Alexander Pope Author:Bonamy Dobree This study of Alexander Pope is both biographical and critical. In writing briefly of a life so crammed with incident, with Homeric battles and domestic squabbles, a selection had to be made, and Mr. Dobree chose those facts which seemed most to bear on the poet's development and his final utterances. — Pope's career is followed from the early da... more »ys in Windsor Forest, where he rode with Sir William Trumbull and talked about poetry, through his brilliant days in London, so full of tumult as he fought for his position, to the final calm of his days at Twickenham, surrounded by friends whom he entertained in his grotto.
Dr. Dobree gives a vivid picture of Pope, with his 'fiery bright and dauntless spirit', battling against the terrific odds of his crippling disease. He reveals, not only the searing satirist and the self-protective, sensitive being screening himself by 'genteel equivocation', but the poet of integrity, the warm friend, the generous giver and the devoted son. Though Pope is treated here in a spirit of just detachment, a figure emerges for whim the chief feeling is one of affection for the man combined with high admiration of the poet.
Bonamy Dobree, Professor of English Literature at the University of Leeds (1936-1955), and part editor of the Oxford History of English Literature, is biographer of several of Alexander Pope's contemporaries, or near contemporaries - including Sarah Churchill, William Penn, Lord Chesterfield, John Wesley, Giacomo Casanova - and author of studies on Restoration tragedy as well as of English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century 1700-1740 (Volume VII of The Oxford History of English Literature).« less