and other poems

Table of Contents

Preface

Contents

Introduction

"What led me into that," he told a friend long after, "was purely the want of money. I had then none; not even to buy books."

"What terrible moments," he said to Spence, "does one feel after one has engaged for a large work. In the beginning of my translating the Iliad, I wished anybody would hang me a hundred times. It sat so heavily on my mind at first that I often used to dream of it and do sometimes still."

"I had once thought of completing my ethic work in four books. — The first, you know, is on the Nature of Man [the Essay on Man]; the second would have been on knowledge and its limits — here would have come in an Essay on Education, part of which I have inserted in the Dunciad [i.e. in the Fourth Book, published in 1742]. The third was to have treated of Government, both ecclesiastical and civil — and this was what chiefly stopped my going on. I could not have said what I would have said without provoking every church on the face of the earth; and I did not care for living always in boiling water. — This part would have come into my Brutus [an epic poem which Pope never completed], which is planned already. The fourth would have been on Morality; in eight or nine of the most concerning branches of it."

"I never in my life knew a man that had so tender a heart for his particular friends, or a more general friendship for mankind. I have known him these thirty years; and value myself more for that man's love than"

"I am so certain of the soul's being immortal," he whispered, almost with his last breath, "that I seem to feel it within me, as it were by intuition."

Contents

Chief Dates In Pope's Life

Contents

The Rape of the Lock

An heroi-comical poem

Nolueram, Belinda, tuos violare capillos; Sed juvat, hoc precibus me tribuisse tuis. Mart, [Epigr, XII. 84.]

Canto V

Contents

An Essay on Criticism

Contents

Contents

An Essay on Criticism

Contents

An Essay on Man, Epistle I

The Design

Contents

Argument of Epistle I

Contents

Epistle I

Contents

Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot

Advertisement to the first publication of this Epistle

Contents

Epistle to Dr Arnuthnot

Contents

Ode on Solitude

Contents

The Descent of Dullness

from The Dunciad, Book IV.

Contents