ABSTRACT
‘To a Young Lady, with the Works of Voiture’ was first published on 20 May 1712. The title in the 1735 Works states that the poem was ‘Written at 17 years old’, which would place it around 1705, when a new translation of Voiture was published by Samuel Briscoe and others, perhaps constituting the gift of the title (see further below). One of Pope’s earliest letters, based on one by Voiture and dating from 1704 (Corr., I.4), is addressed to an unnamed woman, supposedly to accompany the gift of a book. However, there is no other evidence for composition at this early date, and it appears more likely (Ault 1949: 49–56) that versions of the poem were in Pope’s mind somewhat later than this, particularly in 1709–10. Pope was perhaps encouraged in his reading of the French writer by Wycherley, who alludes to Voiture in letters to Pope of 6 December 1707 and 13 November 1708 (Corr., I.34 and 53). Pope’s extended comparison of life to a play in his letter to Cromwell of 29 August 1709 (Corr. I.70–1) appears like a prose summary of lines 21–8 of the poem (see Commentary). On 24 June 1710 Pope sent Cromwell a suggestive ‘Rondeau’ based (without identification) on a short poem of Voiture’s, and this evidently enjoyed a certain manuscript circulation amongst Pope’s male acquaintance, though it did not appear in print until 1726 (Corr., I.90). (The poem is a short act of witty revenge against a woman, perhaps Teresa Blount, who had mocked his diminutive stature.) Cromwell identified the source in his letter of 3 August 1710, and Pope’s reply, 12 October 1710, offered further Voiture-inspired persiflage (Corr., I.95, 98). On 5 December 1710 (Corr., I.109) Cromwell wrote to Pope in response to what is evidently a circulated version of the present poem, since it quotes from line 8:
Your Poem shews you to be, what you say of Voiture, with Books well-bred: The state of the Fair, tho’ satirical, is touch’d with that delicacy and gallantry, that not the Court of Augustus, nor — But hold, I shall lose what I lately recover’d, your opinion of my Sincerity; yet I must say, ’tis as faultless as the Fair to whom ’tis address’d, be she never so perfect. The M.G. [‘major-general’, John Tidcombe] . . . transcrib’d it by lucubration: From some discourse of yours, he thought your inclination led you to (what the men of fashion call Learning) Pedantry; but now he says he has no less, I assure you, than a Veneration for you.
