The Poems of Alexander Pope: A reduced version of the Twickenham Text

A splendid presentation of Pope’s poems, excluding only his translations of Homer, this is the only one-volume edition that can lay claim to completeness and accuracy of text. It presents the corpus of Pope’s poetry as printed in the highly praised Twickenham Edition, except for the 1712 version of The Rape of the Lock and other early versions of phrases preserved in the critical apparatus of the six-volume work. Pope’s own notes to his poems are included, as well as a generous selection of the copious annotation in the Twickenham text. This reduced version of the unsurpassed standard edition of Pope will be of great value to all students and teachers of English literature. John Butt, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University, is general editor of the Twickenham Edition. "The publishers are surely right in claiming that 'this should for long remain the standard one-volume edition of Pope's poems.' The Twichenham edition . . . has been a splendid achievement, and Professor Butt's distillation of the long labours of his fellow-editors is most commendable."—Times Literary Supplement.

Customer Reviews:

The most complete one-volume Pope available

By Molly the Cat "Meow" - May 3, 1998

This one-volume reprint of all the authentic original poems of Alexander Pope, first published in 1963, derives from the Twickenham Edition, the recognized standard text of Pope's poetry. It is exhaustive, even down to containing early versions of lines like the verses on "Atticus" which ended up years later in the "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," and reprints both the "Tibbald" and "Cibber" versions of the "Dunciad." It also has a great deal of useful editorial annotation, though not so much as to overwhelm or supplant Pope's own text and frequent notes. Highly recommended to all who love Pope's verse.

A Worthless Edition of some of the Best Poetry in English

By Paul D. Harmon - December 6, 2009

Now, when I say "worthless edition" I do not at all refer to the Twickenham version of Mr. Pope's poetry, which is beyond excellent, but rather to the Kindle version of the Twickenham version, which one might have naively assumed would be the same. As I'm sure others have noticed, books on Kindle sometimes have a few mistakes in them. I do not consider this a very big deal in general, and I'm hardly about to complain about it in the free or ninety-nine cent books.

However, there are literally hundreds and hundreds of confusing errors in the Kindle edition of this book, which absolutely do not appear in its ink-and-paper incarnation. Some of them, such as one letter for another when the text is italicized, are consistent, but most are totally random. I'm familiar enough with the poetry that I'm rarely slowed down by these myself, but anyone who has not carefully read it before will be constantly baffled: an erroneous letter typically forms a different word, a word which... read more

Bad Kindle

By BW "BW" - June 1, 2010

The kindle version is very poorly done. In particular, the notes - essential for following Pope's allusions, many of which were pretty obscure even when they were first published two and a half centuries ago - are jumbled together en mass at the end of the book, without any links to the text. They are essentially unusable, and so is the book. It's not that the publisher didn't know how to link, as there are hyperlinks for the indexes of titles and first lines. But for the all-important notes, that was apparently too much trouble. Funny thing is, they've priced this edition like a professional work, rather than the public domain hackwork that it more nearly resembles.