SOURCE: “The Aesthetics of Revision in The Rape of the Lock,” in Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense, Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 75-102.

In the following essay, Morris describes the nature of Pope's revision technique and identifies various applications in The Rape of the Lock, focusing on emblematic qualities of the Game of Ombre in canto III of the expanded version of the poem.

To make verses was his first labour, and to mend them was his last.

—Samuel Johnson [Lives of the Poets, III, 218]

Byron States with disarming clarity one of the central tenets of Romantic composition: the myth of spontaneity. “I am like the tyger (in poesy),” he wrote of his method of composition. “If I miss my first Spring—I go growling back to my Jungle.—There is no second.—I can’t correct.—I can’t—& I won’t.”¹ All poets revise, of course...