It is argued that by placing the late works of Alexander Pope within a social, political and biographical context, Pope's works can be misinterpreted.
Alexander Pope's self-representations in his Horatian poems involve defence of the self as well as literary self-defence. The apparent egotism is a way of defining and protecting identity against the threats of what he saw as a corrupt society. The drama of the poems, which paradoxically sometimes exposes egotism, act as a second kind of ...