ABSTRACT
‘To the Author of a Poem, intitled, Successio’ was first published on 20 May 1712. On 9 April of that year Lintot had paid Pope £3 16s 6d for this poem and the two previous items (Foxon 1991: 35; McLaverty 2001: 17), and it first appeared in Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, as the second (the first being ‘On Silence’) of ‘two | Copies of Verses, | written | Some Years since in Imitation of the style of | Two Persons of Quality. | By the same Hand’. (For further discussion of the extent of Pope’s role in the publication of Miscellaneous Poems see Headnote to ‘The First Book of Statius’.) The third edition of Miscellaneous Poems (1720), published when Pope was very much more eminent, makes explicit the attribution to him – ‘By Mr. Pope’ – and the poem is included in the opening section of 18 poems all by Pope, and identified as such in the Index. However, Pope did not include it among his own Works, and it did not appear as part of an edition of his writings until the second volume of William Roscoe’s edition in 1824.
