The first part of this book traces, in a series of short extracts, the changes in taste and critical judgment that have affected Pope's reputation as a poet over two centuries. In his own lifetime he was praised and idolized by his friends and by the literary world in general. At the same time he was scorned and attacked by his enemies (John Dennis, for example) with an extraordinary force of personal spite and venom. Both friends and enemies were as concerned to defend or attack his morals and his character as to assess the poems themselves. In the second part of the book, Editor O'Neill has had three aims in mind. First, to give the student a collection of essays that would help him to enjoy and understand a good range of Pope's poetry, so something on each of the major poems has been included, or at least on each kind of poem. Second, she has tried to give something from each of the more distinguished names in recent Pope criticism - George Sherburn, for example, Maynard Mack, Edward Niles Hooker, Ian Jack, R. A. Brower - as well as work from some lesser known but often equally perceptive critics. O'Neill's third aim has been to give some idea of the different kinds of recent criticism on Pope, encouraging the student to approach the poems in several quite different ways. Included among the perspectives given are insights into "nature" and "wit" in Pope's work, the philosophical ideas and meanings in the poems, the historical and intellectual climate of Pope's time, his patterns of imagery and meaning, his enriching and subtle allusions to ancient classical writers, and, as in S. L. Goldberg's essay, an assessment of Pope's work as a whole, with its sharp and carefully argued distinctions between the less successful poems and the best. This book is Volume 3 in the Readings in Literary Criticism series.
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