The Rape of the Lock

Pastorals (pub. 1709) An Essay on Criticism (1711) [in verse]

The Rape of the Lock (1712; 1714; 1717) Windsor-Forest (1713) The Iliad of Homer, tr. (1715-20)-- creative translation/imitation

Eloisa to Abelard (1717)-- an Ovidian heroic epistle in verse (modelled on the Heroides)

Ode on Solitude (1717) The Odyssey of Homer, tr. (1725-26)--creative translation/imitation

The Dunciad (1728; 1743)-- one of the finest examples of mock-heroic genre in the English language

Moral Essays (Epistles to Various Persons) [1731-35] --epistolary form

An Essay on Man (1733-4)-- epistolary form (in verse)

Imitations of Horace (1732-38)-- creative translation/imitation An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1734) [in verse]

Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741) (the Scriblerus Club, with Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot and John Gay, among others)

1712 edition - 2 cantos

1714 edition - 5 cantos

1717 edition - Clarissa's speech added (a close imitation of Sarpedon's speech in Homer's Iliad, part XII)

written at the request of John Caryll (the muse invoked at the beginning of the poem) and based on a true story, involving Arabella Fermor and Lord Petre, two Catholic aristocrats

written in heroic couplets and belonging to the mock-heroic genre

Literary sources: heroic tradition: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Milton's Paradise Lost (1667); mock-heroic tradition: Dryden's Mac Flecknoe, Samuel Garth's Dispensary (1699), and Nicolas Boileau's Le Lutrin [lectern] (1674; 1708 in English translation)

mock-epic, also called mock-heroic, form of satire that adapts the elevated heroic style of the classical epic poem to a trivial subject. The tradition, which originated in classical times with an anonymous burlesque of Homer, the Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and the Mice), was honed [sharpened] to a fine art in the late 17th- and early 18th-century Neoclassical period. (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Uses a grandiose style to highlight the inappropriateness of the topic for a serious, poetic treatment, creating thus a humorous effect.