Poetical Works (Oxford Paperbacks) - Tapa blanda

Reseña del editor

This edition, first published in 1966, contains all of Pope's poems, except for his translations from Homer, scraps of verse originally included in letters, and poems of doubtful attribution. It also includes Pope's own notes, the 1728 edition of The Dunciad, and the 1712 edition of The Rape of the Lock. Davis has provided a text which attempts to follow Pope's latest wishes both in substance and accidentals. He has taken as his copy text the late quartos of The Dunciad in 1743, the Essay on Man and the Essay on Criticism in February 1744, and the Epistles in May 1744. For the rest he has followed the 1751 text, which he has collated with the earlier editions.

Reseña del editor

Alexander Pope's exceptional talent and fierce ambition made him England's first truly professional poet. His writings are the finest poetic expression of the ideals of an age in which cultured taste insisted above all on elegance of form - whether demonstrated in a handsomely proportional building, a landscaped garden, or a graceful couplet. Pope's mastery of language enabled him to praise, mock, censure, or moralize with equal skill. He could prick the balloon of conceit with a single line or redeploy the entire paraphernalia of the classical epic to bemoan the loss of a lock of hair or to unmask pretentiousness and false values. The formal harmony and balance of his poems reflect a profound sense of moral order, enlisting wit and satire as correctives to vanity and pompousness.

This edition contains all of Pope's poems, except his translations from Homer. The editor, Herbert Davis, has selected texts which follow Pope's latest wishes both in substance and accidentals, and has also included Pope's own annotations. Pat Rogers, Debartolo Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Florida, has written an introduction for this paperback edition.