Alexander Pope
1688–1744 · England
“What dire offence from amorous causes springs, / What mighty contests rise from trivial things!”
The lineage through Alexander Pope
Drew From(4)
who shaped Alexander Pope
- The Rape of the Lock is a joke that only lands if you know the Iliad — and Pope knew it cold, having translated the whole thing
- Belinda's toilette is Homer's arming scene in miniature; Clarissa's Canto V speech is a near line-for-line burlesque of Sarpedon's exhortation to Glaucus in Book 12
- Read the Iliad first and the parody opens up: the gulf between epic grandeur and a society quarrel over hair is the entire point
- Pope didn't invent the mock-heroic — he inherited it from Dryden, whom he venerated as his master
- Dryden's Mac Flecknoe set the template: epic grandeur turned on a subject that can't bear the weight, played for satire
- Read it first and you see exactly the line Pope is standing on — the heroic couplet honed into a comic scalpel
via The Aeneid
- The whole joke of The Rape of the Lock runs on Virgil — Pope is mock-soldering a society scandal onto the frame of the Aeneid
- Belinda's trip up the Thames burlesques Aeneas's voyage up the Tiber, and her grief in Canto IV echoes Dido's in Aeneid IV
- The mockery only fully registers if you know the epic it's deflating — read Virgil first and every inflated line gets funnier
via Paradise Lost
- The Rape of the Lock is a wink at Paradise Lost — Pope dresses a trifling society squabble in Milton's cosmic apparatus
- Know Milton first and the jokes land: Belinda's dream answers Eve's, Umbriel's descent to the Cave of Spleen replays Satan's journey to the new world
- Pope's supernatural machinery — the sylphs, the omens — is Milton's epic burlesqued to the scale of a curl of hair
Portraits
National Portrait Gallery oil shown with quill in hand, blue fur-trimmed gown and short grey wig; one of the most reproduced authentic likenesses of Pope at his desk.
Michael Dahl, 1727
Three-quarter MFA Boston portrait in white allonge wig; a widely reproduced Richardson likeness of the mature poet.
Jonathan Richardson the Elder, 1736
Famous Quotes
“What mighty contests rise from trivial things.”
“The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, / And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.”
“Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.”
“Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey, / Dost sometimes counsel take — and sometimes tea.”
About Alexander Pope
English poet, the dominant figure of Augustan poetry and master of the heroic couplet. His mock-epic The Rape of the Lock and philosophical Essay on Man showcase his unmatched technical brilliance and biting wit. Despite chronic illness and physical disability, he became the first English poet to support himself entirely through his writing.