Explaining why the English Augustan Age could more accurately be called the ""Age of Passion"" than the ""Age of Reason,"" this book recovers the interpretive and stylistic aims of Pope and his contemporaries and addresses objections that have lost Pope's Iliad the audience it deserves. Controversial even before the appearance of the first of its six volumes in 1715, the work remains so today, little read in spite of Samuel Johnson's declaration that...