Johnson and Pope: Agon or Admiration Society?
"Johnson and Pope: Agon or Admiration Society?" Timothy Erwin, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, timothy.erwin@unlv.edu At the 2020 ASECS meeting in Toronto a speaker suggested that Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope engaged in "a lifelong agon." The idea deserves sustained discussion. When the unknown Johnson published "London" (1738), he entered willingly or not into a competition with Pope, whose "One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight: A Dialogue" appeared about the same time. Pope was impressed, saying of the anonymous author that his identity would soon be known.