This is the first collection of essays since George Sherburn's landmark monograph The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1934) to reconsider how the most important and influential poet of eighteenth-century Britain fashioned his early career. The volume covers Pope's writings from across the reign of Queen Anne and just beyond. It focuses, in particular, on his interaction with the courtly culture constellated round the Queen. It examines, for instance, his representations of Queen Anne herself, his portrayals of politics and patronage under her reign, his negotiations with current literary theory, with the classical tradition, with chronologically distant yet also contemporaneous English poets, with current thought on the passions, and with membership of a religious minority. In doing so, it comprehensively reconsiders anew the ways in which Pope, increasingly supportive of Anne's rule and mindful of the Virgilian rota, sought at first to realise his authorial aspirations.

A.D. Cousins is Emeritus Professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Member of the Order of Australia. He has published eighteen books including monographs on Andrew Marvell, Thomas More, Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse, mythologies of internal exile in Elizabethan non-dramatic verse, and on religious verse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is on the Editorial Board of Moreana (Edinburgh University), the international journal of More studies, as well as of the Australian journal JLLC (Monash University). He has been a Visiting Professor at Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Visiting Adjunct Professor at the Renaissance Studies Center at the University of Massachusetts, a Visiting Scholar at Princeton and at Penn State, and a Library Fellow at the Library of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was also an Honorary Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities. He holds doctorates in both English Literature and Political Theory.

Daniel Derrin is currently an honorary research fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. Prior to research and teaching fellowships at Durham, he was the S. Ernest Sprott fellow for 2014-15 (University of Melbourne), and an Associate Investigator for the Australian Research Council's Centre for the History of Emotions (2013-15). He is the author of Rhetoric and the Familiar in Francis Bacon and John Donne (2013), co-editor with A.D. Cousins of Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern English Drama (2018), and co-editor with Hannah Burrows of The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology (forthcoming, 2021).