POPE, ALEXANDER

born May 21, 1688, London, Eng. died May 30, 1744, Twickenham, near London poet and satirist of the English Augustan period, best known for his poems An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712-14), The Dunciad (1728), and An Essay on Man (1733-34). He is one of the most quotable of all English authors. Pope's father, a wholesale linen merchant, retired from business in the year of his son's birth and in 1700 went to live at Binfield in Windsor Forest. The Popes were Roman Catholics, and at Binfield they came to know several neighbouring Catholic families who were to play an important part in the poet's life. Pope's religion procured him some lifelong friends, notably the wealthy squire John Caryll (who persuaded him to write The Rape of the Lock, on an incident involving Caryll's relatives) and Martha Blount, to whom Pope addressed some of the most memorable of his poems and to whom he bequeathed most of his property. But his religion also precluded him from a formal course of education, since Catholics were not admitted to the universities. He was trained at home by Catholic priests for a short time and attended Catholic schools at Twyford, near Winchester, and at Hyde Park Corner, London, but he was mainly self-educated. He was a precocious boy, eagerly reading Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, which he managed to teach himself, and an incessant scribbler, turning out verse upon verse in imitation of the poets he read. The best of these early writings are the "Ode on Solitude" and a paraphrase of St. Thomas Kempis, both of which he claimed to have written at the age of 12. Additional reading I.R.F. Gordon, A Preface to Pope (1976), is an illustrated introduction to his life, work, and times; a full biography is Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (1985). Pat Rogers, An Introduction to Pope (1976), focuses on the poetry, while his Essays on Pope (1993), is a collection of critical essays; as are Howard Erskine-Hill and Anne Smith (eds.), The Art of Alexander Pope (1979); and Wallace Jackson and R. Paul Yoder, Critical Essays on Alexander Pope (1993).