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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
The life of Alexander Pope, told through five interesting pieces of biographical trivia 1. He was known as ‘the Wasp of Twickenham’. Poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) earned this nickname because of his stinging satirical attacks on the famous people of the age, especially other writers. Pope’s long mock-epic The Dunciad (1728-43) – […]