One thumbnail generalization in literary history has it that eighteenth-century poetry is about the World, nineteenth-century poetry about the Poet, and twentieth-century poetry about Poetry. Anyone who has heard or made this claim probably suspects it oversimplifies too vastly to be true, and yet it has a stubborn appeal. If we think, say, of Dryden and Pope, Wordsworth and Keats, and Yeats and Wallace Stevens, we may also think of corresponding shifts of emphasis from poems heavily referential (Absalom and Achitophel, An Essay on Man) to autobiographical (The Prelude, Ode to a Nightingale) and to aesthetic (the “Byzantium” poems, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction).

But the more closely we look at the eighteenth century, and especially at the poetry of Pope, the more this supposedly linear narrative of poetic development curves and twists. Pope’s idea of autobiography may not be Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s or Wordsworth’s, but he is one of the more insistently autobiographical of English poets. Paradoxically, this tendency is most explicit in the poems one expects to be least personal, the several Imitations of Horace (1733–8) he wrote in his forties. But autobiographical moments mark major and minor poems from every stage of Pope’s career. Moreover, much of his poetry invites us to read it as metapoetry, that is, as self-reflexive poetry about poetic creation and possibility. In this metapoetic mode Pope arguably influenced mid and late eighteenth-century practice even more than he influenced it stylistically.