Abstract:
Excerpt from The Rape of the Lock, and Other Poems of Alexander Pope: Edited With Notes and Introduction
By the beginning of the eighteenth century much had been accomplished by the poets of England: Chaucer had portrayed actual life, Spenser had revealed his rich imagination. Shakespeare had revealed in the ideal and the romantic, and Milton in the religious; but as yet no great poet had arisen to express the fashionable and conventional life which to England was a new phenomenon and the direct result of the infusion of French ideas and customs into the court of Charles II. It is because Pope became the exponent of this phase of English life that he became the literary autocrat of his own day, and even now occupies an important place in the history of English poetry.
