The Guardian on . . . The Dunciad

Rather impressive to see The Guardian offering a feature essay on Pope's Dunciad. What's the chance that Tanenhaus and Co will offer an appreciative essay on a challenging 200-year-old work by an American master?

Alexander Pope's longest and most elaborate poem, The Dunciad, has a good claim to be the greatest unread poem in the language. Glitteringly witty, the jewelled machinery of Pope's verse is as enjoyable now as it ever was, yet the work into which he put the most invention and the most gusto is little known outside seminar rooms. Perhaps it is because the poem is so full of obscure names - the 18th-century hacks and literary dunces whom it mocks; or because the verse is encrusted with Pope's own prefaces and notes and appendices - an apparatus of mock-learning that mimics the pretensions of would-be scholars and critics. The Dunciad has become forbidding when it is truly a thing of delight and dark brilliance.

Comments

[Daniel]

Good for them! If Tanny & Co. could get it up to one poetry review a week it would be an improvement.

American?