ALEXANDER POPE'S EPISTLES TO SEVERAL PERSONS (MORAL ESSAYS).

Edited, with an introduction, byJames E. Wellington '48. Coral Gables:University of Miami Press, 1963. 178 pp.$2.00.

Year afterYear after year poetry-loving Dartmouth undergraduates voted Robert Frost as their favorite poet. More recently an esoteric elite have championed Donne and Eliot. Today with the increased popularity of the 18th Century fewer and fewer students smirk at the briefest two lines of doggerel ever written: "Pope/Nope." They exalt Pope as wittier even than the metaphysical poets including Donne, passionate and paradoxically perverse.

Professor Wellington in editing the MoralEssays calls attention to poems so brilliant that they are not dimmed even in the diamond glitter of The Rape of the Lock, the Gothic glare of Heloise and Abelard, the Barnum and Bailey spotlights on the high-diving-into-a-newer exhibition in Book II of The Dunciad, or the broken stained-glass illumination of the Essay on Man and the Daliesque half lights of the ending. The most obvious comparison with The Rape is Epistle to a Lady, the subject of which Pope with charming understatement announces to be the characters of women "... more inconsistent and incomprehensible than those of Men."

Accordingly we get feminine extravagances bordering on the sinister but made macabrely picturesque by the 18th-century love of painting and costume: Fannia, smirking on her effete husband and dressing up as a naked Leda with a lascivious swan; a beauty dressing up as an angel but with artful lubricity combining Magdalen with her loose hair and Cecilia with her sweet smiles; Sappho, glittering with diamonds, heavily perfumed, but, underneath, unwashed; Rufa the redhead, pretending mornings to study Locke and evenings seeking pickups in a park; Narcissa so vain that she would do anything to enhance her beauty with a face lotion except boil a baby to make it; Cloe, the perfect woman who has everything... "except a heart." Between women and men, according to Pope, exists this minute difference:

Men, some to Bus'ness, some to Pleasure take; But ev'ry Woman is at heart a Rake.

And woman is protean in her rakishness.

Pope is a difficult author to assess with consistency, authority, and finality, for he often is a series of self-designed labyrinths all furnished with breakable threads leaving explorer-scholars not knowing which way to turn. With savoir faire and waxed twine Professor Wellington in his 87-page introduction solves problems which baffle the inexpert.

Such questions and answers serve intellectually acute and inquiring minds at graduate-school and honors levels, but Professor Wellington takes good care of undergraduates and general readers with 43 pages of factual notes for 45 pages of poetry.

Professor of English