Why I am unabashedly in love with Pope

Dear Gentle Readers,

Many hate Pope.  They find him splenetic and painful, but I love him.  I always have.
I just reread Rape of the Lock.  The epic conventions are glorious.  But, of course, perhaps that really is why I love him.  Pope knows the genres he works in really well; he knows them so well he can satirize them with a skill that John Stewart could only envy.  Yes, Rape of the Lock is not Paradise Lost, but it is a wonderful read.  It is hard to excerpt just a bit of the poem.  But here is one of my favourite parts:

While through the press enraged Thalestris flies,
And scatters deaths around from both her eyes,
A beau and witling perished in the throng,
One died in metaphor, and one in song.
'O cruel nymph! a living death I bear,'
Cried Dapperwit, and sunk beside his chair.
A mournful glace Sir Fopling upwards cast,
'Those eyes are made so killing' -- was his last.
V.57-64

 Thalestris, Pope's Camilla, kills with her eyes, and, her victims die poetically in metaphor or song.  This is a poet's epic about epics.  No more to say today.  Just a quick academic gushing over a poetic love outside my normal period of study.

Your Humblest Author.

Reading all the books: A Comprehensive Summer

Dear Gentle Readers:

My first year of my PhD wrapped up swimmingly.  I took courses in topics ranging from Marxist ideology critique to medieval nationhood.  I learned that medieval maps tended to face east because that's where Paradise is and that Derrida gets ambivalent when his cat sees him naked.  I have written on Donne, Kant, Zizek, Lacan, Althusser, Spenser, Augustine, Higden, Trevisa, Chaucer, Jameson, and John Speed.   I have many good ideas for my dissertation.  But most of all, I had a blast.

I am sorry that I did not bring you along for the ride.  I was overwhelmed and decided that blogging was the last thing I needed.  Now, though, I start the next phase of my program: The Comprehensive Exams.  I will be reading a fairly extensive list of some of the top hits in English Lit, and I have decided to pick up blogging again.  I can't promise you genius, but maybe I can introduce you to some awesome works.  So for the next 4 months, enjoy the ride; it will be a crazy one.

Your Humblest Author.