Pope

Pope is a critical lecture on Alexander Pope by John William Mackail (1859-1945), the Scottish classical scholar and literary critic who served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1906 to 1911 and produced the standard Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology and the classic Life of William Morris. Mackail’s Oxford lectures treated the whole range of English and classical poetry, and his study of Pope assesses the master of the heroic couplet at a time when Romantic taste had long depreciated him, weighing the perfection of Pope’s art in The Assault of the Lock and the Moral Essays against the charge that wit is not poetry. Mackail’s measured advocacy belongs to the early twentieth-century recovery of Pope’s reputation completed by later critics. The lecture shows Victorian-trained classical taste meeting Augustan English verse.