Pope, Alexander

Pope, Alexander (1688–1744). English poet and master of the heroic couplet. Largely self-educated, the son of a Roman catholic draper, and crippled by a tubercular condition during his adolescence, Pope was always an outsider, although his precocious poetic talents quickly brought him to the attention of the literati. 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. Although suspected of Jacobite sympathies because of his opposition to Walpole and George II, Pope's party allegiances are difficult to establish with confidence. Financially independent as a consequence of his translations of Homer, Pope moved in 1718 to Twickenham, where he spent the rest of his life, indulging his passion for gardening.

J. A. Downie