Alexander Pope [ Art and Literature ]
… in the 1710s, was by the 1730s being regularly attacked in his satires, and replying in kind. Party politics certainly played an important role in the strengthening of some friendships and the decaying of others. Pope’s political … sociable virtue. Notwithstanding his cultivation of an idealistically sociable identity, Pope was perfectly capable of playing the villain when it suited him. Such incidents as his poisoning of the pirate bookseller Edmund Curll in 1716 – and his own subsequent publicising of the act in print – remind us that the nurturing of enmities always played just as vital a role in Pope’s self-fashioning as did the language of friendship. 4 4 . For full details of Pope’s …
Catholicism | Celebrity | Correspondence | Enmity | Friendship | Poetry
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