ABSTRACT
The introduction explains the book’s purpose: to provide a comprehensive reconsideration of how the most important and influential poet of eighteenth-century Britain, Alexander Pope, fashioned his early career. It then offers an example of how Pope positions himself amidst recent poetic contemporaries by making use, in his own way, of a ‘rhetoric of sovereignty’ that had been a familiar way of engaging with the court-centred literary culture constellated around the monarch. Finally, it outlines the chapters of the book and some connections between them.
