Yasmine Gooneratne’s Alexander Pope is a compact critical study of one of the eighteenth century’s sharpest poets: satirist, translator, formal technician and professional irritant.

Gooneratne follows the development of his style across the poems, asking how wit, irony, feeling and social judgement are compressed into an extraordinarily controlled verse form. His admiration for epic scale sits beside a temperament much better suited to ambiguity, mockery and the exposure of human vanity; Gooneratne reads that friction as productive rather than incidental. The discussion moves through the early poetry, Windsor Forest, Eloisa to Abelard, the Homer translations, satires and later work, showing form as something Pope continually negotiates rather than simply masters once and repeats. Short, serious literary criticism from the era when introductory studies still assumed the reader might actually want an argument.

Cambridge University Press, 1976. First edition. Paperback. Part of the British Authors: Introductory Critical Studies series. Light rubbing and shelf wear to covers, minor edge and corner wear, with a small crease to the lower front cover. Pages lightly age-toned but clean; binding sound.