1709 in poetry
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Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).
On May 2, Alexander Pope's career as a poet was launched with the publication of the anthology Poetical Miscellanies, The Sixth Part, edited by John Dryden. The publisher, Jacob Tonson, had solicited poems from Pope for the volume three years before; but publication was delayed and finally occurred three weeks before Pope's 21st birthday. Pope did not visit London at the time of publication, instead travelling there in June. Tonson was a hard bargainer, and paid Pope 13 guineas, for the young man's verses (about two pence per line). Pope would eventually become a hard bargainer himself in dealing with publishers, and although he became good friends with Tonson, he hardly ever wrote for him again.
Pope's January and May; Or, The Merchant's Tale, a story about a young wife and the old husband she cuckolds (on pages 172-224) retold part of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (lines 817-720 of Pope's version):
The poet also contributed a translation, The Episode of Sarpedon, Translated from the Twelfth and Sixteenth Books of Homer's Iliads (pages 301-323). John Denham, a poet of Dryden's generation, had written the best-known translation of Sarpedon's speech. According to the 20th-century critic and Pope biographer Maynard Mack, Pope's version shined in comparison, and when both versions were weighed together, "the coffee-house critics must have sensed [...] that a new star of some magnitude was rising in their sky".
But the four Pastorals (pages 721-751) which concluded the volume, would have been the works on which Pope pinned most of his hopes for recognition, according to Mack, because the genre was what Virgil and various Renaissance critics deemed a proper first test for an aspiring poet.
On May 17, Pope's friend, Wycherley, wrote to him that "all the best Judges [...] like your part of the Book so well, that the rest is lik'd the worse". Pope wrote back three days later, referring to Tonson's low payments but valuable publicizing (by including him in what the title page of the anthology called "Eminent hands"):
Death years link to the corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
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