Critical Essay | Critical Essay by James Russell Lowell

Critical Essay by James Russell Lowell

SOURCE: "Pope," in Literary Essays, Vol. IV, Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1897, pp. 1-57.

Lowell was a celebrated American poet and essayist, and an editor of two leading journals, The Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review. In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1871, Lowell favorably evaluates Pope's verse.

I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with diffidence. I was brought up in the old superstition that he was the greatest poet that ever lived; and when I came to find that I had instincts of my own, and my mind was brought in contact with the apostles of a more esoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt that ardent desire for smashing the idols I had been brought up to worship, without any regard to their artistic beauty, which characterizes youthful zeal. What was it to me that Pope was called a master...
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