Alexander Pope In The Reign Of Queen Anne

This is the first collection of essays since George Sherburn’s landmark monograph The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1934) to reconsider how the most important and influential poet of eighteenth-century Britain fashioned his early career. The volume covers Pope’s writings from across the reign of Queen Anne and just beyond. It focuses, in particular, on his interaction with the courtly culture constellated round the Queen. It examines, for instance, his representations of Queen Anne herself, his portrayals of politics and patronage under her reign, his negotiations with current literary theory, with the classical tradition, with chronologically distant yet also contemporaneous English poets, with current thought on the passions, and with membership of a religious minority. In doing so, it comprehensively reconsiders anew the ways in which Pope, increasingly supportive of Anne’s rule and mindful of the Virgilian rota, sought at first to realise his authorial aspirations.

The book gives a complete account of Pope's life and work in his early twenties, and supplies a new political interpretation, including a careful analysis of possible Jacobite colourings."--Jacket.

The cultural highlights of the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) have long been overlooked. However, recent scholarship, including the present volume, is demonstrating that Anne has been seriously underestimated, both as a person, and as a monarch, and that there was much cultural activity of note in what might be called an interim period, coming after the deaths of Dryden and Purcell but before the blossoming of Pope and Handel, after the glories of Baroque architecture but before the triumph of Burlingtonian neoclassicism. The authors of Queen Anne and the Arts make a case for Anne’s reign as a time of experimentation and considerable accomplishment in new genres, some of which developed, some of which faded away. The volume includes essays on the music, drama, poetry, quasi-operas, political pamphlets, and architecture, as well as on newer genres, such as coin and medal collecting, hymns, and poetical miscellanies, all produced during Anne’s reign.

Pope's life as a writer falls into three periods, answering fairly enough to the three reigns in which he worked. Under Queen Anne he was an original poet, but made little money by his verses; under George I. he was chiefly a translator, and made much money by satisfying the French-classical taste with versions of the "Iliad" and "Odyssey." Under George I. he also edited Shakespeare, but with little profit to himself; for Shakespeare was but a Philistine in the eyes of the French-classical critics. But as the eighteenth century grew slowly to its work, signs of a deepening interest in the real issues of life distracted men's attention from the culture of the snuff-box and the fan. As Pope's genius ripened, the best part of the world in which he worked was pressing forward, as a mariner who will no longer hug the coast but crowds all sail to cross the storms of a wide unknown sea. Pope's poetry thus deepened with the course of time, and the third period of his life, which fell within the reign of George II., was that in which he produced the "Essay on Man," the "Moral Essays," and the "Satires." These deal wholly with aspects of human life and the great questions they raise, according throughout with the doctrine of the poet, and of the reasoning world about him in his latter day, that "the proper study of mankind is Man."

This volume is the first to discuss the canon of Pope’s verse in relation to Early British Enlightenment thinking about mythology and mythography. Pope did not merely use classical (along with non-classical) mythology in his verse as a traditional, richly diverse medium through which to represent the diversity of private and civic life in his day, but he was an ambitious translator as well as refashioner of myth. It is a medium that he shapes anew and variously across all his major poems. This volume enhances appreciation of myth as a mode of apprehension as well as expression throughout Pope’s verse. In doing so it illuminates how, in early eighteenth-century Britain, understandings of what myth is and what it does were taking new directions – not least in response to Baconian thought and its legacy.

This title was first published in 2002: Making use of the growing body of research in recent years on the nature of creativity, Netta Goldsmith here presents a new view of the famous poet whose personality has long frustrated scholars as elusive. Goldsmith tells the story of Pope's life so as to show the factors-personal and public, psychological and social-which shaped his character and enabled him to secure widespread recognition as a major poet. Discussions of significant works are integrated into the narrative covering main events and key relationships, as well as illustrating points made throughout about Pope's approach to his art. Among other things this book shows how vulnerable Pope felt as a Papist in a time of endemic Jacobite activity, and how his fear of possible prosecution for sedition determined much of his conduct and the way he shaped his career. Alexander Pope: The evolution of a poet not only provides a fresh perspective on Pope, but also on the very nature of literary creativity.