SOURCE: “‘What stranger Cause’: Pope's Iliad and The Rape of the Lock,” in The Unbalanced Mind: Pope and the Rule of Passion, The Harvester Press, 1986, pp. 32-63.

In the following essay, Ferguson traces the influence of Pope's classical translations on the aesthetics of mock-heroic satire he practiced in The Rape of the Lock.

In April 1724, Pope wrote to Lord Bolingbroke thanking him for sending a copy of Voltaire's poem La Ligue (1723), and remarking that as his French was imperfect, ‘I can only tell my thoughts in Relation to the design and conduct of the Poem, or the sentiments’. As a ‘heroic’ poem, the first aspect of the work which engages his attention and praise is the conduct of the ‘machinery’, which he analyses in the following terms:

I think the forming the Machines upon the Allegorical persons of Virtues and vices very reasonable; it being equally proper to...