Alexander Pope

Pope's letters are fascinating documents, apart from his importance as a poet. Highly revealing of his remarkable character--ambitious, dangerous, trimming, ridiculous, intelligent, generous yet antagonistic--they also comprise a body of writing of extraordinary interest for an understanding of his times: its personalities, its plots, its tragedies and exiles, its loves, its scandals, the movement of its religious, political, and philosophical ideas, its sense of poetry, and its notions of poeti