Alexander Pope

• Born: 21 May 1688
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: 30 May 1744
• Best Known As: Author of 1733's Essay on Man

Alexander Pope was called "The Wicked Wasp of Twickenham" for his stinging literary satires of his fellow writers. But Pope also was a poet whose mastery of the heroic couplet has kept him in the canon of English literature since the 18th century. Largely self-educated, Pope began writing poetry as a teen and was first published in 1709. An Essay on Criticism, published in 1711, established him as a technically adept and malicious wit, and Pope became a celebrity in London's literary circles. His mock-heroic poem The Rape of the Lock (1712-14) cemented his reputation, and his translations of Homer made him financially secure enough that in 1719 he settled in a villa in Twickenham. Pope made a career out of mocking other poets, and his sharp-edged jabs earned him the 'Wicked Wasp' nickname. Pope was undeniably skilled at verse, and his literary reputation has waxed and waned over the years, but his work is generally considered a major influence on English satire. His other works include The Dunciad (1728-42), Moral Essays (1731-35) and Essay on Man (1733). He is the source of many commonly-used (and often unattributed) quotes, including: "To err is human, to forgive divine," "A little learning is a dangerous thing," and "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread."

Pope suffered an infection as a child that permanently curved his spine (he stood 4'6" tall)... Pope was a Roman Catholic; his spotty education as a youth was due to restrictions against Catholics in Protestant-ruled England... Some other Pope gems are "Fools admire, but men approve," "The proper study of mankind is man" and "Hope springs eternal in the human breast."

The English poet and satirist Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the greatest poet and verse satirist of the Augustan period. No other poet in the history of English literature has handled the heroic couplet with comparable flexibility and brilliance.

Alexander Pope inherited from John Dryden the verse from that he chose to perfect. He polished his work with meticulous care and, like all great poets, used language with genuine inventiveness. His qualities of imagination are seen in the originality with which he handled traditional forms, in his satiric vision of the contemporary world, and in his inspired use of classical models.

Pope was born on May 21, 1688, in London, where his Roman Catholic father was a linen merchant. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 his family moved out of London and settled about 1700 at Binfield in Windsor Forest. Pope had little formal schooling, largely educating himself through extensive reading. Sir William Trumbull, a retired statesman of literary interests who lived nearby, did much to encourage the young poet. So did the dramatist and poet William Wycherley and the poet-critic William Walsh, with whom Pope became acquainted when he was about 17 and whose advice to aim at "correctness" contributed to the flawless texture and concentrated brilliance of Pope's verse.

A sweet-tempered child with a fresh, plump face, Pope contracted a tubercular infection in his later childhood and never grew taller than 4 feet 6 inches. He suffered curvature of the spine (necessitating the wearing of a stiff canvas brace) and constant headaches. His features, however, were striking, and the young Joshua Reynolds noticed in his "sharp, keen countenance … something grand, like Cicero's." His physical appearance, frequently ridiculed by his enemies, undoubtedly gave an edge to Pope's satire; but he was always warmhearted and generous in his affection for his many friends.

Early Poems

Precocious as a poet, Pope attracted the notice of the eminent bookseller Jacob Tonson, who solicited the publication of his Pastorals (1709). By this time Pope was already at work on his more ambitious Essay on Criticism (1711), an illuminating synthesis of critical precepts designed to expose the evils and to effect a regeneration of the contemporary literary scene.

The Rape of the Lock (1712, two cantos) immediately made Pope famous as a poet. The cutting off of a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor's hair by Robert, Lord Petre, had caused an estrangement between these prominent Catholic families; and Pope's friend John Caryll had suggested that he write a poem "to make a jest of it, and laugh them together again." In the poem Fermor is represented as Belinda and Lord Petre as the Baron. Adopting a mock-heroic style in the manner of Nicholas Boileau's Le Lutrin, Pope showed how disproportionate it was to treat the event overseriously, at the same time glancing good-humoredly at vanity and at the rococolike glitter of the beau monde. Rejecting Joseph Addison's advice not to enlarge his design, Pope published an extended version (1714, five cantos) containing the "machinery" of the sylphs (adopted from the Rosicrucian system) and various other epic motifs and allusions. These not only heightened the brilliance of the poem's world but also helped to place its significance and that of the "rape" in proper perspective.

Several other poems published by 1717, the date of the first collected edition of Pope's works, deserve a brief mention. "Windsor Forest" (1713), written in the tradition of Sir John Denham's "Cooper's Hill, " celebrated the peace confirmed by the Treaty of Utrecht. A rich tapestry of historical and poetic allusions, it showed the Stuarts, and especially Queen Anne, in a quasi-mythical light. In 1717 appeared the sophisticated yet moving "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady" and "Eloisa to Abelard, " an example in the Ovidian manner of the currently popular form of heroic epistle. The representation of the cloistered Eloisa's conflicting emotions toward her former lover (the scholar Peter Abelard), the denouement, and the concluding epilogue make this poem, in effect, a drama in miniature.

Translations of Homer

Pope also engaged in poetic imitations and translations. His Messiah (1712), published by Sir Richard Steele in the Spectator, was an imitation of Virgil's fourth Eclogue, based on passages from Isaiah; and his early "translations" of Chaucer included the Temple of Fame (1715). In later life Pope published reworkings of several of John Donne's satires. But Pope's versions of Homer were his greatest achievement as a translator.

From an early age a frequenter of Will's Coffeehouse, Pope was for a time friendly with men of both political parties. He wrote the prologue for Joseph Addison's Cato (1713), and the Whigs naturally hoped to secure his talents for their party. But growing opposition between him and Addison's followers (who met at Button's) made inevitable Pope's adherence to his other and more congenial group of literary friends - Jonathan Swift, Dr. John Arbuthnot, John Gay, and Thomas Parnell. Together they combined to form the Scriblerus Club, which aimed at a burlesque treatment of all forms of pedantry and which indirectly contributed to the creation of such works as Gulliver's Travels and the Dunciad. In 1715 Addison tried to forestall the success of Pope's translation of the Iliad by encouraging Thomas Tickell to publish a rival version, and this caused Pope a great deal of anxiety until the superiority of his own translation was acclaimed.

Pope undertook the translation because he needed money - the result of a sharp drop in the interest from his father's French annuities. The translation occupied him until 1720, and it was a great financial success, making Pope independent of the customary forms of literary patronage. Parnell and William Broome were among those who assisted with the notes, but the translation was entirely Pope's own. It has been highly praised by subsequent critics.

From the time his Iliad began to appear, Pope became the victim of numerous pamphlet attacks on his person, politics, and religion, many of them instigated by the infamous publisher Edmund Curll. In 1716 an increased land tax on Roman Catholics forced the Popes to sell their place at Binfield and to settle near the Earl of Burlington's villa at Chiswick. The next year Pope's father died, and in 1719 the poet's increased wealth enabled him to move with his mother to a semirural villa at Twickenham. There he improved house and gardens, making a special feature of the grotto, which connected house and gardens beneath the intervening road. At Twickenham, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu soon became Pope's neighbor. Several years earlier she had rivaled Martha Blount as an object of Pope's affection, but later a good deal of enmity existed between her and Pope, and she joined Lord (John) Hervey in attacking him.

During the 1720s Pope was engaged on a version of the Odyssey (1725-1726). Broome and Elijah Fenton were his collaborators, completing half of the translation between them. It was Pope's name, however, that sold the work, and he naturally received the lion's share of the profits (Pope earned about £9, 000 from his translations of Homer). It was this translation that led to Pope's association with the young Joseph Spence, who wrote a Judicious and engaging criticism of it and who later recorded his valuable Anecdotes of Pope.

Editorial Work

Pope also undertook several editorial projects. Parnell's Poems (1721) was followed by an edition of the late Duke of Buckingham's Works (1723), subsequently suppressed on account of its Jacobite tendencies. The trial of his friend Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, for complicity in a Jacobite plot also caused Pope a good deal of concern. Then, in 1725, Pope's edition of William Shakespeare appeared. Pope's emendations and explanatory notes were notoriously capricious, and his edition was attacked by Lewis Theobald in Shakespeare Restored (1726), a work that revealed a superior knowledge of editorial technique and that gained for its author the unenviable distinction of becoming the original hero of the Dunciad.

The Dunciad

In 1726-1727 Swift was in England and a guest of Pope. Together they published three volumes of Miscellanies in 1727-1728, in the last of which the Peri Bathous; or the Art of Sinking in Poetry was included. Renewed contact with Swift must have given a great impetus to Pope's poem on "Dulness, " which appeared as the three-book Dunciad (1728). Theobald was the prime dunce, and the next year the poem was enlarged by a ponderous apparatus (including "Notes Variorum") intended as a burlesque on the learned lumber of commentators and textual critics.

Clearly Pope used the Dunciad as personal satire to pay off many old scores. But it was also prompted by his distaste for that whole process by which worthless writers gained undue literary prominence. "Martinus Scriblerus" summarized the action of the poem as "the removal of the imperial seat of Dulness from the city to the polite world, " and this parody of Virgil's epic was accompanied by further mock-heroic elements - the intervention of the goddess, the epic games of the second book, and the visit to the underworld and the vision of future "glories, " with the former city-poet Elkanah Settle acting the part of the sybil. Indeed, despite its devastating satire, the Dunciad was essentially a phantasmagoric treatment of the forces of anticulture by a great comic genius.

In 1742 Pope published a fourth book to the Dunciad separately, and his last published work was the four-book Dunciad (1743), which incorporated the new material and enthroned the brazen laureate Colley Cibber as prime dunce in place of Theobald. This revenge on Cibber, who had recently exposed a ridiculous escapade of the poet's youth, provided the poem with a more considerable hero. It also gained in artistic completeness, since the action of the fourth book depicted the fulfillment of Settle's prophecy.

Epistles and An Essay on Man

"The Epistle to Burlington" (1731), reminiscent of the Dunciad in its vivaciously satiric portrait of "Timon, " was designed as part of a "system of ethics in the Horatian way" of which An Essay on Man (1733-1734) was to constitute the first book. Though this plan was never realized, the poem illustrates, along with its companion, "Epistle to Bathurst" (1733), antithetical vices in the use of riches. These two epistles were subsequently placed after those "To Cobham" (1734) and "To a Lady" (1735), which were thus intended to provide the projected magnum opus with an introductory section on the characters of men and women. "To Cobham" fits easily into this scheme, but "To a Lady" is rather a deliciously witty portrait gallery in Pope's best satiric manner.

"To Burlington" also compliments a nobleman friend of long standing who influenced Pope's appreciation of architecture as did Allen Bathurst his appreciation of landscape gardening. To these pursuits Pope devoted much of his time, being disposed to regard a cultivated esthetic taste as inseparable from a refined moral sense.

Pope's friendship with the former statesman Henry St. John Bolingbroke, who on his return from exile had settled a few miles from Twickenham, stimulated his interest in philosophy and led to the composition of An Essay on Man. Some ideas were doubtless suggested by Bolingbroke; certainly the argument advanced in Epistle 4 - that terrestrial happiness is adequate to justify the ways of God to man - was consonant with his thinking. But Pope's sources were predominately commonplaces with a long history in Western thought, the most central being the doctrine of plenitude (expressed through the metaphors of a "chain" or "scale" of being) and the assertion that the discordant whole is bound harmoniously together. Even Pope's doctrine of the "ruling passion" was not original - though he gave it its most extended treatment. In essence, however, the Essay is not philosophy but a poet's apprehension of unity despite diversity, of an order embracing the whole multifarious creation.

The Correspondence

In 1733 Pope's mother died. The same year he engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with Curll to have his letters published in the guise of a pirated edition. Appearing in 1735, this edition allowed him to publish an authoritative edition in 1737. Such maneuvers are not easy to justify. Nor is the careful rewriting and fabrication, designed to reflect the author in the best possible light. But at least Pope's letters suggest the extent of his many friendships and something of the hospitality he enjoyed whenever he indulged his love of traveling.

Imitations of Horace

The 1730s were also the years of the Imitations of Horace (1733-1738), pungent and endearing by turns. How congenial to Pope were the conversational framework and Horatian independence of tone is evident from the fact that they read not like "imitations" but have the freshness of originals. Indeed, the best of them - the "Epistle to Arbuthnot" (1735) and the "Dialogues" (1738) - have no precise source. The "Epistle, " with its famous portrait of Addison ("Atticus") and searing indictment of Hervey ("Sporus"), was both the satirist's apologia pro vita sua and his vindication of personally oriented satire. The two "Dialogues" continued this theme, introducing an additional element of political satire.

As Pope grew older, he came to rely more and more on the faithful Martha Blount, and to her he left most of his possessions. He described his life as a "long disease, " and asthma increased his sufferings in his later years. At times during the last month of his life he became delirious. He died on May 30, 1744, and was buried in Twickenham Church.

Further Reading

The definitive edition of Pope's works is The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, edited by John Butt (10 vols., 1951-1967), a monumental and illuminating scholarly achievement. Pope's Poetical Works, edited by Herbert Davis (1967), presents the poems, without annotation, as in their original format.

George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (1934), is a scholarly literary biography of Pope to about 1726. A less scholarly but readable, reliable, and up-to-date biography is Peter Quennell, Alexander Pope: The Education of Genius, 1688-1728 (1968), the first volume of a projected two-volume study. Marjorie Nicolson and G.S. Rousseau, "This Long Disease, My Life": Alexander Pope and the Sciences (1968), is a good treatment of Pope's illness and a history of science of the time. A short but colorful biography is Bonamy Dobrée, Alexander Pope (1951). See also Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets (3 vols., 1779-1781; several recent editions); Emily Morse Symonds, Mr. Pope, His Life and Times (2 vols., 1909); Edith Sitwell, Alexander Pope (1930); Norman Ault, New Light on Pope (1949); and William K. Wimsatt, The Portraits of Alexander Pope (1965).

Useful critical studies of the poetry include Geoffrey Tillotson, On the Poetry of Pope (1938) and Pope and Human Nature (1958); Aubrey L. Williams, Pope's Dunciad (1955); Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (1959); Thomas R. Edwards, This Dark Estate: A Reading of Pope (1963); and Maynard Mack, comp., Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope (1964; rev. ed. 1968).

Recommended for general reading are James R. Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry (1948); Ian Jack, Augustan Satire (1952); and Geoffrey Tillotson, Augustan Poetic Diction (1964).

(click to enlarge)
Alexander Pope, portrait by Thomas Hudson; in the National Portrait Gallery, London (credit: Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London)

(born May 21, 1688, London, Eng. — died May 30, 1744, Twickenham, near London) English poet and satirist. A precocious boy precluded from formal education by his Roman Catholicism, Pope was mainly self-educated. A deformity of the spine and other health problems limited his growth and physical activities, leading him to devote himself to reading and writing. His first major work was An Essay on Criticism (1711), a poem on the art of writing that contains several brilliant epigrams (e.g., "To err is human, to forgive, divine"). His witty mock-epic The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714) ridicules fashionable society. The great labour of his life was his verse translation of Homer's Iliad (1720) and Odyssey (1726), whose success made him financially secure. He became involved in many literary battles, prompting him to write poems such as the scathing mock-epic The Dunciad (1728) and An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735). The philosophical An Essay on Man (1733 – 34) was intended as part of a larger work that he never completed.

For more information on Alexander Pope, visit Britannica.com.

Pope, Alexander (1688-1744). English poet. Largely self-educated, the son of a Roman catholic draper, and crippled by a tubercular condition, Pope was always an outsider. He made his reputation with his Pastorals (1709), the verse Essay on Criticism (1711), and the heroi-comical Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714). Windsor-Forest (1713), at once a paean to peace and a celebration of British imperialism, led to his vital association with Swift, Gay, and the Scriblerus Club, and his later involvement in political satire, particularly at the expense of Walpole, beginning with The Dunciad (1728). While the Moral Essays (1731-5) and An Essay on Man (1733-4) employed moral and philosophical themes to expose contemporary failings, the more strident criticism of the Imitations of Horace prepared the way for the apocalyptic revised Dunciad of 1743.

English poet and garden-designer. He laid out his own important garden at Twickenham, Mddx., which exemplified principles of light and shade, grouping and perspective, and contained a commemorative obelisk and urns, so had mnemonic and elegiac overtones. His insistence on respecting the genius loci (genius of the place) led to a growing sensitivity towards the natural features of a site (which even might be enhanced), and his was a powerful influence on the design of the C18 garden.

Bibliography

• Batey (1999)
• D. Coffin (1994)
• Jane Turner (1996)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Pope, Alexander (1688–1744), English poet, translator, and critic. A celebrity not only in fact but also by profession, Alexander Pope was the unmatched superstar of English neoclassical literature and arguably the first author in England to make his living exclusively through literary talent. During a comparatively short life focused on literary and cultural activities, Pope alternately defined, improved, invented, satirized, critiqued, and reformed the genres and conventions of early-eighteenth-century British verse.

Born in 1688 amidst a "Glorious Revolution" that put an end to the absolutist claims of Stuart monarchs and set Britain on a course for a constitutional if not altogether secular government, Pope's life was characterized by the contradictions of new gentility and chastised affluence. Despite their urban origins and their mercantile vocation, Pope and his forebears drifted in Tory, royalist circles; despite physical deformity and entrenchment in the upper middle classes, Pope affected the stylish, rakish ways of high life; despite profiting handsomely from his publications and living like a conforming country squire on his suburban Twickenham estate, Pope persisted in Catholicism (enduring heavy economic and political sanctions) and enjoyed provoking persecution from an officialdom that was also his audience and customer. The story of Pope's meteoric rise—from the publication of his Pastorals (1709) at the age of twenty through the runaway success of his versified critical treatise, The Essay on Criticism (1711), at twenty-three through his best-selling translations of Homer (1715–1726) through his unlikely versified philosophical hit, An Essay on Man (1733–1734), and on through his snarling but astonishingly successful Dunciad (1743)—may read like the contrived biography of some twentieth-century movie idol, but it also points up Pope's lucky historical position at a moment when an enlarged readership and an expanding urban culture were transforming the "literary career" from a private preserve for gentlemen to an open public spectacle. So powerful and pervasive was this new idiom of the public writer that Pope could maintain influential friends across the political and cultural spectrum, from the conservative Jonathan Swift to the snappy Joseph Addison and from Richard Boyle, the Whiggish earl of Burlington, to Tory movers-and-shakers such as Robert Harley, earl of Oxford and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke.

Pope routinely presents himself as a conservative spokesman (and satirist) for sound common sense and as a sturdy pillar of English classicism. His works, however, are emphatically neoclassical. They stress what the period called "imitation," a speculative, psychological, and altogether modern attempt to write "as if" one were an ancient author who happened to be living and writing in Augustan London. "Wit," "genius," "grace," and other eighteenth-century literary values vie for hegemony with assorted classical "rules." Pope's works advocate experimentation and adaptation, applying putatively classical norms to eighteenth-century contexts, topics, and genres. Pope's early Pastorals (1709) apply Virgilian techniques to English landscapes to produce a modern Georgics. An Essay on Criticism (1711) borrows from Horace's Ars Poetica (Art of poetry) to characterize and to spoof Augustan rhetorical miscarriages. The Rape of the Lock (1714) fuses contemporary mockery (as practiced by John Dryden, John Philips, Samuel Garth, and John Gay) with Homeric heroism to produce a ridiculous mock-heroic "epic" about domestic adventures in the boudoir. Not unlike the Rape is Windsor Forest (1713), a more sober but no less historically mixed attempt to combine Elizabethan versified history with Augustan heroic couplets to produce an epic story of the British monarchy, an epic that somewhat preposterously culminates in the coronation of Queen Anne.

Pope's later works preserve his commitment to this unabashedly transhistorical classicism while also negotiating between the differing demands of moral, satiric, and heroical writing, three strands that intertwine but never completely braid in Pope's increasingly tense later verse. The Essay on Man (1733–1734) flutters nervously if brilliantly between versified popularizations of philosophical optimism (as preached by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and others) and broad satiric indictments of human shortsightedness. Several verse essays and epistles in imitation of Horace, collectively known as the Moral Essays (1733–1738), along with the companion An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), tackle a range of philosophical topics, from architectural aesthetics to the character of women, in a sometimes theatrical, sometimes compassionate, sometimes deliberative, generally satiric voice. Pope's last large work, The Dunciad (1743), a re-issue and extension of his earlier Dunciad Variorum (1729), deploys crashingly gigantic heroic couplets to record, judge, and satirize a veritable encyclopedia of "dunces," poetasters, and seekers after literary fame who, in Pope's mind, have succeeded only in sucking the life out of neoclassicism.

In addition to his poetic offerings, Pope made substantial contributions to literary criticism (mostly through the seemingly simple but always subtle witticisms in An Essay on Criticism [1711]), to the rise of bibliography and textual studies (through his not always competent production of an edition of Shakespeare [1725] and through his relentless, ravaging attacks on other editors), and to the rise of the private epistle as a literary form (through his audacious publication of his own correspondence [1735]). Pope was a major figure in the history of the print culture and of the publishing industry through his lively interactions with eighteenth-century publishing magnates such as Jacob Tonson, Bernard Lintot, and the scandalous Edmund Curll. Pope's opinions on naturalistic landscape gardening are definitive for their period. These and many other contributions mark him as a quintessential if not always representative figure in early eighteenth-century English culture.

Bibliography

Primary Source

Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope. Edited by John Butt. London, 1963. A one-volume edition of the Twickenham text with selected annotations.

Secondary Sources

Brower, Reuben. Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion. Oxford, 1959. Classic study of Pope's poetic technique and topical allusions.

Brownell, Morris R. Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England. Oxford, 1978.

Griffin, Dustin H. Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems. Princeton, 1978. Analysis of Pope, Pope's persona, and the role of the author in neoclassical verse.

Mack, Maynard. Alexander Pope: A Life. New Haven, 1985. Standard, highly detailed biography of Pope.

Quintero, Ruben. Literate Culture: Pope's Rhetorical Art. Newark, Del., 1992. Updated account of the rhetorically attuned culture in which Pope flourished.

—KEVIN L. COPE

Quotes:

"Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part."

"Some old men, continually praise the time of their youth. In fact, you would almost think that there were no fools in their days, but unluckily they themselves are left as an example."

"Let me tell you I am better acquainted with you for a long absence, as men are with themselves for a long affliction: absence does but hold off a friend, to make one see him the truer."

"Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude."

"Satan is wiser now than before, and tempts by making rich instead of poor."

"Education forms the common mind. Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined."

See more famous quotes by Alexander Pope

For other uses, see Alexander Pope (disambiguation).

Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope (c.1727), an English poet best known for his Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad
Born	21 May 1688(1688-05-21) London
Died	30 May 1744 (aged 56)
Occupation	Poet

Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744) is a famous eighteenth century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson.^[1] Pope is famous for his use of the heroic couplet.

Contents 1 Life 2 Early career 3 Essay on Criticism 4 Translations of Homer 4.1 Twickenham and the Grotto 5 The Odyssey and Shakespeare 6 Later career: "An Essay on Man" and satires 7 Essay on Man 8 Criticisms of Pope's Work 9 Works 9.1 Major Works 9.2 Editions 10 Footnotes 11 References 12 External links

Life

Pope was born to Alexander Pope Snr. (1646 – 1717) a linen merchant of Plough Court, Lombard Street, London, and Edith Pope (née Turner) (1643–1733), who were both Catholics.^[2] Pope's education was affected by the penal law in force at the time upholding the status of the established Church of England, which banned Catholics from teaching on pain of perpetual imprisonment. Pope was taught to read by his aunt, then went to Twyford School in about 1698–9.^[2] He then went to two Catholic schools in London.^[2] Such schools, while illegal, were tolerated in some areas.^[3]

In 1700, his family moved to a small estate in Binfield, Berkshire, close to the royal Windsor Forest.^[2] This was due to strong anti-Catholic sentiment and a statute preventing Catholics from living within 10 miles (16 km) of either London or Westminster.^[4] Pope would later describe the countryside around the house in his poem Windsor Forest. Pope's formal education ended at this time, and from then on he mostly educated himself by reading the works of classical writers such as the satirists Horace and Juvenal, the epic poets Homer and Virgil, as well as English authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and John Dryden.^[2] He also studied many languages and read works by English, French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets. After five years of study, Pope came into contact with figures from the London literary society such as William Wycherley, William Congreve, Samuel Garth, William Trumbull, and William Walsh.^[2][3]

At Binfield, he also began to make many important friends. One of them, John Caryll (the future dedicatee of The Rape of the Lock), was twenty years older than the poet and had made many acquaintances in the London literary world. He introduced the young Pope to the aging playwright William Wycherley and to William Walsh, a minor poet, who helped Pope revise his first major work, The Pastorals. He also met the Blount sisters, Teresa and (his alleged future lover) Martha, both of whom would remain lifelong friends.^[3]

From the age of 12, he suffered numerous health problems, such as Pott's disease (a form of tuberculosis that affects the bone) which deformed his body and stunted his growth, leaving him with a severe hunchback. His tuberculosis infection caused other health problems including respiratory difficulties, high fevers, inflamed eyes, and abdominal pain.^[2] He never grew beyond 1.37 metres (4 feet, 6 inches) tall. Pope was already removed from society because he was Catholic; his poor health only alienated him further. Although he never married, he had many female friends whom he wrote witty letters. He did have one alleged lover, his lifelong friend, Martha Blount.^[3][5][6][7]

Early career

In May, 1709, Pope's Pastorals was published in the sixth part of Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies. This brought instant fame to Pope. This was followed by An Essay on Criticism published in May 1711 , which was equally well received.

Around 1711, Pope made friends with Tory writers John Gay, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Parnell and John Arbuthnot, who together formed the satirical Scriblerus Club. The aim of the club was to satirise ignorance and pedantry in the form of the fictional scholar Martinus Scriblerus. He also made friends with Whig writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. In March of 1713, Windsor Forest was published and was a well known success.^[3]

Pope's next well known poem was The Rape of the Lock; first published in 1712, with a revised version published in 1714. This is sometimes considered Pope's most popular poem because it was a mock-heroic epic, written to make fun of a high society quarrel between Arabella Fermor (the "Belinda" of the poem) and Lord Petre, who had snipped a lock of hair from her head without her permission. In his poem he treats his characters in an epic style; when the Baron steals her hair and she tries to get it back, it flies into the air and turns into a star.

During Pope's friendship with Joseph Addison, he contributed to Addison's play Cato as well as writing for The Guardian and The Spectator. Around this time he began the work of translating the Iliad, which was a painstaking process - publication began in 1715 and did not end until 1720.^[3]

In 1714, the political situation worsened with the death of Queen Anne and the disputed succession between the Hanoverians and the Jacobites, leading to the attempted Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. Though Pope as a Catholic might be expected to have supported the Jacobites because of his religious and political affiliations, according to Maynard Mack, "where Pope himself stood on these matters can probably never be confidently known". These events led to an immediate downturn in the fortunes of the Tories, and Pope's friend, Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke fled to France.

Essay on Criticism

An Essay on Criticism was first published anonymously on 15 May 1711. Pope began writing the poem early in his career and took about three years to finish it.

At the time the poem was published, the heroic couplet style (in which it was written) was a moderately new genre of poetry, and Pope's most ambitious work. "An Essay on Criticism" was an attempt to identify and refine his own positions as a poet and critic. The poem was said to be a response to an ongoing debate on the question of whether poetry should be natural, or written according to predetermined artificial rules inherited from the classical past.^[8]

The poem begins with a discussion of the standard rules that govern poetry by which a critic passes judgment. Pope comments on the classical authors who dealt with such standards, and the authority that he believed should be accredited to them. He concludes that the rules of the ancients are identical with the rules of Nature, and fall in the category of poetry and painting, which like religion and morality, reflect natural law.^[8]

The poem is purposefully unclear and full of contradictions. Pope admits that rules are necessary for the production and criticism, but gives importance to the mysterious and irrational qualities of poetry.^[9]

He discusses the laws to which a critic should adhere while critiquing poetry, and points out that critics serve an important function in aiding poets with their works, as opposed to the practice of attacking them.^[9]

The final section of "An Essay on Criticism" discusses the moral qualities and virtues inherent in the ideal critic, who, Pope claims, is also the ideal man.

Translations of Homer

Pope's house at Twickenham, showing the grotto. From a watercolour produced soon after his death.

Pope had been fascinated by Homer since childhood. In 1713, he announced his plans to publish a translation of the Iliad. The work would be available by subscription, with one volume appearing every year over the course of six years. Pope secured a revolutionary deal with the publisher Bernard Lintot, which brought him two hundred guineas a volume, a very vast sum indeed.

His translation of the Iliad appeared between 1715 and 1720. It was acclaimed by Samuel Johnson as "a performance which no age or nation could hope to equal" (although the classical scholar Richard Bentley wrote: "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.").

Twickenham and the Grotto

A likeness of Pope derived from a portrait by William Hoare^[10]

The money made from the Homer translation allowed Pope to move to a villa at Twickenham in 1719, where he created his now famous grotto and gardens. Pope decorated the grotto with alabaster, marbles, and ores such as mundic and crystals. He also used Cornish diamonds, stalactites, spars, snakestones and spongestone. A number of mirrors, an expensive luxury in the Augustan age, were also placed around the grotto. A camera obscura was installed to delight his visitors, of whom there were many. The serendipitous discovery of a spring during its excavations enabled the subterranean retreat to be filled with the relaxing sound of trickling water, which would quietly echo around the chambers. Pope was said to have remarked that: "Were it to have nymphs as well – it would be complete in everything." Although the house and gardens have long since been demolished, much of this grotto still survives. The grotto now lies beneath St James Independent School for boys, and is opened to the public once a year.[5]

The Odyssey and Shakespeare

Encouraged by the success of the Iliad, Pope translated the Odyssey. The translation appeared in 1726, but this time, confronted with the arduousness of the task, he enlisted the help of William Broome and Elijah Fenton. Pope attempted to conceal the extent of the collaboration (he himself translated only twelve books, Broome eight and Fenton four), but the secret leaked out. It did some damage to Pope's reputation for a time, but not to his profits.

Frontispiece and titlepage of a 1752 edition of Alexander Pope's extensively annotated translation of Homer's The Odyssey.

In this period, Pope was also employed by the publisher Jacob Tonson to produce an opulent new edition of Shakespeare. When it finally appeared, in 1725, this edition silently "regularised" Shakespeare's metre and rewrote his verse in a number of places.[6] Pope also demoted about 1560 lines of Shakespearean material to footnotes, arguing that they were so "excessively bad" that Shakespeare could never have written them.[7] (Other lines were excluded from the edition altogether.[8]) In 1726, the lawyer, poet, and pantomime deviser Lewis Theobald published a scathing pamphlet called Shakespeare Restored, which catalogued the errors in Pope's work and suggested a number of revisions to the text. Pope and Theobald were probably well acquainted, and Pope no doubt interpreted this as a violation of the rules of friendship.[9]

A second edition of Pope's Shakespeare appeared in 1728, but aside from making some minor revisions to the Preface, it seems that Pope had little to do with it. Most later eighteenth-century editors of Shakespeare dismissed Pope's creatively motivated approach to textual criticism. Pope's Preface, however, continued to be highly rated. It was suggested that Shakespeare's texts were thoroughly contaminated by actors' interpolations and they would influence editors for most of the eighteenth century.[10]

Later career: "An Essay on Man" and satires

Though the Dunciad was first published anonymously in Dublin, its authorship was not in doubt. As well as Theobald, it pilloried a host of other "hacks", "scribblers" and "dunces". Mack called its publication "in many ways the greatest act of folly in Pope's life". Though a masterpiece, "it bore bitter fruit. It brought the poet in his own time the hostility of its victims and their sympathizers, who pursued him implacably from then on with a few damaging truths and a host of slanders and lies...". The threats were physical too. According to his sister, Pope would never go for a walk without the company of his Great Dane, Bounce, and a pair of loaded pistols in his pocket.

In 1731, Pope published his "Epistle to Burlington", on the subject of architecture, the first of four poems which would later be grouped under the title Moral Essays (1731-35). In the epistle, Pope ridiculed the bad taste of the aristocrat "Timon". Pope's enemies claimed he was attacking the Duke of Chandos and his estate, Cannons. Though the charge was untrue, it did Pope a great deal of damage.

Around this time, Pope began to grow discontented with the ministry of Robert Walpole and drew closer to the opposition led by Bolingbroke, who had returned to England in 1725. Inspired by Bolingbroke's philosophical ideas, Pope wrote An Essay on Man (1733-4). He published the first part anonymously, in a cunning and successful ploy to win praise from his fiercest critics and enemies.

Despite the 'Essay' being written in heroic couplets, many translations into European languages rapidly followed, especially in Germany, where the 'Essay' was regarded as a serious contribution to philosophy.

The Imitations of Horace followed (1733-38). These were written in the popular Augustan form of the "imitation" of a classical poet, not so much a translation of his works as an updating with contemporary references. Pope used the model of Horace to satirise life under George II, especially what he regarded as the widespread corruption tainting the country under Walpole's influence and the poor quality of the court's artistic taste.

Pope also added a wholly original poem, An Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot, as an introduction to the "Imitations". It reviews his own literary career and includes the famous portraits of Lord Hervey ("Sporus") and Addison ("Atticus"). In 1738 he wrote the Universal Prayer.^[11]

After 1738, Pope wrote little. He toyed with the idea of composing a patriotic epic in blank verse called Brutus, but only the opening lines survive. His major work in these years was revising and expanding his masterpiece The Dunciad. Book Four appeared in 1742, and a complete revision of the whole poem in the following year. In this version, Pope replaced the "hero", Lewis Theobald, with the poet laureate Colley Cibber as "king of dunces". By now Pope's health, which had never been good, was failing, and he died in his villa surrounded by friends on 30 May 1744. On the previous day, 29 May 1744, Pope called for a priest and received the Last Rites of the Catholic Church. He lies buried in the nave of the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Twickenham.

Essay on Man

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Main article: An Essay on Man

The Essay on Man is a philosophical poem, written in heroic couplets and published between 1732 and 1734. Pope intended this poem to be the centrepiece of a proposed system of ethics that was to be put forth in poetic form. It was a piece of work that Pope intended to make into a larger work; however, he did not live to complete it.^[12]

The Essay on Man is an attempt to justify the ways of God to Man, and that man is not himself the centre of all things. The essay is not solely Christian; however, it makes an assumption that man has fallen and must seek his own salvation.^[12]

The Essay on Man consists of ten epistles that are addressed to Lord Bolingbroke. Pope presents an idea or his view on the Universe; he says that no matter how imperfect, complex, inscrutable and disturbing the Universe appears to be, it functions in a rational fashion according to the natural laws. The natural laws consider the Universe as a whole a perfect work of God. To humans it appears to be evil and imperfect in many ways; however, Pope points out that this is due to our limited mind set and limited intellectual capacity. Pope gets the message across that humans must accept our position in the "Great Chain of Being" which is at a middle stage between the angels and the beasts of the world. If we are able to accomplish this then we potentially could lead happy and virtuous lives.^[12]

Essay on Man is an affirmative poem of faith: life seems to be chaotic and confusing to man when he is in the center of it, but it really according to Pope is a divinely ordered. In Pope's world God exists and is what he centers the Universe around in order to have an ordered structure. The limited intelligence of man can only take in tiny portions of this order and can experience only partial truths, hence man must rely on hope which then leads into faith. Man must be aware of his existence in the Universe and what he brings to it, in terms of riches, power and fame. It is man's duty to strive to be good regardless of other situations: this is the message Pope is trying to get across to the reader.^[13]

Criticisms of Pope's Work

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The death of Alexander Pope from Museus, a threnody by William Mason. Diana holds the dying Pope, and John Milton, Edmund Spenser, and Geoffrey Chaucer prepare to welcome him to heaven.

Pope died the greatest poet of his age. However, by the mid-eighteenth century new fashions in poetry started to emerge. A decade after Pope's death, Joseph Warton claimed that Pope's style of poetry was not the most excellent form of the art. Pope's conservative poetry also did not impress William Wordsworth. Wordsworth criticised Pope's poetic style as artificial and archaic, and argued that he did not express the true thoughts and feelings of men.^[3]

In the twentieth century an effort to revive Pope's reputation began and was successful. Pope's work was now found to be full of references to the people and places of his time and these aided individuals' understanding of the past. The postwar period stressed the power of Pope's poetry and recognised that Pope's immersion in Christian and Biblical culture gave great depth to his poetry. Maynard Mack thought very highly of Pope's poetry. He argued that Pope's humane moral vision demanded as much respect as his technical excellence. In the years 1953-1967 the production of the definitive Twickenham edition of Pope's poems was published in ten volumes.^[3]

The last decades of the twentieth century brought further challenges to Pope's literary reputation. These critics were prompted by theoretical perspectives, such as Marxism, feminism and other forms of post-structuralism. Hence Hammond focused on Pope's singular achievement in making an independent living solely from his writing. Laura Brown's 'Alexander Pope' (1985) adopted a Marxist approach and accused Pope of becoming an apologist for the oppressive upper classes. A year after Brown's study, Brean Hammond published an article about Pope inspired by Cultural Materialism in the British context and the USA-based New Historicism. Following Hammond's approach, Raymond Williams explained art as a set of practices influenced by broad cultural factors rather than simply the vague ideas of genius alone.^[3]

In 'Politics and Poetics of Transgression' (1985) Peter Stallybrass and Allon White claimed that Pope drew upon the low culture which he despised in order to produce his own 'high art'. They asserted that Pope was implicated in the very material he was attempting to exclude, an observation not far different from the arguments of Pope's contemporaries.^[3]

Feminists also criticised Pope's works. Ellen Pollak's 'The Poetics of Sexual Myth' (1985) argued that Pope followed an anti-feminist tradition. Pollak believed that Pope regarded women as inferior to men both intellectually and physically. However, in Pope's defence it should be said that this was the general view of his time. Carolyn Williams identified a crisis in the male role during the eighteenth century in Britain and discussed its impact on Pope as well as on his writing.^[3]

Works

Major Works

Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:

• 1709: Pastorals
• 1711: An Essay on Criticism^[14]
• 1712: The Rape of the Lock (enlarged in 1714)^[14]
• 1713: Windsor Forest^[14]
• 1715–1720: Translation of the Iliad^[14]
• 1717: Eloisa to Abelard^[14]
• 1717: Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady^[14]
• 1723–1725: The Works of Shakespear, in Six Volumes
• 1725–1726: Translation of the Odyssey^[14]
• 1727: Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry
• 1728: The Dunciad^[14]
• 1733–1734: Essay on Man^[14]
• 1735: The Prologue to the Satires (see the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot and Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?)

Editions

• The Works of Alexander Pope vol 3 vol 3 v 9 of 10 v 6 of 8

Footnotes

1. ^ Dictionary of Quotations (1999)
2. ^ ^{a b c d e f g} Erskine-Hill, DNB
3. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k} 'Alexander Pope', Literature Online biography (2000)
4. ^ "An Act to prevent and avoid dangers which may grow by Popish Recusants" (3. Jac. 1, v). See http://www.catholic.org/encyclopedia/view.php?id=9128 for details.
5. ^ Gordon (2002)
6. ^ 'Mount', Britannica (2009)
7. ^ The Life of Alexander Pope, by Robert Carruthers, 1857, with a corrupted and badly scanned version available from Google Books, or as an even worse 23MB PDF. For reference to his relationship with Martha Blount and her sister, see pp.64–68 (89th and following pages of the PDF). In particular, discussion of the controversy over whether the relationship was sexual is described in some detail on pp.76–78.
8. ^ ^{a b} Rogers (2006)
9. ^ ^{a b} Baines (2001)
10. ^ NPG 299; Alexander Pope
11. ^ The Universal Prayer
12. ^ ^{a b c} Nuttal (1984)
13. ^ Cassirer (1944)
14. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Cox, Michael, editor, The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature, Oxford University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-19-860634-6

References

• 'Alexander Pope', Literature Online biography (Chadwyck-Healey: Cambridge, 2000).
• The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Oxford University Press, 5th ed., 1999).
• Martha Blount, Encyclopædia Britannica (2009). Retrieved April 17, 2009.
• Baines, Paul. The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope (Routledge Publishing, 2001), pp. 67–90.
• Cassirer, Ernst. An essay on man; an introduction to a philosophy of human culture (Yale University Press, 1944).
• Gordon, Ian. 'An Epistle to a Lady (Moral Essay II)', The Literary Encyclopedia. 2002-01-24, accessed 2009-04-17.
• Erskine-Hill, Howard. 'Pope, Alexander (1688–1744)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, Sept 2004, online edn, Jan 2008). Accessed 18 April 2009.
• Mack, Maynard. Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), the definitive biography).
• Nuttal, Anthony. 'Pope's Essay on Man' (Allen and Unwin, 1984), pp. 3–15, 167-188.
• Rogers, Pat. The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• Rogers, Pat. The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 17–39.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Alexander Pope

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Alexander Pope

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Alexander Pope

• Works by Alexander Pope at Project Gutenberg
• University of Toronto "Representative Poetry Online" page on Pope
• Alexander Pope, The English Poet picture slide show
• Various biographies:
  • http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/apope.htm
  • http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~sconstan/popebio.html
  • http://www.island-of-freedom.com/POPE.HTM
• Famous Quotes by Alexander Pope
• Pope's Grave
• The Twickenham Museum - Alexander Pope
• Alexander Pope in Twickenham
• St Mary Twickenham: Alexandra Pope Accessed 2007-08-09
• Richmond Libraries' Local Studies Collection. Local History Notes: Alexander Pope 1688-1744 Accessed 2007-08-09
•  "Alexander Pope". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Alexander_Pope. 
• Essay on Pope
• Rape of the Lock Opera

This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913.

Persondata
NAME	Pope, Alexander
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	English poet
DATE OF BIRTH	21 May 1688
PLACE OF BIRTH	London
DATE OF DEATH	30 May 1744
PLACE OF DEATH

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