ABSTRACT
Pope's most perfect achievement is also in some ways his most fanciful creation. It seems clear that Pope's chief aim was to take up an excellent poetic opportunity. Pope has devised a symbol of extraordinarily rich poetic implication. Of all the additions he made in the second version, which include the entire mythology of sylphs and gnomes, it is the Cave of Spleen at the start of Canto IV which best reveals Pope's capacity to pack dense human implication into fantastic visions. Pope was the last great poet who could confront his own destiny through allegorical description as well as through personal confession. Pope had now reached a turning point in his career. His main activities for the next decade were to lie in the margins of creative writing-translating Homer, editing Shakespeare, parodying the wits in Scri-blerian farce. The maze of fancy was now about to dissolve.
