The Rape of the Lock and A Key to the Lock

When Lord Petre had the effrontery of cutting off a lock of Lady Arabella Fermor’s hair, a veritable war erupted between the two noble families.A mutual friend, saddened by their estrangement, asked Alexander Pope, then a young poet, to write a poem about it, in order to make a joke of it and “laugh them together again”.But the result – which in its ingenuity and poetical brilliance reaches peaks of epic sublime – concealed darker and more dangerous undertones that unleashed an even greater storm between the parties involved – and among the whole literary world of the time. As Belinda glides along the Thames admired for her beauty and the crafty Baron schemes to take his prize, a host of supernatural beings – elfs, sylphs, gnomes – dance around them to avoid the impending doom, in what is Pope’s crowning poetical achievement and perhaps the greatest satirical poem ever written.Included in this volume are the original two-canto version of The Rape of the Lock and Pope’s hilarious mock-interpretation of the poem as a seditious work, A Key to the Lock.