The Major Works, 1725-1744, ed. Rosemary Cowler (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1986). Includes Pope's Preface to The Works of William Shakespear (1725); Peri Bathous (1728); and A Letter to a Noble Lord (1733).
  
  

• Selected Works

  • Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope (Regents Critics Series), ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965).
  • Selected Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Paul Hammond (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987).
  
  

• Individual Works

  • The Art of Sinking in Poetry: Martinus Scriblerus' [Peri Bathous], ed. Edna Leake Steeves (New York: Russell, 1952). One of Pope's Scriblerian satires, written in the form of a parody of Longinus's On the Sublime. A facsimile text is provided, together with an introduction and extensive commentary. For Pope's collaborations in other works of Scriblerian satire, see below in this section, under "Collaborative Works."
  • The Dunciad in Four Books, ed. Valerie Rumbold (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1999). An edition of the 1743 Dunciad, the final and most extended version of the poem. A helpful and accessible introduction to this daunting text is provided, and both the poem itself and Pope's prose apparatus are thoroughly annotated.
  • The Rape Observed: An Edition of Alexander Pope's Poem "The Rape of the Lock," ed. Clarence Tracy (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1974).
  • The Rape of the Lock, Bedford Cultural Editions, ed. Cynthia Wall (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998). The text of the poem is accompanied by an extensive introduction and by numerous eighteenth-century texts and documents that aim to contextualize the poem both within Pope's life and career and within the larger cultural context (political, social, and poetic).
  
  

• Collaborative Works

  Pope collaborated with John Arbuthnot, John Gay, and Jonathan Swift in the production of several Scriblerian satires (satires directed against abuses in modern learning), in particular, The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus and Three Hours after Marriage. The fruits of this literary collaboration can be seen in some of the greatest satirical works of the eighteenth century, including Gay's A Beggar's Opera, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Pope's The Dunciad. The collaborative Scriblerian texts are available in the following modern editions:
  
  
  • Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, et al., The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1950; rpt. New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988).
  • Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, Three Hours after Marriage, in Burlesque Plays of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Simon Trussler (London and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 91-140.
  • Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, Three Hours after Marriage, in John Gay: Dramatic Works, ed. John Fuller, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1983) 1: 207-63.
  
  

• Correspondence

  • The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). A landmark edition, meticulously edited, aiming at a complete collection of all of Pope's letters. See the next five entries for letters that have come to light since the publication of this edition. It appears likely that further correspondence remains to be uncovered.
  • George Sherburn, "Letters of Alexander Pope, Chiefly to Sir William Trumbull," Review of English Studies, n.s. 9 (1958): 388-406.
  • George Rousseau, "A New Pope Letter," Philological Quarterly, 45 (1966): 409-18.
  • Maynard Mack, Collected in Himself (London, 1982). See Appendix B, pp. 461-550, for more post-Sherburn letters.
  • Pat Rogers, "Not in Sherburn," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 8 (1985): 59-64. Indicates where letters not included in Sherburn's edition have since appeared in print. Rogers lists some fifty new letters and an equal number of previously published letters that have recently appeared in better versions.
  • Margaret M. Smith and Alexander Lindsay, Index of English Literary Manuscripts: Volume III 1700-1800, Part 3, Alexander Pope -- Sir Richard Steele (London: Mansell, 1992), p. 14. Lists several more post-Sherburn letters not included in Mack and Rogers.
  • Howard Erskine-Hill, "Pope and Burlington," Lord Burlington: Architecture, Art, and Life, ed. Toby Barnard and Jane Clark (London, 1995), pp. 219-20. An undated note from Pope to the Earl of Burlington.
  • Alexander Pope: Selected Letters, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000). A generous selection of Pope's letters. Includes a biographical index that identifies Pope's correspondents and persons mentioned in his letters.
  
  

• Archives and Depositories

  Pope's surviving manuscripts, transcripts, drawings and sketches, annotated books, correspondence, and other documents are comprehensively discussed and indexed in Margaret M. Smith and Alexander Lindsay, Index of English Literary Manuscripts: Volume III 1700-1800, Part 3, Alexander Pope -- Sir Richard Steele (London: Mansell, 1992), pp. 1-78. The Index gives locations for the materials listed. The most important repository of mss. and correspondence is the British Library. Other important collections are at Yale (Osborn Collection), Harvard (Houghton Library), and Oxford (Bodleian Library).
  
  

• Manuscript Facsimiles

  Many of the poetic manuscripts of Pope, with the conspicuous exception of the Homer MSS in the British Library, have been published in facsimile editions. These facsimile editions are listed here.
  • Maynard Mack, The Last and Greatest Art: Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of Alexander Pope (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated Univ. Presses, 1984). Photographic reproductions and transcripts of manuscript drafts of the following poems and texts: The Pastorals (including "An Essay on Pastoral"), Sapho to Phaon, Epistle to Jervas, The Dunciad, An Epistle to Burlington, The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, An Essay on Man and An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.
  • Robert M. Schmitz, Pope's "Windsor Forest," 1712: A Study of the Washington University Holograph, Washington University Studies New Series, Language and Literature No. 21 (St. Louis: Washington Univ., 1952).
  • Robert M. Schmitz, Pope's "Essay on Criticism," 1709: A Study of the Bodleian Manuscript Text with Facsimiles, Transcripts, and Variants (St. Louis: Washington Univ. Press, 1962).
  • Pope's Dunciad of 1728: A History and Facsimile, ed. and intro. David L. Vander Meulen (Charlottesville and London: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1991). A facsimile reprint of the first published version of The Dunciad. The copy chosen for reproduction contains collations made by Jonathan Richardson, Jr., of the 1728 text and a manuscript version of the poem. Vander Meulen provides an accompanying essay and apparatus discussing the composition, publication and reception of the 1728 Dunciad. Untangles some of the complexities in the publishing history of the poem.
  • Earl R. Wasserman, Pope's "Epistle to Bathurst": A Critical Reading with an Edition of the Manuscripts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1960).
  
  

• Selected Teaching Editions and Anthologies

  Besides the one-volume edition of the Twickenham Pope (noted above under "Collected Works"), several other teaching anthologies are currently in use.
  • Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, Riverside Editions, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969). A generous selection of poetry and critical prose. The texts of the poem are based on the Twickenham edition.
  • Selected Poetry, Oxford World's Classics, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998)
  • The Works of Alexander Pope, intro. Andrew Crozier (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1995). A cheap paperback edition, but not very useful for students studying Pope, as there are no notes and little introductory material.
  
  

Biographies

• Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men: Collected from Conversation, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). Not a biography, as such, but a collection of anecdotes, table-talk, and snippets of conversation, chiefly by and about Pope. An invaluable source of biographical and critical information about Pope.
• Samuel Johnson, "The Life of Pope," in The Lives of the English Poets (London, 1779-81). Remains one of the most perceptive biographical and critical studies of Pope.
• Edith Sitwell, Alexander Pope (London: Faber and Faber, 1930). A lively and tendentious biography of Pope. Sitwell (herself a poet) aims to salvage Pope's reputation "from the cold, damp mossiness that has blighted the public taste for the last forty, fifty, even sixty years." An important salvo in the early twentieth-century, modernist campaign to rehabilitate Pope's reputation as a poet, but not to be relied on from a scholarly point of view.
• George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934). A sympathetic and scholarly biography covering the early years of Pope's career. A product of the twentieth-century critical reassessment of Pope.
• Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven, New York, and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1985). The standard biography, written by the foremost Pope scholar of his generation. One of the most important works on Pope in the twentieth century.
• Felicity Rosslyn, Alexander Pope: A Literary Life, Macmillan Literary Lives (London: Macmillan, 1990).

Criticism

• Reference Works

  • John Barnard, ed., Pope: The Critical Heritage (Boston and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). A selection of critical reviews, comments, pamphlet attacks, and other documents concerning Pope, many of them excerpted from larger works. Covers the period 1705 to 1782. A collection of this kind is especially relevant in Pope's case, given the highly public character of his satire and the extraordinary degree of public interest his life and poetry aroused. See also J. V. Guerinot's bibliography of pamphlet attacks on Pope (in "Bibliographies," above), and Bateson and Joukovsky's critical anthology (in "Criticism," below).
  • Reginald Berry, A Pope Chronology (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1988). A chronological, day-by-day list of facts about Pope's life and career. Useful for tracking down specific details or for ascertaining what Pope was doing at specific points in his life.
  
  

• Concordances

  As the texts of Pope's poems become increasingly available on the Internet, it will be possible to do word searches electronically. It is well to be cautious, however, about the quality and reliability of electronic texts. For a list of poems by Pope available on the Web, go to http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/p.html.
  • Edwin Abbott, A Concordance to the Works of Alexander Pope (New York: Appleton, 1875; rpt. New York: Kraus Reprints, 1965). Based on Warburton's 1751 edition of Pope's poetry. Now superseded by the Bedford and Dilligan concordance.
  • Emmett G. Bedford and Robert J. Dilligan, A Concordance to the Poems of Alexander Pope, 2 vols. (Detroit: Gale Research, 1974). Concordance based on the Twickenham edition of Pope's poetry, including the translations of Homer.
  
  

• Collections and Festschriften

  Over the last few decades a number of useful collections of essays on Pope have been published. Many of the best articles in Pope criticism are conveniently available in these collections; moreover, the article is often the preferred form for criticism of individual works The collections serve as handy snapshots of the state of play in Pope scholarship around the time of their publication: for this reason, it seems useful to list them chronologically here.
  • Pope and His Contemporaries: Essays Presented to George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949).
  • Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964; rev. and enlarged ed., 1968). A collection of essays from the 1930s to the 1960s, which Mack sees as the period when the modern rehabilitation of Pope's reputation as a writer was undertaken. The contributors to this volume are a distinguished group of scholars and critics.
  • Alexander Pope: A Critical Anthology, ed. F. W. Bateson and N. A. Joukovsky (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). A collection of critical comments on Pope, from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth century. Straddles the gap between the critical material in Barnard's Critical Heritage (above) and the critical collections and monographs listed here and below.
  • Pope: A Collection of Critical Essays (Twentieth-Century Views), ed. J. V. Guerinot (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972). Contributions by some of the most prominent critics of the mid twentieth century, such as Auden, Tillotson, and Wimsatt. Includes Cleanth Brooks's classic new-critical reading of The Rape of the Lock and Emrys Jones's influential essay on The Dunciad.
  • Alexander Pope: Writers and Their Backgrounds, ed. Peter Dixon (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1972). A collection of thematic essays addressing various aspects of Pope's time, his intellectual interests, and his writing. Includes essays on politics, religion, visual arts, economics, classicism, and criticism.
  • The Art of Alexander Pope, ed. Howard Erskine-Hill and Anne Smith (London: Vision Press, 1979). A collection of essays by a distinguished group of Pope scholars. The essays cover a broad range of Pope's poetry.
  • Pope: Recent Essays by Several Hands, ed. Maynard Mack and James Winn (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1980). A collection of essays on Pope from the 1960s and '70s. An important set of essays by a distinguished roster of critics.
  • Maynard Mack, Collected in Himself: Essays Critical, Biographical, and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of His Contemporaries (Newark: Univ. of Delaware; and London and Toronto: Associated Univ. Presses, 1982). A collection of Mack's writings on Pope. Contains, among other materials, several bibliographical studies; a "Finding List" of 176 books believed to have belonged to Pope's library (Appendix A); and a number of previously unpublished letters by Pope.
  • The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988). One of several collections published to marked the tercentenary of Pope's birth. Thirteen essays by established Pope scholars. Organized into six sections on the following topics: The Rape of the Lock, Pope and women, An Essay on Man, landscape gardening and Pope's villa, translation and criticism, and Pope as viewed by posterity.
  • Alexander Pope: Essays for the Tercentenary, ed. Colin Nicholson (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Univ. Press, 1988). Contributors to this collection are chiefly from the University of Edinburgh. Strikes a balance between the more established scholarship represented in The Enduring Legacy (1988) and the more aggressively revisionist work in Pope: New Contexts (1990)
  • Pope: New Contexts, ed. David Fairer (New York and London: Harvester, 1990). Fairer contrasts his collection of tercentenary essays with that of Rousseau and Rogers (see above). The "Enduring Legacy" of their title, argues Fairer, suggests continuity and permanence; the aim of his collection, by contrast, is to challenge critical orthodoxies and to highlight revisionist approaches to Pope.
  • Approaches to Teaching Pope's Poetry, ed. Wallace Jackson and R. Paul Yoder (New York: Modern Language Association, 1993). Prominent critics of Pope here display their strategies in teaching his poetry. Advice offered on texts, anthologies, and relevant critical studies. One group of essays discusses general themes and topics of use to the instructor, and a second group focuses on individual poems. Students, as well as their teachers, will find this anthology useful.
  • Pat Rogers, Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993). A compilation of essays by a leading Pope scholar and literary historian. Some of the articles collected here appeared previously in relatively inaccessible publications. Rogers's essays are invariably perceptive, fresh, and original.
  • Pope, ed. and intro. by Brean Hammond (New York and London: Longman, 1996). An anthology of essays from the 1980s and '90s that highlight more recent theoretical approaches, chiefly feminism, cultural materialism, and new historicism, as applied to Pope. Hammond's spirited introduction (together with a brief annotated bibliography) makes the case for a new generation of Pope scholars, emphasizing how their work differs from the formalist and humanist emphasis of earlier scholarship. Essays organized into four groupings: statements; gender/incorporation; ideology/contradiction; and liminality, carnival, and print.
  
  

• Monographs and Articles

  • Introductory Studies

    • Paul Baines, The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). A lot of material, succinctly presented, on Pope's life and the cultural, social, and political circumstances of his time. Perhaps the most helpful features of the book are its descriptive survey of Pope criticism and its extensive bibliography (pp. 153-213).
    • Ian Gordon, A Preface to Pope, 2d ed. (1976; London and New York: Longman, 1993). An introductory survey, with brief critical discussions of the major poems.
    • Brean Hammond, Pope (Harvester New Readings) (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986). A critical introduction to Pope for students and general readers. Approaching the poet from a cultural materialist perspective, Hammond focuses on such issues as ideology, politics, and gender as they are reflected in Pope's career and his writings.
    
    

  • Overviews, and Career Studies

    Entries in this section are studies that address a range of Pope's writings, often with a view to achieving a critical or thematic synthesis.
    • John M. Aden, Pope's Once and Future Kings: Satire and Politics in the Early Career (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1978). Focuses on political satire in Pope's early poetry (up to 1728). Suggests that Pope's Catholicism and the atmosphere of hostility against Roman Catholics in eighteenth-century England are crucial factors in accounting for his political views.
    • G. Douglas Atkins, Quests of Difference: Reading Pope's Poems (Lexington: Kentucky State Univ. Press, 1986). A deconstructionist approach to Pope.
    • Fredric V. Bogel, Acts of Knowledge: Pope's Later Poems (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1981). A study of the theme of human knowledge "knowledge viewed as a form of life . . . the human interpretation of human experience" in Pope's later poetry. Focuses particularly on the Epistles to Several Persons and the Horatian imitations.
    • Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). A seminal study of Pope's habit of poetic allusion to the Greco-Roman literary tradition. Details Pope's literary debts to Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Virgil. Brower argues that for Pope, "the imitation of life is also the imitation of literature."
    • Laura Brown, Alexander Pope (Re-reading Literature) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). A provocative Marxist-inspired study of Pope. Argues that "as a consistent advocate of the beliefs and ambitions of the capitalist landlords and of an imperialist consensus, Pope must be scrutinized, doubted, and demystified."
    • Leopold Damrosch, Jr., The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (Berkeley and London: Univ. of California Press, 1987). A thoughtful study that confronts the complexity of Pope's literary engagement with his own time. Damrosch's theme is "the Lebenswelt that Pope creates in his writings [and] . . . the ways in which Pope's imaginative world attempts to encompass an increasingly recalcitrant external world." Damrosch's Pope is one of the first modern poets, who seeks to speak for his society but finds himself marginalized in many ways -- socially, culturally, institutionally.
    • Helen Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996). Beginning with the fact of Pope's physical deformity, Deutsch explores the tension between form and deformity in his life and poetry.
    • Thomas R. Edwards, Jr., This Dark Estate: A Reading of Pope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1963). Argues that the "Augustan manner" of Pope's earlier poetry, whose "chief feature is a balance between opposing feelings and points of view," is increasingly called into question in his later poems, which confront the world and the reality of death in a more tragic vein.
    • David Fairer, Pope's Imagination (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1984). An exploration of what the idea of the imagination meant to Pope and his age, before the advent of Coleridge and his influential Romantic theory of imagination. A welcome corrective to views that consign the eighteenth-century understanding of imagination to the teleologically fallacious realm of the "pre-Romantic."
    • Rebecca Ferguson, The Unbalanced Mind: Pope and the Rule of Passion (Brighton: Harvester, 1986). A reading of Pope in light of his theory of the passions, not only as expounded in An Essay on Man but also as developed and expressed in more general terms in his other poems. Focuses on eighteenth-century ethical, psychological, and aesthetic views of "passion."
    • David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, rev. and ed. James McLaverty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Imposing study by major bibliographer of Pope's knowing exploitation of the contemporary book trade.
    • Dustin H. Griffin, Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978). Explores the relation between the historical Pope and the version of the poet that appears as a persona in his poems, especially in the later verse epistles, the Horatian satires, and The Dunciad.
    • Robert J. Griffin, Wordsworth's Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). An interesting study. Argues that the Romantic version of literary history, which in many ways continues to dominate, is founded on its view of Pope, a view pioneered by the Warton brothers, who set out to devalue Pope as a poet in favor of a literary history that places the Renaissance tradition (Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton) front and center.
    • Wallace Jackson, Vision and Re-Vision in Alexander Pope (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1983).
    • Samuel Johnson, "The Life of Pope," in The Lives of the English Poets (London, 1779-81). One of the earliest (and best) critical evaluations of Pope. A critical biography. Argues (contra Joseph Warton, see below) for the poetic value of Pope's achievement: "If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?"
    • Frederick M. Keener, An Essay on Pope (New York and London: Columbia Univ. Press, 1974). Questions the direction of Pope criticism in the mid twentieth century, arguing that much of it "reads as if it emanated not from twentieth-century America or England but from some miraculously undisturbed eighteenth-century estate."
    • David Morris, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984). Sympathetic, subtle, and astute readings of Pope's poems.
    • Marjorie Hope Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau, "This Long Disease, My Life": Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968). Begins with a case history of Pope's medical ailments, and opens out to a wider consideration of Pope's interest in medicine and other sciences, chiefly astronomy and optics.
    • Ruben Quintero, Literate Culture: Pope's Rhetorical Art (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1992).
    • James Reeve, The Reputation and Writings of Alexander Pope (London and New York: Heinemann and Barnes and Noble, 1976). Approaches the history of Pope's reputation from the premise that "his poems have been over-valued in the [twentieth] century." Reeve finds the academic study of Pope, particularly in American universities, a distorting influence on our appreciation of his poetic strengths. More of a polemic than a reception history.
    • Robert W. Rogers, The Major Satires of Alexander Pope (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1955).
    • Robert Kilburn Root, The Poetical Career of Alexander Pope (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1938). Along with Tillotson (below), Root is one of the pioneers in the critical revival of Pope's poetic reputation in the twentieth century.
    • John Paul Russo, Alexander Pope: Tradition and Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972). Explores how Pope uses his poetry and his sense of his place in the European literary tradition as means of fashioning an identity.
    • Patricia Meyer Spacks, An Argument of Images: The Poetry of Alexander Pope (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971). A close reading of Pope's poetry, focusing on his use of imagery and metaphor. For Spacks, the "central problem, both moral and aesthetic, on which Pope's imagery focuses is one of control," the achievement of ethical and aesthetic discipline. Not a contextual study: Spacks concentrates on the poetry itself (with glances at Donne and Eliot).
    • Geoffrey Tillotson, On the Poetry of Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938). A pioneering study in the modern critical revival of Pope. Explores Pope's technique in language and versification.
    • Geoffrey Tillotson, Pope and Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958).
    • Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols. (London, 1756; repr. New York and London: Garland, 1974). One of the two most important critical evaluations of Pope in the eighteenth century (the other being that of Samuel Johnson). Places Pope foremost in the second rank of English poets, arguing that his work "is of the didactic, moral, and satyric kind; and consequently, not of the most poetic species of poetry." See Robert Griffin (above) for a useful critique of Warton's view.
    • James Winn, A Window in the Bosom: The Letters of Alexander Pope (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977). A career study of Pope focusing on the poet's voluminous correspondence. Explores both biographical and literary issues: in publishing his letters, Winn reminds us, Pope acknowledged their status as literary documents.
    • Thomas Woodman, Politeness and Poetry in the Age of Pope (London, 1989).
    
    

  • Contextual Studies: Politics, Society, Economics

    • Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Discusses the thesis that Pope was committed to an "emotional Jacobitism" an opposition to the Hanoverian establishment colored by a lingering sense of allegiance to the exiled Stuarts. The question of Jacobitism and eighteenth-century literature remains strongly controversial.
    • Howard Erskine-Hill, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example and the Poetic Response (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1975). A contextual study of the social, economic, and political values of Pope's England, using the lives of six representative contemporaries of Pope as a focus for the problem of wealth and its uses. The selected individuals (John Kyrle, John Caryll, Peter Walter, William Digby, Sir John Blunt, Ralph Allen) all figure importantly in Pope's life and/or poetry.
    • Christine Gerrard, The Patriotic Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Party, and National Myth, 1725-42 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Revisits the world of the 1730s, when politics and writing were closely intertwined. Expands upon Goldgar's treatment of this subject (see Goldgar, below).
    • Bertrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722-1742. Explores the fascinating interaction between the worlds of literature and politics in the age of Walpole. Why is it that so many distinguished writers in the period, including Fielding, Gay, Pope, Swift, and Thomson, were hostile to the Walpole administration? Goldgar addresses this question in detail.
    • Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968). An interpretation of the political debates dominating Pope's age. Whether the politics of Bolingbroke and his associates were "nostalgic" would seem to be an open question.
    • Maynard Mack, The Country and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969). A ground-breaking study that shows how Pope's life of country "retirement" in his home at Twickenham is bound up with the political and social stance he assumes in his writings.
    • Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century, Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought 21 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994). Many of Pope's satires can be read as commentaries on the financial revolution and the rise of capitalism taking place in Pope's lifetime as reflected in such events as the South Sea Bubble.
    
    

  • Literary and Intellectual Contexts

    • Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). Explores the idea of order and its aesthetic reflection in artifice and form as key features of art in Pope's time. Devotes two chapters specifically to Pope.
    • Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1983). Explores the ambivalent reception in England of the Roman "Augustan Age" and the ideals associated with it. Particular emphasis on the Renaissance and the age of Pope. See also Weinbrot, below.
    • Roger D. Lund, "From Oblivion to Dulness: Pope and the Poetics of Appropriation," British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 14 (1991): 171-89.
    • Roger D. Lund, "The Eel of Science: Index Learning, Scriblerian Satire, and the Rise of Information Culture," Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998): 18-42.
    • Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen, 1972); abridged as Hacks and Dunces: Pope, Swift, and Grub Street (London: Methuen, 1980). Shows how Pope's satires about hacks and dunces are grounded in a factual geographical and sociological reality. One of many fine studies by a leading Pope scholar.
    • Howard Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in "Augustan" England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978). Emphasizes the reservations writers in the period felt about characterizations of their time as a second Augustan age. Shows the inadequacy of period labels, in this instance, "Augustan Age."
    
    

  • Pope and Classical Culture

    See also the entries under "Imitations of Horace," below.
    • Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1959). A seminal study of Pope's habit of poetic allusion to the Greco-Roman literary tradition. Details Pope's literary debts to Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Virgil. Brower argues that for Pope, "the imitation of life is also the imitation of literature."
    • Douglas M. Knight, Pope and the Heroic Tradition, Yale Studies in English, vol. 117 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1951). Though Pope's Homer is a translation, Knight regards it as an original work, and his study explores the grounds of its originality.
    • H. A. Mason, To Homer through Pope: An Introduction to Homer's "Iliad" and Pope's Translation (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972).
    • G. F. C. Plowden, Pope on Classic Ground (Athens, Ohio: Ohio Univ. Press, 1983).
    • Steven Shankman, Pope's "Iliad": Homer in the Age of Passion, Princeton Essays in Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983). A study of the artistry of Pope's great translation of Homer, under the rubrics, "Design," "Language," and "Versification." Aims to "address some of the fundamental objections which have lost the translation the audience it deserves."
    • Howard D. Weinbrot, Alexander Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982). Places Pope in the tradition of Roman formal verse satire practised by Horace, Juvenal, and Persius. Argues that the direction of Pope's career as a formal verse satirist moved from the Horatian model of his early imitations to a "Juvenalian-Persian elevation and gloom" in the late imitations.
    • Carolyn D. Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Classical Learning (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
    
    

  • Pope and the Sister Arts: Architecture, Gardening, Painting

    • Morris R. Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). An account of Pope's "virtuosoship," his role as a critic and arbiter of taste in the arts of painting, landscape gardening, architecture, and sculpture.
    • Carole Fabricant, "'Binding and Dressing Nature's Loose Tresses': The Ideology of Augustan Landscape Design," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 8 (1979): 109-35.
    • Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958).
    • John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976). Discusses Pope on pp. 58-104.
    • James Lee-Milne, Earls of Creation: Five Great Patrons of Eighteenth-Century Art (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1972). The five earls (Bathurst, Pembroke, Burlington, Oxford, Leicester) whose lives, houses, and gardens form the focus of this study influenced Pope in his ideas on architecture and gardening, and were, in turn, influenced by him.
    • Peter Martin, Pursuing Innocent Pleasures: The Gardening World of Alexander Pope (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984). A biographical approach to Pope's life-long interest in landscape gardening, including the gardens of his friends and contemporaries.
    
    

  • Pope, Women, and Gender

    • Carole Fabricant, "'Binding and Dressing Nature's Loose Tresses': The Ideology of Augustan Landscape Design," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 8 (1979): 109-35.
    • Christa Knellwolf, A Contradiction Still: Representations of Women in the Poetry of Alexander Pope (Manchester and New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 1998).
    • Felicity Nussbaum, "The Brink of All We Hate": English Satires on Women 1660-1750 (Lexington: Kentucky Univ. Press, 1984). Places Pope's Epistle to a Lady in a tradition of anti-feminist satire that was very much alive in the Restoration and early eighteenth century.
    • Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985). This book explores some important eighteenth-century cultural myths about gender (such as the "myth of passive womanhood") and then applies this contextual perspective, in Pope's case, to new readings of The Rape of the Lock and Epistle to a Lady.
    • Valerie Rumbold, Woman's Place in Pope's World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991). An approach to Pope through some of the important women in his life, including his mother, the Blount sisters, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
    • Claudia N. Thomas, Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women Readers (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1994). Chronicles the complex response of eighteenth-century women readers and writers to Pope's poetry. His work furnished a model to be imitated, appropriated, critiqued, and sometimes repudiated.
    • Carolyn D. Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Classical Learning (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). The general focus of this study is on constructions of gender in the context of eighteenth-century readings of the classics, though, as Williams notes, her book also "has much to say, directly and implicitly, about women" (p. 3). An illuminating analysis of gender issues in Pope's work.
    
    

  • Individual Works

    I have made no attempt at comprehensiveness with the entries that follow. A good deal of fine commentary on individual works is to be found in the materials listed above, especially the essay collections listed under "Collections and Festschriften."
    
    

    • The Dunciad

      • Douglas Brooks-Davies, Pope's "Dunciad" and the Queen of the Night: A Study of Emotional Jacobitism (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1985). Raises the controversial question of Pope's Jacobite sympathies in relation to The Dunciad. Suggests that Jacobitism is "an ultimate clue" to the poem. A highly speculative study that invokes some esoteric contexts for the Dunciad, including the mysteries of Isis and alchemy.
      • Howard Erskine-Hill, Pope: "The Dunciad" (London: Arnold, 1972). A helpful introductory study of the poem.
      • Emrys Jones, "Pope and Dulness," Proceedings of the British Academy 54 (1968): 231-63. An important study that argues for Pope's fascination with the anarchic energy of the dunces and their world, despite his professed repudiation of them.
      • John E. Sitter, The Poetry of Pope's "Dunciad" (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971).
      • Aubrey Williams, Pope's "Dunciad": A Study of Its Meaning (1955). An influential study that establishes the spatial grounding of the poem in the cities of London and Westminster. Argues that the poem must be read as a serious critique of cultural decay in Pope's time. Explores Pope's allusions in the poem to Virgil and Milton, which have the effect, in Williams's view, of heightening the poem's seriousness.
      
      

    • Eloisa to Abelard

      • Gillian Beer, "'Our Unnatural No-voice': The Heroic Epistle, Pope, and Women's Gothic," Yearbook of English Studies 12 (1982): 125-51.
      • Susan Manning, "Eloisa's Abandonment," Cambridge Quarterly 22 (1993): 231-40.
      
      

    • Epistles to Several Persons (or Moral Essays)

      • Peter Dixon, The World of Pope's Satires: An Introduction to the Epistles and Imitations of Horace (London: Methuen, 1968).
      • Miriam Leranbaum, Alexander Pope's "Opus Magnum," 1729-1744 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). See above, under Essay on Man.
      • Robert W. Rogers, The Major Satires of Alexander Pope (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1955).
      • Earl Wasserman, Pope's "Epistle to Bathurst": A Critical Reading with an Edition of the Manuscripts.
      
      

    • An Essay on Criticism

      • David Morris has an excellent essay on this poem in Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984).
      • William Empson, "Wit in the Essay on Criticism," Hudson Review 2 (1950): 559-77.
      
      

    • An Essay on Man

      See also Maynard Mack's extensive Introduction in the Twickenham edition, volume 3.1.
      • Martin Kallich, Heav'n's First Law: Rhetoric and Order in Pope's "Essay on Man" (De Kalb: Northern Illionois Univ. Press, 1967).
      • Miriam Leranbaum, Alexander Pope's "Opus Magnum," 1729-1744 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). A study of the "ethic scheme" or "opus magnum" projected by Pope as the grand poetic work of his maturity. Only An Essay on Man and the four Epistles to Several Persons were actually completed. Gathers together evidence relating to Pope's plan and suggests that our understanding of the existing poems can be enriched by an awareness of the larger scheme.
      • A. D. Nuttall, Pope's "Essay on Man" (Unwin Critical Library) (London and Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1984).
      • Martin Price, To the Palace of Wisdom (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1964), pp. 129-42. Price, like Maynard Mack, is a perceptive and sympathetic reader of the Essay. For Mack's views, see his Introduction to volume 3.1 of the Twickenham edition (listed above).
      • Harry M. Solomon, The Rape of the Text: Reading and Misreading Pope's "Essay on Man" (Tuscaloosa and London: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1993). Argues that Pope's Essay, widely praised in his own time as a masterpiece of didactic poetry, has been "systematically misread" and "trivialized" in the twentieth century. Argues that the fault lies not with Pope but with our habits of reading: we need to learn anew how "to take philosophical poetry seriously as a genre."
      • Douglas H. White, Pope and the Context of Controversy: The Manipulation of Ideas in "An Essay on Man" (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970). Places the poem in the context of philosophical and theological controversies of the early eighteenth century. Fleshes out the contemporary intellectual context of the poem.
      
      

    • Imitations of Horace

      • Peter Dixon, The World of Pope's Satires: An Introduction to the "Epistles" and "Imitations of Horace" (London: Methuen, 1968).
      • Jacob Fuchs, Reading Pope's "Imitations of Horace" (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1989).
      • T. E. Maresca, Pope's Horatian Poems (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1966).
      • Robert W. Rogers, The Major Satires of Alexander Pope (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1955).
      • F. Stack, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985). Pope published his Horatian imitations alongside the original Latin poems of Horace. Stack explores in detail the complex intertextual relation between Horace's originals and Pope's imitations.
      • Richard Steiger, The English and Latin Texts of Pope's "Imitations of Horace," Garland Publications in English and American Literature (New York and London: Garland, 1988).
      
      

    • The Rape of the Lock

      In recent years, critics concerned with Pope's portrayal of and relations with women and with issues of gender in his writing have commented extensively on this poem: see the entries above, under "Pope, Women, and Gender." See also the editions of The Rape above, "Individual Works."
      • Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Interpretations: "The Rape of the Lock" (New York: Chelsea House, 1988). A handy collection of essays on the poem.
      • J. S. Cunningham, Pope: "The Rape of the Lock," Studies in English Literature No 2 (London: Edward Arnold, 1961).
      • Robert Halsband, "The Rape of the Lock" and Its Illustrations, 1714-1896 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). A study of the rich legacy of illustrations of the poem, which themselves constitute a set of readings or critical commentaries of the poem.
      • John Dixon Hunt, ed., Pope: "The Rape of the Lock," A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1968). An earlier, but still useful, compilation of essays.
      • The Rape of the Lock, Contexts 2, ed. William Kinsley (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1979). A collection of literary and historical documents from Pope's time and earlier that furnish a literary context for Pope's poem. A more recent collection of such documents is to be found in Cynthia Wall's 1998 edition of the poem.
      • Louis A. Landa, "Pope's Belinda, the General Emporie of the World, and the Wondrous Worm," South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (1971): 215-35.
      • G. S. Rousseau, ed., Twentieth-Century Interpretations of "The Rape of the Lock" (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969). Essays and commentary from the mid twentieth century.
      
      

    • Windsor-Forest

      • Vincent Caretta, "Anne and Elizabeth: The Poet as Historian in Windsor-Forest," Studies in English Literature 21 (1981): 425-37.
      • Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1960).

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