SOURCE: "Visible Poetry: Pope and Modern Criticism," in Twentieth-Century Literature in Retrospect, edited by Reuben A. Brower, Harvard University Press, 1971, pp. 299-321.

Below, Edwards provides an overview of twentieth century critical reaction to Pope's works.

It was only ninety years ago that Arnold pronounced Dryden and Pope "classics of our prose." In 1880 Shaw was twenty-four, Yeats fifteen, Joyce two years unborn and Lawrence five; as Arnold suspected, a new literary age was dawning, one that would find his view of the Augustan poets no more congenial than many of his other views. But modern criticism was shaped by the need to answer Arnold, and our idea of Pope owes more than we like to admit to the Arnoldian terms it rejects.

The terms themselves are of course almost embarrassingly vulnerable: "Are Dryden and Pope poetical classics? Is the historic estimate, which represents them as such and which has...