ALEXANDER POPE by Peter Quennell. 278 pages. Stein and Day. $7.95. Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipp’d me in ink, my parents’ or my own? Alexander Pope left his own question unanswered, but ...

THE time is long past when Alexander Pope was identified with his least impressive verse, and having been the eighteenth century’s supreme English poet, was adjudged in the nineteenth no poet at all.

ALEXANDER POPE—Edith Sitwell—Cosmopolitan ($4). Says Poet Edith Sitwell of Poet Pope: “I may say, with the deepest humility, what Pope is reputed to have said of Dryden: ‘Had I been born early enough, ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Despite the ubiquity of the usage, it was not always so: John Dryden and Alexander Pope did not speak of a poet’s ...