John Dryden, editor, Poetical Miscellanies: The Sixth Part, sixth in a series of anthologies published by Jacob Tonson from 1684 to this year The 752-page volume, printed on thin paper without book covers, the dimensions of which were "roughly that of a middling-sized modern paperback". Publication had been repeatedly delayed. According to Maynard Mack, the book, like most modern anthologies, "featured mainly the work of writers born to be forgotton", although it included two poems by Jonathan Swift and three by Alexander Pope.
* A Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners, published anonymously "by a person of quality"
Alexander Pope's career launched in ''Poetical Miscellanies''
On May 2, Alexander Pope's career as a poet was launched with the publication of the anthology Poetical Miscellanies, The Sixth Part, edited by John Dryden. The publisher, Jacob Tonson, had solicited poems from Pope for the volume three years before; but publication was delayed and finally occurred three weeks before Pope's 21st birthday. Pope did not visit London at the time of publication, instead travelling there in June. Tonson was a hard bargainer, and paid Pope 13 guineas, for the young man's verses. Pope would eventually become a hard bargainer himself in dealing with publishers, and although he became good friends with Tonson, he hardly ever wrote for him again. Pope's January and May; Or, The Merchant's Tale, a story about a young wife and the old husband she cuckolds retold part of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales : The poet also contributed a translation, The Episode of Sarpedon, Translated from the Twelfth and Sixteenth Books of Homer's Iliads. John Denham, a poet of Dryden's generation, had written the best-known translation of Sarpedon's speech. According to the 20th-century critic and Pope biographer Maynard Mack, Pope's version shined in comparison, and when both versions were weighed together, "the coffee-house critics must have sensed that a new star of some magnitude was rising in their sky". But the four Pastorals which concluded the volume, would have been the works on which Pope pinned most of his hopes for recognition, according to Mack, because the genre was what Virgil and various Renaissance critics deemed a proper first test for an aspiring poet. On May 17, Pope's friend, Wycherley, wrote to him that "all the best Judges like your part of the Book so well, that the rest is lik'd the worse". Pope wrote back three days later, referring to Tonson's low payments but valuable publicizing :
Births
Death years link to the corresponding " in poetry" article:
