Eloisa to Abelard. Eloisa to Abelard is a verse epistle by Alexander Pope that was published in 1717 and based on a well-known medieval story.
Itself an imitation of a Latin poetic genre, its immediate fame resulted in a large number of English imitations throughout the rest of the century and other poems more loosely based on its themes thereafter. Translations of varying levels of faithfulness appeared across Europe, starting in the 1750s and reaching a peak towards the end of the 18th century and the start of the 19th.
These were in the vanguard of the shift away from Classicism and towards the primacy given emotion over reason that heralded Romanticism. Artistic depictions of the poem's themes were often reproduced as prints illustrating the poem; there were also paintings in France of the women readers of the amorous correspondence between the lovers.
Pope's poem was published in 1717 in a small volume titled The Works of Mr Alexander Pope. There were two other accompanying poems, the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and the original version of the Ode on St Cecilia's Day.
Such was the poem's popularity that it was reissued in 1720 along with the retitled Verses to the memory of an unfortunate lady' and several other elegiac poems by different authors. Eloisa to Abelard is an Ovidian heroic epistle of which Pope had earlier published an example translated from the Latin in 1714, Sa
Itself an imitation of a Latin poetic genre, its immediate fame resulted in a large number of English imitations throughout the rest of the century and other poems more loosely based on its themes thereafter. Translations of varying levels of faithfulness appeared across Europe, starting in the 1750s and reaching a peak towards the end of the 18th century and the start of the 19th.
These were in the vanguard of the shift away from Classicism and towards the primacy given emotion over reason that heralded Romanticism. Artistic depictions of the poem's themes were often reproduced as prints illustrating the poem; there were also paintings in France of the women readers of the amorous correspondence between the lovers.
Pope's poem was published in 1717 in a small volume titled The Works of Mr Alexander Pope. There were two other accompanying poems, the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady and the original version of the Ode on St Cecilia's Day.
Such was the poem's popularity that it was reissued in 1720 along with the retitled Verses to the memory of an unfortunate lady' and several other elegiac poems by different authors. Eloisa to Abelard is an Ovidian heroic epistle of which Pope had earlier published an example translated from the Latin in 1714, Sa
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