ABSTRACT
‘On a Fan of the Author’s Design’ was first published on 4 November 1712. The poem appeared anonymously in Addison and Steele’s The Spectator , no. 527, towards the end of the periodical’s life (it ceased on 6 December). Ault (PW, I) ascribes to Pope twelve contributions to the periodical, of which this would be the eleventh. The authorship of the poem was acknowledged by its inclusion in Pope’s Works of 1717. There is no direct evidence for the date of the poem’s composition. In the third volume of the Works of 1736, Pope collected a group of nine short poems (first published separately between 1717 and 1727) together under the title ‘IMITATIONS of ENGLISH POETS’; in the Works of 1741 ‘On a Fan’ was added to this group, whereby it aquired its identity as an imitation of Waller. The ‘Advertisement’ in the 1736 Works states that the ‘Imitations of English Authors [. . .] were done [. . .] some of them at fourteen or fifteen Years old’, and the title page to the group adds the note ‘Done by the Author in his Youth’. Five other imitations of Waller (and one of Cowley) that Pope published in his anonymous 1717 miscellany, Poems on Several Occasions, are there designated as ‘By a Youth of thirteen’ (Ault 1935). These indications, if accurate, would place drafts of this type of prentice work in about 1701–3. Pope quotes three lines of Waller in a discussion of pauses in verse lines in a purported letter to Walsh of 22 October 1706 (Corr., I.23); though the date of this is uncertain, it is certain that Pope had a strong sense of Waller’s style by this time. On 21 August 1712 (Corr., I.97) he sent to Cromwell ‘some Verses of my Youth, or rather Childhood; which (as I was a great admirer of Waller) were intended in Imitation of his Manner’; in the next letter (12 October, Corr., I.98) it appears that Cromwell has been scanning Waller for Pope’s models, without success; but this exchange could refer to any of the ‘Waller’ set.
