Pope, Alexander

Pope, Alexander, 1688–1744, English poet. Although his literary reputation declined somewhat during the 19th cent., he is now recognized as the greatest poet of the 18th cent. and the greatest verse satirist in English.

Life

Pope was born in London of Roman Catholic parents and moved to Binfield in 1700. During his later childhood he was afflicted by a tubercular condition known as Pott's disease that ruined his health and produced a pronounced spinal curvature. He never grew taller than 4 ft 6 in. (1.4 m). His religion debarred him from a Protestant education and from the age of 12 he was almost entirely self-taught.

Although he is known for his literary quarrels, Pope never lacked close friends. In his early years he won the attention of William Wycherley and the poet-critic William Walsh, among others. Before he was 17 Pope was admitted to London society and encouraged as a prodigy. The shortest lived of his friendships was with Joseph Addison and his coterie, who eventually insidiously attacked Pope's Tory leanings. His attachment to the Tory party was strengthened by his warm friendship with Swift and his involvement with the Scriblerus Club.

Works

Pope's poetry basically falls into three periods. The first includes the early descriptive poetry; the Pastorals (1709); Windsor Forest (1713); the Essay on Criticism (1711), a poem written in heroic couplets outlining critical tastes and standards; The Rape of the Lock (1714), a mock-heroic poem ridiculing the fashionable world of his day; contributions to the Guardian; and "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady" and "Eloise to Abelard," the only pieces he ever wrote dealing with love. In about 1717 Pope formed attachments to Martha Blount, a relationship that lasted his entire life, and to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, with whom he later quarreled bitterly.

Pope's second period includes his magnificent, if somewhat inaccurate, translations of Homer, written in heroic couplets; the completed edition of the Iliad (1720); and the Odyssey (1725–26), written with William Broome and Elijah Fenton. These translations, along with Pope's unsatisfactory edition of Shakespeare (1725), amassed him a large fortune. In 1719 he bought a lease on a house in Twickenham where he and his mother lived for the rest of their lives.

In the last period of his career Pope turned to writing satires and moral poems. These include The Dunciad (1728–43), a scathing satire on dunces and literary hacks in which Pope viciously attacked his enemies, including Lewis Theobald, the critic who had ridiculed Pope's edition of Shakespeare, and the playwright Colley Cibber; Imitations of Horace (1733–38), satirizing social follies and political corruption; An Essay on Man (1734), a poetic summary of current philosophical speculation, his most ambitious work; Moral Essays (1731–35); and the "Epistle to Arbuthnot" (1735), a defense in poetry of his life and his work.

Bibliography

See the Twickenham edition of his poems (7 vol., 1951–61); his prose works ed. by N. Ault (1936, repr. 1968); his letters ed. by G. Sherburn (5 vol., 1956); biographies by G. Sherburn (1934, repr. 1963), N. Ault (1949, repr. 1967), P. Quennell (1968), and M. Maynard (1988); studies by G. Tillotson (1946; 2d ed. 1950; and 1958), F. W. Bateson and N. A. Joukovsky, ed. (1972), J. P. Russo (1972), P. Dixon, ed. (1973), F. M. Keener (1974), D. B. Morris (1984), L. Damrosch, Jr. (1987), and R. A. Brower (1986).

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Pope, Alexander

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.

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Pope, Alexander 

Born May 21, 1688, in London; died May 30, 1744, in Twickenham. English poet.

Pope received his education at home. In 1711 he published the Essay on Criticism, the manifesto of British Enlightenment classicism. He applied classicist principles in the narrative poem “Windsor-Forest” (1713). In the mock-heroic narrative poem The Rape of the Lock (1712; second version, 1714), he humorrously depicted the way of life and mores of worldly society. Working from the standpoint of conventional “good taste,” Pope emended the “coarse” passages in Homer, producing new translations of the Iliad (1715–20) and the Odyssey (1725–26). He also devoted his energy to “clearing the vulgarity” from Shakespeare’s works (1725 edition).

Pope’s satires the Dunciad (1728) and The New Dunciad (1742), which were directed againt his literary opponents, castigated ignorance and stupidity. In the philosophical narrative poems “Moral Essays” (1731–35) and Essay on Man (1732–34; Russian translation, 1757), Pope glorified the harmony of all that exists. The Essay on Man met with great success in 18th-century Russia, despite the censor’s distortions of the text. Among those who translated Pope’s works into Russian are I. I. Dmitriev and V. A. Zhukovskii.

WORKS

The Works, vols. 1–10. London, 1871–89.
Literary Criticism. Edited by B. Goldgar. Lincoln, Neb. [1965].
In Russian translation:
“Pokhishchenie lokona.” In Khrestomatiiapo zapadno-evropeiskoi literature XVIII v. Moscow, 1938.

REFERENCES

Istoriia angliiskoi literatury, vol. 1, fasc. 2. Moscow-Leningrad, 1945.
Sitwell, E. A. Pope. New York, 1962.
Spacks, P. M. An Argument of Images: The Poetry of A. Pope. Cambridge, Mass., 1971.
A. Pope. Edited by P. Dixon. London, 1972. (References, pp. 311–21).
Griffith, R. H. A. Pope: A Bibliography. Austin, Tex., 1922–27.