Alexander Pope
1688–1744
Biography
Alexander Pope, an Englishman who wrote poems, translations and satire in the early eighteenth century, is still one of the most quoted poets in the language. He was born in London in 1688 into a Catholic family. Because the laws of his day kept Catholics out of the English universities, he was largely self-taught, and a childhood illness left his body small and frail for the rest of his life. None of this stopped him from becoming one of the most prominent poets of his age.
His reputation began with An Essay on Criticism (1711), a verse essay on taste and sound judgement. His translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey brought him a substantial fortune and a house at Twickenham, beside the Thames, where he made a celebrated garden. His satires, above all The Dunciad, mocked dull writers and the hack journalists of London, and in the 1730s he published the philosophical poem An Essay on Man. Some of his couplets, neatly balanced and easy to remember, have passed into everyday speech.
The Rape of the Lock, which the site holds under its English title, is a mock-heroic poem about a small social incident. It grew out of a real quarrel between two families, after a young nobleman snipped off a lock of a lady's hair. Pope first published it in 1712 in two cantos, then in 1714 expanded it to five and added the sylphs, the spirits who watch over the heroine. Treating a trivial squabble with the grandeur of Homeric epic, he satirised the vanity and idleness of fashionable society, and the wit has kept its edge.
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Books
The Rape of the Lock
by Alexander Pope
When a young baron cuts a lock from Belinda's hair, Pope turns a real quarrel between two families into a mock epic with sylphs, a battle of the fans and a stolen lock that rises to the stars. The five cantos are given without the editor's introduction and notes.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.