SOURCE: “‘The best of passions’: The Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and Eloisa to Abelard,” in The Unbalanced Mind: Pope and the Rule of Passion, The Harvester Press, 1986, pp. 1-31.

In the following essay, Ferguson analyzes the moral system and emotional goals of the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and Elegy to Abelard, in relation to representations of both the human and divine in each poem.

The period around 1717 has been aptly characterised by Reuben Brower¹ as Pope's ‘Ovidian’ phase, when there emerges a marked susceptibility to tender feelings which is brought out particularly in his letters to the Blount sisters and to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Both the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and Eloisa to Abelard, published in that year, are unique among Pope's works in presenting a direct and sustained engagement in emotion, forging an empathy...