Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast.

This week I'd like to talk about a poem from 1735. Don't go away. It's really good. It's called Epistle to

Dr. Arbothnot and it was written by Alexander Pope and Alexander Pope was a sort of

18th century poetry superstar and as ever I always say to you don't take it that the voice of the poem is

necessarily a pure version of the poet. Often poets use filters and personas and various other methods to distance themselves from the work.

Pope I would say does that less than most.

In this particular poem it's pretty clear

it is at least a version of Alexander Pope who's speaking.

It's sort of a Pope as Pope would like to be seen in many ways,

but he talks about very personal things to him and it's fabulous. I love it so much. I bought a 1735 first edition of this it came out in a pamphlet and it's in that

slightly yellowing paper it's if you can smell the scrofula on it, a fabulously 18th century

artifact. And at the beginning of this pamphlet there's a sort of bill of complaint which

Pope writes explaining why this poem has been written and he says and when I'm quoting, it says yes it's a bill of complaint,

be gone many years since and drawn up by snatches as the several occasions offered.

So these are bits of poetry that Pope has been writing

for some time.

Now that sounds a bit, doesn't it,

like somebody doing a bit of a filler Greatest Hits album and think,

if I'm going to write this, I'll pad it out a bit with some of my old stuff.

It's a bit more complicated than that. The bits that were written these

snatches I would suggest were written in tremendous rage. Pope kept, and this is one of my favorite Alexander Pope facts,

he kept six personally bound volumes of anti- Pope criticism.

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