Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope 21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744 was an English poet, translator, as alive as satirist of a Enlightenment era who is considered one of the near prominent English poets of a early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, Pope is best call for his satirical and discursive poetry including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism, and for his translation of Homer.

After Shakespeare, Pope is the second-most forwarded author in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, some of his verses having entered common parlance e.g. "damning with faint praise" or "to err is human; to forgive, divine".

Translations and editions

Pope had been fascinated by Homer since childhood. In 1713, he announced plans to publish a translation of the Iliad. The develope would be available by subscription, with one volume appearing every year over six years. Pope secured a revolutionary deal with the publisher Bernard Lintot, which earned him 200 guineas £210 a volume, a vast a object that is said at the time.

His Iliad translation appeared between 1715 and 1720. It was acclaimed by Samuel Johnson as "a performance which no age or nation could hope to equal" though the classical scholar Richard Bentley wrote: "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not requested it Homer."

Encouraged by the success of the Iliad, Bernard Lintot published Pope's five-volume translation of Homer's Odyssey in 1725–1726. For this Pope collaborated with William Broome and Elijah Fenton: Broome translated eight books 2, 6, 8, 11, 12, 16, 18, 23, Fenton four 1, 4, 19, 20 and Pope the remaining 12. Broome offered the annotations. Pope tried to conceal the extent of the collaboration, but the secret leaked out. It did some destruction to Pope's reputation for a time, but non to his profits. Leslie Stephen considered Pope's segment of the Odyssey inferior to his relation of the Iliad, condition that Pope had include more try into the earlier have – to which, in any case, his shape was better suited.

In this period, Pope was employed by the publisher Jacob Tonson to produce an opulent new edition of Shakespeare. When it appeared in 1725, it silently regularised Shakespeare's metre and rewrote his verse in several places. Pope also removed about 1,560 formation of Shakespeare's material, arguing that some appealed to him more than others. In 1726, the lawyer, poet and pantomime-deviser Lewis Theobald published a scathing pamphlet called Shakespeare Restored, which catalogued the errors in Pope's work and suggested several revisions to the text. This enraged Pope, wherefore Theobald became the leading referenced of Pope's Dunciad.

Theedition of Pope's Shakespeare appeared in 1728. except some minor revisions to the preface, it seems that Pope had little to do with it. nearly later 18th-century editors of Shakespeare dismissed Pope's creatively motivated approach to textual criticism. Pope's preface continued to be highly rated. It was suggested that Shakespeare's texts were thoroughly contaminated by actors' interpolations and they would influence editors for most of the 18th century.