SOURCE: "Pope," in Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry, George W. Stewart Publishers, Inc., 1947, pp. 68-100.

Leavis was an influential contemporary English critic. In the following excerpt, he suggest paths toward a more judicious, comprehensive assessment of Pope's accomplishment than was generally accorded it during the nineteenth century.

Pope has had bad luck. Dryden, fortunate in the timeliness of Mr. Mark Van Doren's book, was enlisted in the argument against the nineteenth century. It was an opportunity; the cause was admirable and Homage to John Dryden admirably served it (though Mr. Eliot, who—or so it seems to me—has always tended to do Dryden something more than justice, was incidentally, perhaps accidentally, unfair to Pope). The homage announcing, on the other hand, Pope's rehabilitation was left to Bloomsbury, and Pope, though he has more to offer the modern reader than Dryden and might have been enlisted...