Pope, Alexander

Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), English poet, who, modelling himself after the great poets of classical antiquity, wrote highly polished verse, often in a didactic or satirical vein. In verse translations, moral and critical essays, and satires that made him the foremost poet of his age, he brought the heroic couplet, which had been refined by John Dryden, to ultimate perfection.

Pope was the son of a London cloth merchant. His parents were Roman Catholics, which meant that, as a result of the severe anti-Catholic laws of William III, he was barred from studying at university. Thus, although he was educated by priests until he was 12 years old, Pope was primarily self-taught, reading widely in English letters, as well as in French, Italian, Latin, and Greek. A devastating illness, probably tuberculosis of the spine, struck him in childhood, leaving him deformed. He never grew taller than 4ft 6in and he was subject to violent headaches and fevers. Perhaps as a result of this conditon, he was hypersensitive and exceptionally irritable, referring famously in his poem “An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot” (1735) to “this long disease, my life”. He was a bitterly quarrelsome man and attacked his literary contemporaries viciously and often without provocation, although to some he was warm and affectionate; he had long and close friendships, for example, with Jonathan Swift and John Gay.

Pope's literary career began in 1704, when the playwright William Wycherley, pleased by Pope's verse, introduced him into the circle of fashionable London wits and writers, who welcomed him as a prodigy. He first attracted public attention in 1709 with his Pastorals, and two years later published his Essay on Criticism, a brilliant exposition of the canons of taste. His most famous poem, The Rape of the Lock (first published 1712; revised edition published 1714) is a fanciful and ingenious mock-heroic based on the true story of a quarrel between two Catholic families, the Fermors and the Petres, which had resulted from Lord Petre's having cut off a lock of the hair of Arabella Fermor. Pope deployed all his satiric talents in describing this ridiculous spectacle, both opining and delighting “What dire offence from am'rous causes springs, / What mighty contests rise from trivial things”.

He continued to experiment in subject matter and theme, in 1713 publishing Windsor Forest, a celebration of the Peace of Utrecht, and in 1714 producing “The Wife of Bath”, which, like his “The Temple of Fame” (1715), was imitative of the works of the same title by the 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. In 1717 a collection of Pope's works containing the most noteworthy of his lyrics was published. His translation of Homer's Iliad was published in six volumes from 1715 to 1720 and a translation of the Odyssey followed (1725-1726). He also published a (much reviled) edition of Shakespeare's plays (1725).

From 1713 Pope was a member of the so-called Scriblerus Club—a group of friends who met to discuss literature and to concoct parodies of pedantic scholarship—and with his friend Swift he wrote scornful and very successful critical reviews of those whom they considered inferior writers; in 1727 they began a series of parodies of the same writers. These hapless adversaries hurled insults at Swift and Pope in return, and in 1728 Pope lampooned them in one of his best-known works, The Dunciad, a satire celebrating dullness, which ridiculed poets and writers who “painful vigils keep, / Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep”. He later enlarged the work to four volumes, the final one appearing in 1743. In 1734 he completed his Essay on Man. Pope's last works, Imitations of Horace (1733-1739), were attacks on political enemies of his friends. He died in 1744.

Pope used the heroic couplet with exceptional brilliance and great flexibility, exploiting its natural capacity for antithetical and epigrammatic statement and using it as a base to craft many poignant and witty formulations, such as “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread”, “To err is human; to forgive, divine” (from An Essay on Criticism) and “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” (from An Essay on Man). He also skilfully used poetic devices such as puns, allusions, chiasmus, and zeugma, as in this famous passage from The Rape of the Lock:

The humour lies in the placing together, as if they are of the same importance, of things which are clearly different; it satirizes people who have so lost their sense of value that losing one's heart is no worse than losing a necklace, for instance. Such work combines the wit of poetry with the vigour of prose, and Pope's great success with the heroic couplet helped to make it the dominant poetic form of the 18th century.