Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 O.S. – 30 May 1744) was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, he is best known for his satirical and discursive poetry, including An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712–1717), The Dunciad (1728–1743), and for his translations of Homer.
Pope is often quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, some of his verses having entered common parlance (e.g. "damning with faint praise" or "to err is human; to forgive, divine").
Alexander Pope was born in London on 21 May 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution. His father, also Alexander Pope, was a successful linen merchant in the Strand, London. His mother was Edith Turner, a daughter of William Turner, Esquire, of York. Both were Catholic. His uncle-in-law was the miniature painter Samuel Cooper, through his mother's sister, Christiana. Pope's education was affected by the Test Acts, a set of English penal laws that upheld the status of the established Church of England, banning Catholics from teaching, attending a university, voting, or holding public office on penalty of perpetual imprisonment. Pope was taught to read by his aunt and attended Twyford School circa 1698. He also attended two Roman Catholic schools in London. Such schools, though illegal, were tolerated in some areas.
In 1700 his family moved to a small estate at Popeswood, in Binfield, Berkshire, close to the royal Windsor Forest. This was due to strong anti-Catholic sentiment and a statute preventing "Papists" from living within 10 miles (16 km) of London or Westminster. Pope later described the countryside around the house in his poem "Windsor-Forest". Pope's formal education then ended, and he thereafter mostly educated himself by reading the works of classical writers such as the satirists Horace and Juvenal, the epic poets Homer and Virgil, and English authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and John Dryden. He studied many languages, reading French, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets. After five years of study, Pope came into contact with figures from London literary society such as William Congreve, Samuel Garth and William Trumbull.
Pope is popularly believed to have composed his early poems beneath a beech tree in a grove half a mile from his house in Binfield. This tree was later carved with the words "Here Pope sung" and became a tourist destination termed "Pope's Tree". By the 1820s, numerous visitors had carved their names and dates of visiting on the tree. Pope's Tree had reportedly become visibly aged and lost most of its canopy by this point.
At Binfield Pope made many important friends. One of them, John Caryll the younger (the future dedicatee of The Rape of the Lock), was 20 years older than Pope and had made many acquaintances in the London literary world. He introduced Pope to the ageing playwright William Wycherley and to William Walsh, a minor poet, who helped Pope revise his first major work, The Pastorals. In 1707 Pope met the Blount sisters, Teresa and Martha (Patty). He remained close friends with Patty until his death, but his friendship with Teresa ended in 1722.
From the age of 12 Pope suffered many health problems, including Pott disease, a form of tuberculosis that affects the spine, which deformed his body and stunted his growth, leaving him with a severe hunchback. His tuberculosis caused other health problems, including respiratory difficulties, high fevers, inflamed eyes and abdominal pain. He grew to a height of only 4 feet 6 inches (1.37 metres). Pope was already removed from society as a Catholic, and his poor health alienated him further. Though he never married, he had many female friends to whom he wrote witty letters, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and it has been speculated that Martha Blount was his lover. His friend William Cheselden said, according to Joseph Spence, "I could give a more particular account of Mr. Pope's health than perhaps any man. Cibber's slander (of carnosity) is false. He had been gay [hedonistic], but left that way of life upon his acquaintance with Mrs. B."
In 1709, Pope's Pastorals was published in the sixth part of bookseller Jacob Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies, earning Pope instant fame. It was followed by An Essay on Criticism, published in 1711 and equally well received.
Around 1711, Pope made friends with Tory writers Jonathan Swift, Thomas Parnell and John Arbuthnot, who together formed the satirical Scriblerus Club. Its aim was to satirise ignorance and pedantry through the fictional scholar Martinus Scriblerus. He also befriended Whig writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. In March 1713, Windsor Forest was published to great acclaim.
During his friendship with Joseph Addison, Pope contributed to Addison's play Cato, as well as writing for The Guardian and The Spectator. Around this time, he began translating the Iliad, a painstaking process; publication began in 1715 and ended in 1720. This translation was based, in particular, on Anne Dacier's 1711 French translation.
In 1714 the political situation worsened with the death of Queen Anne and the disputed succession between the Hanoverians and the Jacobites, leading to the Jacobite rising of 1715. As a Catholic, Pope might have been expected to have supported the Jacobites because of his religious and political affiliations, but according to Maynard Mack, "where Pope himself stood on these matters can probably never be confidently known". These events led to an immediate downturn in the fortunes of the Tories, and Pope's friend Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, fled to France. Former Tory Chief Minister Lord Oxford was impeached.
Pope lived in his parents' house in Mawson Row, Chiswick, between 1716 and 1719; the red-brick building is now the Mawson Arms, commemorating him with a blue plaque.
The money he made from his translation of Homer allowed Pope to move in 1719 to a villa at Twickenham, where he created his now-famous grotto and gardens. A spring was discovered during the excavation of the subterranean retreat, and the grotto was filled with trickling water, which quietly echoed around the chambers. Pope was said to have remarked, "Were it to have nymphs as well – it would be complete in everything." The house and gardens have long since been demolished, but much of the grotto survives beneath Radnor House Independent Co-educational School. The grotto has been restored and is open to the public for 30 weekends annually under the auspices of Pope's Grotto Preservation Trust.
An Essay on Criticism was first published anonymously on 15 May 1711. Pope began writing the poem early in his career and took about three years to finish it.
At the time the poem was published, its heroic couplet style was a new poetic form and Pope's work an ambitious attempt to identify and refine his own positions as a poet and critic. It was said to be a response to an ongoing debate about whether poetry should be natural or written according to rules from the classical past.
The "essay" begins with a discussion of the standard rules that govern poetry, by which a critic passes judgement. Pope comments on the classical authors who dealt with such standards and the authority he believed they should have. He discusses the laws to which a critic should adhere while analysing poetry, pointing out the important function critics perform in aiding poets with their work, as opposed to simply attacking them. The final section of An Essay on Criticism discusses the moral qualities and virtues inherent in an ideal critic, who Pope claims is also the ideal man.
Pope's most famous poem is The Rape of the Lock, first published in 1712, with a revised version in 1714. A mock-epic, it satirises a high-society quarrel between Arabella Fermor (the "Belinda" of the poem) and Lord Petre, who had snipped a lock of hair from her head without permission. The satirical style is tempered by a genuine, almost voyeuristic interest in the "beau-monde" (fashionable world) of 18th-century society. The revised, extended version focuses more clearly on its true subject: the onset of acquisitive individualism and a society of conspicuous consumers. In the poem, purchased artefacts displace human agency and "trivial things" come to dominate.