Alexander Pope
May 21, 1688 — May 30, 1744 — England
Alexander Pope was the greatest English poet of the eighteenth century and one of the most quoted writers in the language. His heroic couplets — pairs of rhyming lines in iambic pentameter — became the dominant form of English verse for fifty years. He produced devastating satire and exquisite mock-epics while simultaneously elevating English poetry through his translations of Homer, which made him wealthy and independent at a time when most poets relied on patrons.
Prodigy and Outsider
Born May 21, 1688 in London to a Roman Catholic linen merchant, Pope was doubly disadvantaged in Georgian England: Catholics were barred from universities, voting, and living within ten miles of London by the Test Acts. He taught himself Greek, Latin, French, and Italian and educated himself through voracious reading, writing his first poetry as a child. A childhood illness — believed to be tuberculosis of the spine — left him with a severe spinal curvature that reached four and a half feet in height as an adult, requiring special clothing and harnesses to function. Despite constant pain and the social exclusions of his religion, he became the center of London literary life through sheer force of wit and connections.
Satire and Sublime
Pope's range was extraordinary. The Rape of the Lock (1714) — a mock-epic about a society scandal involving a lock of hair cut from a noblewoman — is the most celebrated comic poem in English. An Essay on Man (1733–34) attempted a philosophical defense of the goodness of divine creation in exquisitely honed couplets. The Dunciad (1728, expanded 1743) was a scalding attack on the literary hacks and patrons he despised, identifying dullness and corruption as civilizational threats. His translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, admired in his own time as the greatest versions in English, earned him enough money to rent a villa at Twickenham where he created an influential landscape garden. His collected poems remain essential reading for students of English literature.
Did You Know?
More lines from Alexander Pope have entered common English usage than from virtually any other poet — including Shakespeare. "To err is human, to forgive divine," "A little learning is a dangerous thing," "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread," and "Hope springs eternal in the human breast" are all Pope's — lines so familiar that most people have no idea who wrote them.
Legacy
Pope died on May 30, 1744, at Twickenham. His reputation fluctuated after his death — the Romantic poets, preferring nature and spontaneity, dismissed him as artificial — but his mastery of the heroic couplet and the depth of his satirical vision have kept him central to English literary history. Dr. Johnson considered him the greatest English poet after Shakespeare and Milton. The density of quotable wisdom packed into his couplets made him the most cited English-language writer of the eighteenth century, and many of his phrases have permanently entered the language.