"I have been lying in wait for my own imagination this week and more, and watching what thoughts came up in the whirl of the fancy, that were worth communicating to you in a letter."
— Pope, Alexander (1688-1744)
Author
Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Printed by J. Wright
Date
1737
Metaphor
"I have been lying in wait for my own imagination this week and more, and watching what thoughts came up in the whirl of the fancy, that were worth communicating to you in a letter."
Metaphor in Context
I have been lying in wait for my own imagination this week and more, and watching what thoughts came up in the whirl of the fancy, that were worth communicating to you in a letter. But I am at length convinced that my rambling head can produce nothing of that sort; so I must e'en be contented with telling you the old story, that I love you heartily. I have often found by experience, that nature and truth, tho' never so low or vulgar, are yet pleasing when openly and artlessly represented: It would be diverting to me to read the very letters of an infant, could it write its innocent inconsistencies and tautologies just as it thought them. This makes me hope a letter from me will not be unwelcome to you, when I am conscious I write with more unreservedness than ever man wrote or perhaps talk'd to another. I trust your good nature with the whole range of my follies, and really love you so well that I would rather you should pardon me than esteem me; since one is an act of goodness and benevolence, the other a kind of constrained deference.
(To and From Addison, Dec. 14, 1713, L59, p. 111)
(To and From Addison, Dec. 14, 1713, L59, p. 111)
Categories
Provenance
Reading in Google Books
Citation
Text from Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope, and Several of his Friends (London: Printed by J. Wright, 1737). <Link to Google Books>
See also earlier printings of Pope's letters. Pope famously tricked Curll into pirating his correspondence in 1735 under the title Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence for Thirty Years; from 1704 to 1734, before he issued an authorized edition of his own in 1737 as Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope, and Several of his Friends. See also Curll's Miscellanea of 1727 which also includes letters written by Pope to Henry Cromwell. On Pope's stratagem and the 1737 text, see Raymond Stephanson's "Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope and the Curious Case of Modern Scholarship and the Vanishing Text" Eighteenth-Century Life 31:1 (2007): 1-21. <Link to ECL>
See also earlier printings of Pope's letters. Pope famously tricked Curll into pirating his correspondence in 1735 under the title Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence for Thirty Years; from 1704 to 1734, before he issued an authorized edition of his own in 1737 as Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope, and Several of his Friends. See also Curll's Miscellanea of 1727 which also includes letters written by Pope to Henry Cromwell. On Pope's stratagem and the 1737 text, see Raymond Stephanson's "Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope and the Curious Case of Modern Scholarship and the Vanishing Text" Eighteenth-Century Life 31:1 (2007): 1-21. <Link to ECL>
Date of Entry
07/08/2013
