Who was Alexander Pope?
Alexander Pope was a renown English poet whose highly polished verse is famous throughout the world. It is said that he brought Dryden’s heroic couplet to perfection. He was born on 1688 and died on 1744. Pope was the son of a London cloth merchant. His parents’ religion, Roman Catholicism, banned him from the Protestant universities of England. Priests took care of his early education but after his twelfth birthday he was largely self-taught. He became prominent in Greek, Italian, Latin, and French. A horrible illness (presumably tuberculosis) struck him during childhood and left him scarred for the rest of his life. He never grew more than 4 feet and 3 inches and he suffered severe headaches throughout his life. Perhaps as a result of this deformation, he became a hypersensitive and irritable man. In 1717 he moved to a villa called Twickenham, located on the west of London. He lived here for the rest of his life. The most important celebrities of the age came to visit him. He was a b
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was born in London, the son of a Roman Catholic linen-draper. He was a sickly child and at the age of 12 was crippled by a tubercular infection of the spine which resulted in his stunted stature. Although largely self-educated, Pope became, between his Pastorals of 1709 and the complete Dunciad of 1743, the most famous English poet and satirist of his age. His version of Homer marked him out as Dryden’s natural successor in the field of classical verse-translation, and English poetry was heavily influenced by his style until the time of Wordsworth.
