Top 10 Books About Alexander Pope

1. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Alexander Pope

by Alexander Pope. Kensington. From the publisher: "These memoirs and writings of Alexander Pope, the English poet. These writings were faithfully collected from authentic authors, original manuscripts, and the testimonies of many persons of credit and honor, adorned with the heads of many illustrious persons treated of in these memoirs, curiously engraved by the best hands."

2. Alexander Pope: The Evolution of a Poet

by Netta Murray Goldsmith. Ashgate Publishing. From the publisher: "Her goal is to reveal him as a man in relation to his intellectual peers, and to show how he succeeded so triumphantly as a poet, becoming celebrated throughout the western world during his lifetime."

3. The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia

by Pat Rogers. Greenwood Publishing Group. From the publisher: "Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the most important English poet of the 18th century, and many of his sayings are still quoted today. This reference is a comprehensive and convenient guide to his life and literary career."

4. Collected in Himself: Essays, Critical, Biographical and Bibliographical

by Maynard Mack. University of Delaware Press. From the publisher: "A collection of various essays about Pope and the eighteenth century written by Professor Mack during the past four decades. An appendix includes a finding list of books surviving from Pope's library and a selection of letters by, to, and about Pope, most of them unpublished."

5. Women's Place in Pope's World

by Valerie Rumbold. Cambridge University Press. From the publisher: "The poet's own alienation from the dominant culture (through religion, politics and physical handicap), and his troubled fascination with certain kinds of women, make this subject complex and compelling, with wide implications. Dr. Rumbold provides new insight, and shows how women with whom Pope dealt can themselves be seen as individuals with presence and dignity."

6. Alexander Pope

by Laura Brown. Blackwell Publishing. From the publisher: "This book asks us to rethink such a way of understanding Pope. Refusing to accept Pope's version of reality, Laura Brown reads his poems not for what they claim to say, but for what they rationalize away or fail to recognize."

7. Alexander Pope

by Alexander Pope and Douglas Brookes-Davies. Tuttle Publishing. From the publisher: "Pope has often been termed the first truly professional poet in English. He had an acute awareness of the traditions he inherited and a clear vision of where he stood in literary history."

8. Alexander Pope : Selected Letters

by Alexander Pope, and Howard Erskine-Hill (Editor). Oxford University Press. From the publisher: "The collection presented here is in the first place a balanced and varied selection from Sherburn. Since 1956, however, many new letters have been discovered, and this volume includes most of them. Many are among Pope's best, though they have till now been scattered in learned journals."

9. Contradiction Still: Representations of the Feminine in the Poetry of Pope

by Christa Knellwolf. Manchester University Press. From the publisher: "Christa Knellwolf approaches Pope's stylistic complexity revealing it as an effect of his engagement with a historical situation in which the position of women was one of the most prominent sources of ideological conflict."

10. Pope, Print, and Meaning

by James McLaverty. Oxford University Press. From the publisher: "This is the first study to take Pope's experiments in print as a guide to interpretation. Each chapter is devoted to a particular book or text and focuses on how Pope expresses meaning through print."