Alexander Pope

21 May 1688 - 30 May 1744

Standard Name: Pope, Alexander

As well as being a translator, critic, and letter-writer, AP was the major poetic voice of the earlier eighteenth century, an influence on almost everyone who wrote poetry during his lifetime or for some years afterwards.

Full profile

Connections

Connections	Author name Sort descending	Excerpt
Friends, Associates	Judith Cowper Madan	The poems that Judith Cowper wrote as an unmarried young woman suggest that she moved easily both in court and in literary circles. She probably met the poet Alexander Pope in Jervas 's studio. Pope...
Textual Production	Judith Cowper Madan	The Family Miscellany, collected and transcribed by JCM 's brother Ashley Cowper , dated 1747 and now British Library MS Add. 28,101, includes plenty of poems by Ashley himself and plenty more ascribed to...
Textual Features	Judith Cowper Madan	Though often submissive in attitudes, JCM was capable of satire or lampoon. The Receipt, an Imitation, dating from about 1720, lists the unsavoury ingredients that go to compose a blockhead Cambridge clergyman (as Pope
Textual Features	Judith Cowper Madan	Her birthday poem mocks herself as Insipid and a Trifler. She does not care for grandeur; and is Not apt to Love, but is sacred Friendship's Slave. She boasts the friendship of Pope and...
Publishing	Judith Cowper Madan	Pattison died of smallpox in July this year, aged about twenty-one. Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/. Subscribers to his posthumous poems included Pope , Lady Hertford , Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , Laurence Eusden , Matthew Concanen , and Anthony Hammond
Textual Features	Judith Cowper Madan	The poem in its later version, headed with a quotation from Virgil , opens: Unequal, how shall I the search begin, / Or paint with artless hand the awful scene? Concanen, Matthew, editor. The Flower-Piece. Walthoe. 130 JCM calls on the...
Textual Production	Judith Cowper Madan	Judith Cowper's To Mr Pope —Written in his Works, 1720, composed for Pope's first published collection of his poetry (1717), and transcribed by Ashley Cowper , appeared in print the year after The Flower-Piece...
Literary responses	Judith Cowper Madan	In Pope 's lines Cowper (mild, sober, serene, virgin) thus becomes the acceptable female poet, in contrast with the unacceptable Montagu, who shines, glares, and strikes the eye. Rumbold, Valerie. “The Poetic Career of Judith Cowper: An Exemplary Failure?”. Pope, Swift, and Women Writers, edited by Donald C. Mell, University of Delaware Press, pp. 48-66. 53 Since...
Textual Production	Judith Cowper Madan	Five hundred of JCM 's letters survive in manuscript. The correspondence between her and her husband both before and after marriage (about 350 letters, from 13 October 1723) is held by the Bodleian Library (MS...
Textual Features	Judith Cowper Madan	Her courtship letters, says Rumbold, are insecure, unhappy, and demanding. Rumbold, Valerie. “The Poetic Career of Judith Cowper: An Exemplary Failure?”. Pope, Swift, and Women Writers, edited by Donald C. Mell, University of Delaware Press, pp. 48-66. 62 She later sometimes discussed books with her husband: she admired Richardson 's Pamela for its power over the emotions and also its power to...
Literary responses	Judith Cowper Madan	JCM reaped a good deal of praise during her lifetime, but most of it must have been of questionable value to her as a poet. Pope 's To Erinna is typical in casting her as...
Literary responses	Delarivier Manley	Swift also, like his erstwhile allies Addison and Steele , was spurred by DM 's example to consternation over women's growing political activity. Though he was personally her friend, Swift undoubtedly aimed partly at her...
Literary responses	Delarivier Manley	The Atalantis was read in several conflicting ways. Pope used it in his Rape of the Lock to exemplify the brief reading fads of the fashionable female world which was drawn to it because it...
Intertextuality and Influence	Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington	The fictitious narrator begins by observing that while some may consider the story of someone of her station devoid of interest, she has been in contact all her life with cultivated ladies of the highest...
Textual Features	Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington	The elderly lady, Lady Arabella, represents a chilly view of the English aristocracy. She opens her story with a paean in praise of past times and in dispraise of the present: How interminably long the...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

No bibliographical results available.