Pope, Alexander : The Representative Poet

Alexander Pope:

(1688-1744)

English poet Alexander Pope was born in London on 21 May 1688, His mother (Edith) was the daughter of William Turner and his father had a well accomplished business of wholesale linen, both were Catholics, and at that time to be a Catholic, especially from an ambitious man, was a serious disability. But this was only one pope’s difficulties. At the age of 12 as a result of a tubercular disease he grew up only four feet 6 inches in height.  Studios when young, he was in large measure self educated.

Pope's earliest poems, though not free from imitation, were of an astonishing maturity. His grasp of the couplet form was approaching mastery, while his observant eye and telling for description was already far beyond the ordinary.  One of his ambitious poems was ‘Essay on Criticism', published anonymously in 1711, in which he showed the genius for satire that was later to dominate his work. With this poem he made for himself a prominent place in the literary world of his time.

Windsor Forest was the richest and the most complex of his pastoral poems.  It  contained, perfectly blended, some important statements of ‘s vision of man in the world.  A vision to which most subsequent critics have done scant justice.  In 1725 Pope published his edition of Shakespeare in which he fell short of the current scholarly standards.  In the same year there appeared the first part of his translation of homer’s Odyssey . Nevertheless,  it’s translations were the masterpieces,  if not from one language to another certainly from age to age and culture to culture.
Alexander Pope’s art of using word economically and yet with maximum effect has made him one of the most quoted (and misquoted ) of English poets.

These are some straight lines from his poems:

A little learning in a dang’rous thing:

drink deep, or taste not to Pierian.

To err is human, to forgive, divine.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.

 Some of his admirable poems include Solitude, Lines from an Essay on Man, and the most famous “The Rape of the Lock”.

In 1742 when the last and final edition of 'The Dunciad' was released, he began to revise and assemble his poetry, translations for a collected edition. Before he could complete the work on May 30, 1744, he died of dropsy (edema) and acute asthma .

 

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