… Catholicism Celebrity Correspondence Enmity Friendship Poetry Both in financial terms and in the scale of his cultural influence, Alexander Pope was one of the most successful poets of early eighteenth-century Britain. Born into a Catholic … Imitated (London: L[awton] G[illiver], 1733), p. 17. 2 . Brean Hammond, Pope and Bolingbroke: A Study of Friendship and Influence (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), p. 3. It is striking how frequently and with what fervour Pope …