Quick Facts
Born:
May 20, 1683, Shelton, Staffordshire, Eng.
Died:
July 16, 1730, Easthampstead, Berkshire (aged 47)
Subjects Of Study:
Edmund Waller

Elijah Fenton (born May 20, 1683, Shelton, Staffordshire, Eng.—died July 16, 1730, Easthampstead, Berkshire) was an English poet perhaps best known for his collaboration in a translation of the Greek epic poem Odyssey with Alexander Pope and William Broome.

After graduating from Cambridge, Fenton became a teacher. He was promised the patronage of Henry St. John (later 1st Viscount Bolingbroke) and hence resigned the headship of Sevenoaks grammar school in Kent in 1710. His expectations, however, were not realized, and he was obliged to earn his living as children’s tutor to various noble families. His Poems on Several Occasions (1717) was admired by Pope, who asked Fenton if he would assist in a translation of the Odyssey. Fenton translated books 1, 4, 19, and 20. He also wrote the Life of John Milton (1725), a biography that continued to be reprinted into the 19th century. His other significant work includes Mariamne (1723), a tragedy, and an edition of the poems of Edmund Waller (1729). Pope composed his epitaph, and Samuel Johnson was his early biographer.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The Dunciad, poem by Alexander Pope, first published anonymously in three books in 1728; by 1743, when it appeared in its final form, it had grown to four books. Written largely in iambic pentameter, the poem is a masterpiece of mock-heroic verse.

After Pope had edited the works of William Shakespeare to adapt them to 18th-century tastes, the scholar Lewis Theobald attacked him in Shakespeare Restored (1726). Pope responded in 1728 with the first version of his Dunciad, in which Theobald appears as Tibbald, favourite son of the Goddess of Dullness (Dulness), a suitable hero for what Pope considered the reign of pedantry. A year later Pope published The Dunciad Variorum, in which he expanded the poem and added elaborate false footnotes, appendices, errata, and prefaces, as if the Dunciad itself had fallen into the hands of an artless pedant. Both versions, which were published anonymously, are much more than the vengeance of an aggrieved crank, for Pope’s writing exudes facility, wit, and verve.

Pope did not formally acknowledge his authorship of the Dunciad until 1735, when he included it in a volume of his collected works. In 1742 Pope published The New Dunciad, intended as the Dunciad’s fourth book; in it the empire of the Goddess of Dullness has become universal. That same year the poet laureate Colley Cibber savaged Pope in print; Pope responded by revising the Dunciad so as to replace Theobald with Cibber as the work’s dubious hero. The result, The Dunciad in Four Books (1743), drew together, in revised form, the books and critical apparatus of previous versions.

4:043 Dickinson, Emily: A Life of Letters, This is my letter to the world/That never wrote to me; I'll tell you how the Sun Rose/A Ribbon at a time; Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul
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This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen.