The Poems of Alexander Pope

Book excerpt: A splendid presentation of Pope’s poems, excluding only his translations of Homer, this is the only one-volume edition that can lay claim to completeness and accuracy of text. It presents the corpus of Pope’s poetry as printed in the highly praised Twickenham Edition, except for the 1712 version of The Rape of the Lock and other early versions of phrases preserved in the critical apparatus of the six-volume work. Pope’s own notes to his poems are included, as well as a generous selection of the copious annotation in the Twickenham text. This reduced version of the unsurpassed standard edition of Pope will be of great value to all students and teachers of English literature. John Butt, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University, is general editor of the Twickenham Edition. "The publishers are surely right in claiming that 'this should for long remain the standard one-volume edition of Pope's poems.' The Twichenham edition . . . has been a splendid achievement, and Professor Butt's distillation of the long labours of his fellow-editors is most commendable."—Times Literary Supplement.