ABSTRACT
The Rape of the Lock has long been regarded as Alexander Pope's best-loved and most charming poem. Pope's imagination was more inventive, exuberant and original, and his language more brilliantly responsive in this poem than in any other he wrote. There are levels of seriousness in The Rape of the Lock, particularly in the criticism of the social and the economic mores of eighteenth-century English life, that have been well elaborated by modern critics. But there is also a joyousness in the poem very different from anything else in Pope's poetry. The place, time and action of The Rape of the Lock are each highly compressed. On one level The Rape of the Lock is a lighthearted satire on the ritual surrounding eighteenth-century English high-society courtship. At another level The Rape of the Lock is less lighthearted, touching on a world of violence and aggression beneath the dazzling surface of the world of society life.
