When Pope first published this poem there was nothing about fairies in it.  Afterwards he thought of the fairies, but Addison advised him not to alter the poem, as it was so delightful as it was.  Pope, however, did not take the advice, but added the fairy part, thereby greatly improving the poem.  This caused a quarrel with Addison, for Pope thought he had given him bad advice through jealousy.  A little later this quarrel was made much worse.  Pope translated and published a version of the Iliad, and at the same time a friend of Addison did so too.  This made Pope bitterly angry, for he believed that the translation was Addison’s own and that he had published it to injure the sale of his.  From this you see how easily Pope’s anger and jealousy were aroused, and will not wonder that his life was a long record of quarrels.

Pope need not have been jealous of Addison’s friend, for his own translation of Homer was a great success, and people soon forgot the other.  He translated not only the Iliad, but with the help of two lesser poets the Odyssey also.  Both poems were done in the fashionable heroic couplet, and Pope made so much money by them that he was able to live in comfort ever after.  And it is interesting to remember that Pope was the first poet who was able to live in comfort entirely on what he made by his writing.

Pope now took a house at Twickenham, and there he spent many happy hours planning and laying out his garden, and building a grotto with shells and stones and bits of looking-glass.  The house has long ago been pulled down and the garden altered, but the grotto still remains, a sight for the curious.

It has been said that to write in the heroic couplet “is an art as mechanical as that of mending a kettle or shoeing a horse, and may be learned by any human being who has sense enough to learn anything."* And although this is not all true, it is so far true that it is almost impossible to tell which books of the Odyssey were written by Pope, and which by the men who helped him.  But, taken as a whole, the Odyssey is not so good as the Iliad.  Scholars tell us that in neither the one nor the other is the feeling of the original poetry kept.  Pope did not know enough Greek to enter into the spirit of it, and he worked mostly from translation.  Even had he been able to enter into the true spirit he would have found it hard to keep that spirit in his translation, using as he did the artificial heroic couplet.  For Homer’s poetry is not artificial, but simple and natural like our own early poetry.  “A pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer,” said a friend** when he read it, and his judgment is still for the most part the judgment of to-day.

Macaulay. *Bentley.