ALEXANDER POPE :
ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744) Alexander Pope was born in London in 1688- the year of the Revolution and of John Bunyan's death. His father, a prosperous linen- draper, was a Roman Catholic; and on account of his religion, Pope was excluded from the public schools and universities. As a result, he picked up most of his knowledge in a haphazard way. So although Pope read widely, he never became an accurate scholar. This want of sound learning somehow creeps into his work. Extraordinarily precocious (in his own famous words, he "lisped in numbers for the numbers came") he published his Pastorals in 1709 and his Essay on Criticismin 1711. Pope lived with his parents first at Binfield, on the skirts of Windsor Forest, and then at Chiswick, till the completion of his translation of Homer, the financial success of which enabled him in 1719 to buy a house at Twickenham.
At Twickenham, he passed the rest of his life, and there he died in 1744. Pope's poetic career neatly falls into three periods – an early and a late period of original work divided by a period (1715-25) of translation. To the period before 1715, belong a number of miscellaneous poems of which the most important are Pastorals (1709), short poems on spring, summer, autumn and winter, closely fashioned on Virgil; Essay on Criticism (1711) which is a remarkable performance for a man of twenty one, and Windsor Forest (1713) in which the landscape is copied out of the Greek and Latin poets. In this period also comes out Pope's mock-heroic poem The Rape of the Lock which can certainly be regarded as his masterpiece. It appeared first in 1712, and later in an enlarged form in1714. The characteristic miniaturizing effect of Pope's use of the mock- heroic has been related by many critics to the fact that he was only four feet and six inches' tall and suffered from the curvature of the spine. The translation of Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey – the former made single- handed and the latter with much help from the others represents the labour of Pope's second period. The translation of Iliadwas published in instalments between 1715 and 1720; and the translation of Odysseyappeared in 1725-26. After the publication of his translation of Homer, Pope confined himself almost wholly to satire and didactic poetry. The principal works of the third period are: Four Moral Essays(1731-35), The Dunciad(1728), An Essay on Man (1733-34), Imitations of Horace(between 1733 and 1737), and Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot(1742). The Dunciad, a long and elaborate satire on the 'dunces" - the bad poets and pretentious critics of Pope's day, used the mock-epic machinery and was obviously influenced by Dryden's Mac Flecknoe.
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