Alexander Pope biography

Dromo's Den

Alexander Pope Biography

POPE, Alexander (1688–1744). An English poet, born in London, May 21, 1688. His father, a linen draper, withdrew from business about 1700 and settled at Binfield, in Windsor Forest; in 1716 he moved to Chiswick on the Thames, near London. The poet's mother was Edith Turner, who belonged to a Yorkshire family. The elder Pope was a Roman Catholic, and to this faith the poet also nominally adhered, thus debarring himself from a university career. He learned to read from an old aunt and received some education in two Catholic schools as well as from private tutors (Roman Catholic priests), but for the most part he taught himself. He read widely in English poetry and studied French, Italian, Latin, and Greek. Thus left to himself, he never became an accurate scholar. Soon after the death of his father (1717) he leased (1719) a house and five acres of land at Twickenham, on the banks of the Thames, whither he withdrew with his mother, to whom he was tenderly attached, and there he dwelt till his death. In the famous villa Pope was visited by the most celebrated wits, statesmen, and beauties of the day. He died May 30, 1744. In his tenth year Pope was stricken by an illness which distorted his frame and robbed him of his plumpness and his color. His physical infirmity, susceptible temperament, and incessant study rendered his life "one long disease." He was, Lord Chesterfield said, "the most irritable of all the genus irritabile vatum, offended with trifles, and never forgetting or forgiving them." Of his many quarrels that with Addison was least justifiable. Yet when no disturbing jealousy, vanity, or rivalry intervened, Pope was generous and affectionate, as witness the long friendship with Arbuthnot, Gay, and Swift, and his devotion to his mother.

Pope was the most precocious of English poets. About 1702 he made a translation of the first book of the Thebaïs of Statius (not published till 1712), and about the same time he wrote an epic called Alexander, which he burned about 1717. By 1706 he had composed his Pastorals, which were first published in Tonson's Miscellanies in 1709. The smooth and melodious verses at once made Pope known. The experiment in the pastoral was followed by the Essay on Criticism (1711), which expounded the canons of taste; the Messiah (1712); Windsor Forest (1713), a descriptive poem, less artificial than the Pastorals; and the Rape of the Lock (first draft, 1712; altered and enlarged in 1714), the most graceful, airy, and fanciful of Pope's poems. In 1714 appeared The Wife of Bath, imitated from Chaucer, from whom he also got The Temple of Fame. In 1717 Pope published a collection of his works, where first appeared the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard and the Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady, his most noteworthy lyrics. Pope was already engaged on the work that was to give him solid fame. His translation of the Iliad was published in six volumes (1715–20). Out of the profits of this work he purchased and adorned his villa. The translation, though wanting in Homeric simplicity, naturalness, and primitiveness, is nevertheless a fine piece of writing, judged apart from its original. The Iliad was followed by the Odyssey (1725-26), which was, however, mostly the work of William Broome and Elijah Fenton. Though a pecuniary success, the Odyssey added nothing to Pope's fame. Pope now made his famous attack on Grub Street. The Dunciad was finished by 1727; but before publishing it Pope stirred up his enemies with "Bathos, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry," in the Miscellanies (March, 1728), written in conjunction with Swift and Arbuthnot. The Dunciad, in three books, first appeared May 28, 1728, and was enlarged the next year. Pope took as his supreme dunce Lewis Theobald (q.v.), who had criticized an edition of Shakespeare that Pope had brought out in 1725. Around Theobald gyrated the other dunces. In 1742 Pope added a fourth book, dethroned Theobald and put Colley Cibber (q.v.) in his place. This long lampoon, though mean in spirit, is brilliant in style. Pope closed his poetical career with the Moral Essays (1731–38) and a group of satires called Imitations of Horace (1733–38). The former group contains the famous Essay on Man (1733), a philosophical poem, in which is expounded the deism of Bolingbroke, taken back in the sequel, the Universal Prayer (1738). To the latter group belongs the delightful Epistle to Dr. Arbuthmot (1735).

Pope has been variously estimated. To his generation he seemed the greatest of English poets. This position was questioned by Joseph Warton, who, in his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (vol. i, 1751), placed Pope below Spenser. And the later romantics, who laid the stress on the matter of poetry rather than on its technique, had doubts as to whether Pope was a poet at all. On his rank a memorable controversy was started by W. L. Bowles in 1806. If, in the language of Wordsworth, "poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," uttered in impassioned language, there is little poetry in Pope. He was hardly successful in Eloisa and the Unfortunate Lady, his two experiments in pathos. They are only the rhetoric of emotion. Likewise the Rape of the Lock is a poem of the fancy rather than of the imagination. Without deep feeling or great imagination. Pope yet possessed rare excellences. In execution he could be faultless. He evoked the melodies of the heroic couplet and molded it to the expression of keen wit and epigram. His proverbial philosophy, so often quoted—as "A little learning is a dang'rous thing"—is likely to be false or only half true, for Pope himself was no thinker; but in the realm of satire, as represented by the Imitations of Horace, he is still in the first rank of English poets.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIX (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 45.