Alexander Pope (1688-1744) · CatalogAlexander PopeAlexander Pope (1688-1744) · CatalogEnglish poet, satirist and translator of Homer, master of the heroic couplet.
Author
Alexander Pope
1688-1744 · English poet, satirist and translator of Homer, master of the heroic couplet
Alexander Pope (1688-1744), the son of a Roman Catholic linen merchant, was barred by the penal laws from university and public life and educated himself largely through wide reading. Crippled by tuberculosis of the spine, he became the leading English poet of his age, master of the heroic couplet, translator of Homer, and author of An Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad and An Essay on Man.
“All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good:”
An Essay on Criticism is a verse essay in heroic couplets that Alexander Pope published anonymously in 1711, when he was twenty-three. It sets out, in the manner of Horace's Art of Poetry and Boileau's L'Art poétique, the principles by which writers and readers should judge poems, and much of it has passed into proverb.
An Essay on Man is a philosophical poem in heroic couplets that Alexander Pope published anonymously in four parts, called epistles, in 1733 and 1734, addressed to his friend Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke. Pope meant it as the opening of a larger work on human nature and society that he never finished.