- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Classics; New edition edition (25 April 1985)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140585087
- ISBN-13: 978-0140585087
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.4 x 1.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
146,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #59 in Books > Fiction > Poetry & Drama > Poetry > By Period > 16th to 18th Centuries
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Product Description
Review
?A literary colossus.?
?"The Economist"
?The Soviet superbard.?
?"Time"
?These poems beat and tumble and thrash with life.?
?"The Daily Telegraph" (London)
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
?"The Economist"
?The Soviet superbard.?
?"Time"
?These poems beat and tumble and thrash with life.?
?"The Daily Telegraph" (London)
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Product Description
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) is regarded by many as the most important poet of the early eighteenth century. An invalid from infancy, Pope devoted his energies towards literature and achieved remarkable success with his first published work at the age of 21. A succession of poems followed, including "An Essay on Criticism" (1711), "Windsor Forest" (1713), and his masterpiece "The Rape of the Lock" (1712). A second period of 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), feature in this selection. In his introduction - a defence of Pope's poetic practice - Pat Rogers argues that the Romantic conception of poetry as a record of fleeting and subjective states must be abandoned in order to understand Pope fully. Instead, he should be seen as an accomplished practitioner of the poetry of ideas and of satirical reflection on human society.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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First Sentence
First in these fields I try the sylvan strains, Nor blush to sport on Windsor's blissful plains : Fair Thames, flow gently from thy sacred spring, While on thy banks Sicilian Muses sing; Let vernal airs through trembling osiers play, And Albion's cliffs resound the rural lay. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
First in these fields I try the sylvan strains, Nor blush to sport on Windsor's blissful plains : Fair Thames, flow gently from thy sacred spring, While on thy banks Sicilian Muses sing; Let vernal airs through trembling osiers play, And Albion's cliffs resound the rural lay. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
An thoroughly enjoyable read if you enjoy poetry. I had never read any of Pope's work before and found myself wanting to study more about him after this read.
15 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a good selection of Pope's poems -- perhaps containing his best work. (Although a complete edition, such as John Butt's one-volume compression of the massive -- and Dunciadical -- Twickenham edition, will contain more pleasures, including Pope's occasional poetry, some of which is very good.)
The introduction is unusually good, a rumbustuous defence of Pope against the long-standing (and surely fading) conception of poetry as simple, sensuous and whatever: the Palgravian imprisonment of poetry into the idealistic lyric.
Pope's poems are, of course, fantastic. (Although I'm not sure that I feel as much for them as I do for a few other poets' work: lack of experience? or does Pope, for all his gifts, really lack some of the -- what? -- inwardness? tenderness? yielding attitude to life that poetry embodied for the Romantics?) I haven't learnt to love 'Windsor Forest' (Pope seems here -- and elsewhere -- to have learnt from Ben Jonson, whose 'To Penshurt' is perhaps the originator of this genre), and confess that 'The Rape of the Lock' is too refined for my taste. The humour in 'The Dunciad' seems to stretch much further -- such as the diving into the river in Book Two (surely taken from Jonson's concluding poem in his 'Epigrams') where one dunce relates how the mud-nymphs ("Nigrina black, and Merdamente brown") fell in love with him.
Pope's verse-letters and satires are fantastic too: crisp, like nothing else in English. (The epigramaic sharpness, and concern for making satire a work of art, again more akin to Jonson than Dryden.) Passages like this description of a Lord's library:
His study! with what authors is it stored?
In books, not authors, curious in my lord;
To all their dated backs he turns you round:
These Aldus printed, those De Suel has bound.
Lo some are vellum, and the rest as good
For all his Lordship knows, but they are wood.
-- Or this devasting portrait of a bluestocking:
Wise wretch! with pleasures too refined to please,
With too much spirit to be e'er at ease,
With too much quickness ever to be taught,
With too much thinking to have common thought,
You purchaise pain with all that joy can give,
And die of nothing but a rage to live.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Having only read these three poems I still must whole heartedly recommend others to them. He not only writes engaging and politically charged poems like Windsor Forest, but also has an amazing gift as a poet. Eloise to Abelard, is a touching homage to a 14th century legend of two lovers and beautiful to read.
This contains also the Dunciad and so contains his main poetical works as well as some lesser known ones. I would recommend this over the Oxford World Classics - complete works of Pope.
This contains also the Dunciad and so contains his main poetical works as well as some lesser known ones. I would recommend this over the Oxford World Classics - complete works of Pope.
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