BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
Alexander Pope was born in London in 1688. He had some instruction at home, and was afterwards sent, first to a Roman Catholic seminary near Winchester, then to another in London. "This," he said, "was all the teaching I ever had, and God knows it extended a very little way. When I had done with my priests, I took to reading by myself, for which I had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry: and in a few years I had dipped into a very great number of the English, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets." He was small of stature and deformed, and his ill health made him peevish, irritable, and selfish. Yet his rare intellectual abilities and the deserved success of his earlier poetry secured for him the friendship of many of the most influential men of the time. Bolingbroke declared that he never knew a man more tenderly devoted to his friends; and Warburton said, "He is as good a companion as poet, and, what is more, appears to be a good man."
Pope's "Essay on Criticism" was published in 1711; the "Rape of the Lock" in 1714; his translation of Homer's "Iliad" in 1715-18, and of the "Odyssey" in 1726; the "Dunciad" in 1728; the "Essay on Man" in 1732. A revised and enlarged version of the "Dunciad" was published in 1742. The latter part of Pope's life was spent at his country-seat of Twickenham, which he enlarged and beautified from the proceeds of his translation of Homer. He died in 1744.
"Pope is our greatest master in didactic poetry," says Stopford Brooke, "not so much because of the worth of the thoughts as because of the masterly form in which they are put."
"In two directions," says Mark Pattison, "in that of condensing and pointing his meaning, and in that of drawing the utmost harmony of sound out of the couplet, Pope carried versification far beyond the point at which it was when he took it up. The matter which he worked up into his verse has a permanent value, and is indeed one of the most precious heirlooms which the eighteenth century has bequeathed us."
Other Poems to be Read: The Rape of the Lock; The Dying Christian to his Soul; The Universal Prayer; Pastorals; Windsor Forest.
References: Johnson's Lives of the Poets; Stephen's Hours in a Library; De Quincey's Literature of the Eighteenth Century; Lowell's My Study Window; Pope (English Men of Letters), by Leslie Stephen.
