William Pope Duval

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Pope, Alexander (1688–1744), was the son of a Roman Catholic linen- draper of London. His health was ruined and his growth stunted by a severe illness at the age of 12. He showed his precocious metrical skill in his ‘Pastorals’ (1709) written, according to himself, when he was 16. He became intimate with Wycherley, who introduced him to London life. His Essay on Criticism (1711) made him known to Addison's circle, and his ‘Messiah’ was published in the Spectator in 1712. The Rape of the Lock appeared in Lintot's Miscellanies in the same year and was republished, enlarged, in 1714. Windsor Forest (1713) appealed to the Tories by its references to the Peace of Utrecht. He drifted away from Addison's ‘little senate’ and became a member of the Scriblerus Club. His translation in heroic couplets of Homer's Iliad (1715–20) is more Augustan than Homeric in spirit and diction. It was supplemented in 1725–6 by a translation of the Odyssey, in which he was assisted by William Broome and Elijah Fenton. The two translations brought him financial independence.

In 1717 had appeared a collection of his works containing two poems dealing with the passion of love. They are ‘Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’, and ‘Eloisa to Abelard’. About this time he became strongly attached to Martha Blount, with whom his friendship continued throughout his life, and to Lady M. W. Montagu, whom in later years he assailed with bitterness.

Pope assisted Gay in writing the comedy Three Hours after Marriage (1717). In 1723, Pope's portrait of Atticus, a satire on Addison, appeared. In the Miscellanies (1727, by Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay) Pope published his prose treatise Peri Bathous, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry, ridiculing among others Ambrose Philips, Theobald, and J. Dennis. In 1725 Pope published an edition of Shakespeare, the errors in which were pointed out in a pamphlet by Theobald. This led to Pope's selection of Theobald as hero of his Dunciad, a satire on Dullness. An additional book, The New Dunciad, was published in 1742. Influenced in part by the philosophy of his friend Boling-broke, Pope published a series of moral and philosophical poems, An Essay on Man (1733–4), consisting of four Epistles; and Moral Essays (1731–5). In 1733 Pope published the first of his miscellaneous satires, Imitations of Horace. In it he defends himself against the charge of Malignity, and professes to be inspired only by love of virtue. He inserts, however, a gross attack on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as ‘Sappho’. An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1735), the prologue to the above Satires, is one of Pope's most brilliant pieces of irony and invective, mingled with autobiography. It contains the famous portraits of Addison and Lord Hervey, and lashes at his minor critics, Dennis, Cibber, Curll, Theobald, etc.

He was partly occupied during his later years with the publication of his earlier correspondence, which he edited and amended in such a manner as to misrepresent the literary history of the time. He also employed discreditable artifices to make it appear that it was published against his wish. Thus he procured the publication by Curll of his ‘Literary Correspondence’ in 1735, and then endeavoured to disavow him.

With the growth of Romanticism Pope's poetry was increasingly seen as artificial. It was not until Leavis and Empson that a serious attempt was made to rediscover Pope's richness, variety, and complexity.

William Pope Duval , 1784–1854, American frontiersman, territorial governor of Florida (1822–34), b. near Richmond, Va. He went to Kentucky as a young man, studied law, and began practicing at Bardstown c.1804. Duval was a U.S. Representative from Kentucky (1813–15) and U.S. judge in East Florida (1821–22). As territorial governor, he accomplished the peaceful removal of the Seminole to the southern district, the compilation and revision of territorial laws, and legislation creating a board of education and improving the schools. He was the original of Washington Irving's "Ralph Ringwood" in Wolfert's Roost.

Pope, William Burt (1822–1903), Wesleyan theologian. He was tutor at Didsbury College, Manchester (1867–86). His Compendium of Christian Theology (1875) contains a sympathetic defence of the Methodist doctrine of Christian perfection.