Messiah (English poem)
poem
Messiah is a 'sacred eclogue' by Alexander Pope, composed in 1712. It is based on the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil, and is an example of English Classicism's appropriation and reworking of the genres, subject matter and techniques of classical Latin literature.
Samuel Johnson, while still a student at Oxford, translated Pope's Messiah into Latin hexameters. The translation appeared in Miscellany of Poems (1731), edited by John Husbands, and is the earliest surviving publication of any of Johnson's writings.
References
Sources
Bate, Walter Jackson (1977), Samuel Johnson, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ISBN 0-15-179260-7.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6821952. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1712, 1731 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “Messiah (English poem)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.