ABSTRACT
The Dunciad is Alexander Pope's most ambitious, deeply felt, contentious and, some would say, seriously flawed poem. It was a continuing part of Pope's imaginative life in a way that no other of his compositions were although some of them, particularly An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, can be seen as expressions of cognate concern. The first version was published in May 1728 and the fourth, and last, in October 1743, just six months before Pope's death. Although The Dunciad had been published anonymously there was never much doubt as to its authorship. The Dunciad is not a mere personal brawl, or unseemly public display of private hostility. Pope has done what any artist does: he has taken the experiences he lived through and transformed them into a fictional account. The Dunciad makes an interesting comparison with a poem written nearly two hundred years later, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
