(1688–1744)

Pope claimed that "as yet a child . . . I lisp'd in numbers [i.e., meter]." Certainly he was a precocious poet and his early efforts were encouraged by many, including the playwrights William Wycherley and William Congreve, to whom Pope dedicated his Iliad (1715–1720). If Pope had encouraging friends, he soon had detracting enemies as well. His first publication, the Pastorals (1709), occasioned a rivalry between Pope's Tory supporters and the Whig partisans of Ambrose Philips, whose Pastorals appeared in the same volume. Pope's next important poem, An Essay on Criticism (1711), brought a barrage of vituperative abuse from the critic John Dennis, who called Pope "a hunch-backed toad" and argued that his deformity was merely the outward sign of mental and moral ugliness. Undaunted, Pope continued to publish: the Messiah (1712), The Rape of the Lock (1712, substantially enlarged in 1714), Windsor-Forest (1713), and The Temple of Fame (1715). With the publication of his Works (1717), Pope had proved himself master of a dazzling repertoire of poetic modes: pastoral and georgic, didactic, eclogue, mock-epic, allegorical dream-vision, heroic, and elegiac. No other living poet could display such dazzling versatility and comprehensive control.

There was still another area, however, in which Pope was proving the breathtaking range of his poetic gifts. Between 1713 and 1726, Pope devoted much of his creative energy to translating Homer's epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, into heroic couplets. "Pope's Homer" not only won for him financial independence so that he could "live and thrive, / Indebted to no Prince or Peer alive" (Imitations of Horace, Epistle 2. 2), it also confirmed his reputation as the presiding poetic genius of his time. While he was working on the Odyssey, Pope produced a six-volume edition of Shakespeare's works (1725), which, though it contained some valuable insights, was very much an amateur effort. When Lewis Theobald, the leading Shakespeare scholar of the time, rather pedantically highlighted Pope's many editorial shortcomings in Shakespeare Restored, or, a Specimen of the Many Errors Committed . . . by Mr. Pope (1726), Pope's revenge was not far off: two years later, he published The Dunciad, a savagely satirical assault on Pope's critics and the bankrupt cultural values they embodied.

In the seventeen years between Dennis's attack and the publication of The Dunciad, Pope's appearance, talent, and character had been assailed in print more than fifty times. His enemies accused him of being obscene, seditious, duplicitous, venal, vain, blasphemous, libelous, ignorant, and a bad poet. Theobald's rebuke was the last straw, perhaps because it was the most justified. Pope's style of comic social criticism owed much to his membership in the Scriblerus Club with John Gay, Jonathan Swift, Dr. John Arbuthnot, Thomas Parnell, and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. The Scriblerians originally planned to produce a series entitled The Works of the Unlearned; although the group regularly met only for a short while in 1714, its members remained in contact. In addition to The Dunciad, the fruit of their exchanges may be seen in Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), Pope's Peri Bathous: Or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728), and Arbuthnot's and Pope's Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (1741).

An Essay on Man (1733–1734) showcased Pope's talent for philosophical poetry. This work and four Moral Essays (1731–1735) were originally intended to form part of a long poetic sequence on the nature of humankind that Pope had hoped would be his greatest work, though the project was abandoned. Between 1733 and 1738, Pope published more than a dozen Imitations of Horace. In these loose adaptations of Horace's epistles and satires, Pope invested his modern social criticism with the classical authority of a revered Roman poet. The Moral Essays, or "Epistles to Several Persons" as Pope called them, also show Pope assuming the mantle of Horace by using the familiar epistle as a vehicle for social commentary. Pope's Horatian poems are his most mature, elegant, and self-assured works.

(This note borrowed whole from Addison-Wesley Longman's website for The Longman Anthology of 18^th-Century British Literature. Biography compiled by Professor David Damrosch, Columbia University, one of that anthology's editors.)