Alexander Pope: Selected Letters

Alexander Pope's letters are fascinating documents, revealing his remarkable character. This selection of his letters comprises a body of writing of interest for an understanding of his times, its personalities, scandals, religious, political and philosophical ideas and its sense of poetry.
Alexander Pope's letters are fascinating documents, apart from his importance as a poet. Highly revealing of his remarkable character - ambitious, dangerous, trimming, ridiculous, intelligent, generous yet antagonistic - they also comprise a body of writing of extraordinary interest for an understanding of his times: its personalities, its plots, its tragedies and exiles, its loves, its scandals, the movement of its religious, political and philosophical ideas, its sense of poetry, and its notions of poetic craft and genre Moreover, Pope published a collection of his own letters: a selective and highly edited collection, in which (having retrieved the originals from some recipients) he revised their texts and on occasion claimed they had been written to other people. This came to light with the 19th-century discovery of transcripts of the original letters, made for Pope's correspondent Lord Caryll. Other letters preserved in the British Library's Homer MS are clearly ones the poet would not have chosen to keep, since he used their backs for drafts of his Iliad translation.