By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) is not the most fashionable English poet: few people read his poetry for pleasure, one suspects, and even in universities he is not as popular or central to the canon as he once was. With his Augustan rationalism and his perfectly crafted heroic couplets, his love of chiasmus and antithesis and other rhetorical devices, he can come across as artificial, cold, even ‘unpoetic’.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) is one of the leading poets of the Augustan era in English literature, named in honour of the Roman emperor Augustus, because Augustan writers sought to return to the values embodied by classical poets from the time of Augustus’ reign. Such a period of English verse – from the late seventeenth century until the second half of the eighteenth – is also sometimes known as ‘neoclassicism’ for this reason.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The most remarkable thing about this poem, ‘Ode on Solitude’, is that Alexander Pope (1688-1744) wrote it when he was just 12 years old! A paean to the simple life and a world of peace and quiet, ‘Ode on Solitude’ was an extraordinarily precocious poem by a poet who would go on to define the poetic tastes of the first half of the eighteenth century with longer works such as The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad. This poem was written just as that century was dawning, in 1700.
Ode on Solitude
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
1. He was known as ‘the Wasp of Twickenham’.Â