ABSTRACT
Alexander Pope had always kept his literary reputation in mind. He sought critical esteem, from the time he arrived in London with a manuscript of the Pastorals, right up to those final years when he chose Warburton as his editor, in the belief that this ponderous scholar was the man who would see that his reputation endured. During the middle decades of the twentieth century Pope enjoyed a renaissance, at least in academic circles, as a number of distinguished scholars edited everything he had written and elucidated, sympathetically for the most part, his major poems. Pope's ideas, formed two and a half centuries ago, are still challenging. Pope has often been praised as technical virtuoso in his flexible use of what might at first seem a somewhat inflexible verse form. Pope also had a sense of theatre, which enabled him to create entertaining scenes, full of movement.
