Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was the greatest English poet of the early eighteenth century and a master of the heroic couplet. Author of An Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad and An Essay on Man, and translator of Homer, he gave the language more proverbial lines than any writer except Shakespeare.
Works
An Essay on Criticism, An Essay on Man
A Catholic outsider
Pope was born in London in 1688, the son of a Catholic linen merchant. At that time Catholics could not attend university, vote, hold public office or live within ten miles of London, and the family moved to Binfield, in Windsor Forest. Pope was educated largely by himself, reading the classics in Latin and Greek.
As a child he contracted a form of tuberculosis of the spine that stunted his growth: he grew to only four feet six inches and suffered from pain and ill health all his life. He wrote with remarkable precocity, and his Pastorals were published when he was twenty-one.
Fame and fortune
An Essay on Criticism (1711) and The Rape of the Lock, a mock-heroic poem about a stolen lock of hair, made him famous before he was twenty-five. He then spent more than ten years translating the Iliad and the Odyssey into English couplets.
Sold by subscription, the translations made him rich, one of the first English writers to live entirely from his pen. In 1719 he settled in a villa at Twickenham, on the Thames, where he created a famous garden and a grotto decorated with shells, minerals and mirrors.
The satirist
With his friends Jonathan Swift and John Gay, Pope belonged to the Scriblerus Club, which mocked bad learning. In The Dunciad (1728, enlarged in 1743) he ridiculed the dull writers and critics of his time, crowning one of them king of the Dunces.
His later works include the philosophical An Essay on Man and the Moral Essays and Imitations of Horace, verse letters on ethics and society. He died at Twickenham in 1744. His reputation declined with the Romantics, but recovered in the twentieth century.
Anecdotes
Lord Petre's scissors
The Rape of the Lock was based on a real quarrel: Lord Petre had cut a lock of hair from the head of Arabella Fermor without her permission, and the two Catholic families fell out. A friend asked Pope to write a poem to laugh them back into friendship.
A dog's collar
Pope gave the Prince of Wales a puppy whose collar bore a couplet in which the dog asks the reader whose dog he is. The epigram is a joke on courtiers, all of whom belong to someone.
Frequently asked questions
What is a heroic couplet?
A pair of rhyming lines of iambic pentameter, the form Pope used for most of his poems and brought to great perfection.
What are Pope's main works?
An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712–1714), translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, The Dunciad (1728–1743) and An Essay on Man (1733–1734).
Why was Pope's life restricted?
As a Roman Catholic he was barred by the laws of the time from university, public office and voting, and his health was ruined by a childhood spinal disease.