The Rape of the Lock is a masterpiece of its kind, and comes nearer to being a “creation” than anything else that Pope has written.  The occasion of the famous poem was trivial enough.  A fop at the court of Queen Anne, one Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair from the abundant curls of a pretty maid of honor named Arabella Fermor.  The young lady resented it, and the two families were plunged into a quarrel which was the talk of London.  Pope, being appealed to, seized the occasion to construct, not a ballad, as the Cavaliers would have done, nor an epigram, as French poets love to do, but a long poem in which all the mannerisms of society are pictured in minutest detail and satirized with the most delicate wit.  The first edition, consisting of two cantos, was published in 1712; and it is amazing now to read of the trivial character of London court life at the time when English soldiers were battling for a great continent in the French and Indian wars.  Its instant success caused Pope to lengthen the poem by three more cantos; and in order to make a more perfect burlesque of an epic poem, he introduces gnomes, sprites, sylphs, and salamanders,[188] instead of the gods of the great epics, with which his readers were familiar.  The poem is modeled after two foreign satires:  Boileau’s Le Lutrin (reading desk), a satire on the French clergy, who raised a huge quarrel over the location of a lectern; and La Secchia Rapita (stolen bucket), a famous Italian satire on the petty causes of the endless Italian wars.  Pope, however, went far ahead of his masters in style and in delicacy of handling a mock-heroic theme, and during his lifetime the Rape of the Lock was considered as the greatest poem of its kind in all literature.  The poem is still well worth reading; for as an expression of the artificial life of the age—­of its cards, parties, toilettes, lapdogs, tea-drinking, snuff-taking, and idle vanities—­it is as perfect in its way as Tamburlaine, which reflects the boundless ambition of the Elizabethans.

The fame of Pope’s Iliad, which was financially the most successful of his books, was due to the fact that he interpreted Homer in the elegant, artificial language of his own age.  Not only do his words follow literary fashions but even the Homeric characters lose their strength and become fashionable men of the court.  So the criticism of the scholar Bentley was most appropriate when he said, “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”  Pope translated the entire Iliad and half of the Odyssey; and the latter work was finished by two Cambridge scholars, Elijah Fenton and William Broome, who imitated the mechanical couplets so perfectly that it is difficult to distinguish their work from that of the greatest poet of the age.  A single selection is given to show how, in the nobler passages, even Pope may faintly suggest the elemental grandeur of Homer: