Pope was born in 1688 and is a very famous poet. He was very smart as a child and reportedly could speak in meter before he could pronounce things properly, quite a contrast to most in our class who can’t speak in meter at all. Because of his religion he wasn’t allowed to go to a fancy school like Oxford. Pope’s father sold cloth for a living and so he could afford to home school Pope.
As a small child Pope developed a form of TB (quite common in this time it seems) that disfigured him (also sounds familiar) so that he had to be in tight straps just to sit up later in life. He was in constant pain from his many problems and described his life as “this long disease.”
Still, he was very productive. He career started at 16 by writing poems describing the area in which he lived. These are called “pastorals.” At 23 he published an essay called “An Essay on Criticism.” One year later he published a famous epic called The Rape of the Lock. Soon he, with a little help, translated both the Iliad and the Odyssey from Greek.
Pope was teased by many writers of his time and soon turned to satire. He wrote The Dunciad which was an attack on those boring writers. Moral Essays was critical of many others. Pope the guy was both loved and hated. He was supposedly cruel and of ill-nature. At the same time he had many friends and owned a beautiful estate on the Thames river where he held parties for his friends. Pope became rich and famous and died in 1744.
Source: Textbook
