miscellaneous poems translations hands von pope alexander (1 Ergebnisse)

8vo, engraved frontispiece and pp. [viii], 320; [353]-376, [8] advertisements; bound in old sprinkled calf, gilt, rebacked, spine gilt, red morocco labels; edges gilt, marbled endpapers. A sound copy. First edition of one of the most important miscellanies of the early 18th century, almost certainly edited by Pope, as was first proposed by Norman Ault in his New Light on Pope (1948). Most notable here is the first appearance of Pope's Rape of the Locke [sic], in two cantos (pp. 353-376); the poem was subsequently expanded to five cantos, and printed separately in 1714. 'The story of its composition is well known. John Caryll, something of a mediating figure among the Catholic gentry of the time, was sufficiently disturbed by an estrangement caused between the Petre and Fermor families when Robert Lord Petre cut a love-lock from the pretty head of Arabella Fermor that he asked Pope to write something to make a jest of the incident, 'and laugh them together'.' (Maynard Mack, p. 248). There is no evidence that Pope had ever met Miss Fermor, portrayed here as Belinda. The poem adopts the conventions of mock-heroic, and represents, in an essentially affectionate though sometimes daring way, the absurdities of the fashionable world, where trifles were liable to be magnified to epic proportions. Six other pieces by Pope are first printed in this volume: (i) The First Book of Statius his Thebaid (pp. 1-56); (ii) The Fable of Vertumnus and Pomona; from the fourteenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses (pp. 129-136); (iii) To a Young Lady, with the Works of Voiture (pp. 137-142); (iv) Two copies of Verses, written some years since in imitation of the style of two persons of quality (pp. 143-146); (v) To the Author of a Poem, intitled Successio (pp. 147-148); and (vi) Verses design'd to be prefix'd to Mr. Lintott's Miscellany (pp. 174-175). The last of these is not signed, but was claimed by Pope in a letter to his friend Henry Cromwell, first printed by Edmund Curll in 1727. The volume also includes contributions from Matthew Prior, John Gay, William Broome, Edmund Smith, Elijah Fenton, and several others. There are in addition two modernisations of Chaucer by the late Thomas Betterton, who died in 1710. Pope had known Betterton since his boyhood, and it is likely that he had a hand in polishing the two poems for publication, as he was paid £5 7s 6d for his efforts, a sum he turned over to Betterton's widow, a day or two before her own death. Various scholars have claimed that the gap in pagination in this volume can be explained by Pope's late withdrawal of Windsor Forest and the Ode for Musick, which he had decided to publish separately. Foxon rejects this hypothesis, and argues convincingly that the irregularity was caused by the fact that portions of the volume were printed separately, so that Pope could rewrite in proof, as had been done with Tonson's miscellany in 1709. Griffith 6; Case 260 (1)(a); Rothschild 1565.