Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was fiercely critical of writers whom he considered to have little talent and whom he liked to nominate as dunces. His most encyclopedic examination of these apostles of dullness is the Dunciad, a long satirical saga first published in a three-book version in 1728.

As the Enlightenment movement was gathering strength in the early 18th century, various challenges to established religious faith were launched. In response, a number of celebrated commentators produced defences of religion and morality, and among these was Alexander Pope....

First published in 1711, An Essay on Criticism was one of Pope's earliest major poems. As the title suggests, it is an exploration of what Pope considered to be the essential aspects of good critical writing....

Alexander Pope wrote the "Pastorals" in 1704 at the age of 16, but it was only in 1709 that the publisher Jacob Tonson included them in his Poetical Miscellanies. In the "Pastorals", Pope develops a theory of the relationship between art and nature....

'The Rape of the Lock' was one of Alexander Pope's most popular poems....

Pope's mastery of the heroic couplet and his perceptive wit are apparent in the many epigrams and epitaphs that he composed.

These four poems, which deal with ethical issues, were collated and published in 1751 by William Warburton, seven years after Pope's death.

Alexander Pope was the most influential and most admired writer of his time, famous for satirical and reflective poems such as The Rape of the Lock and the Essay on Man.

Alexander Pope was celebrated for his command of classical Greek and produced seminal translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Prior to the preparation of these translations, Pope took advantage of his mastery of the classical style to compose a burlesque epic about the theft of a lock of hair.

This very clever and highly-polished epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, who was suffering from terminal illness, dates from 1734. Arbuthnot, from his deathbed, solemnly advised Pope to moderate his satire and expressed fear about the poet's personal safety from his numerous foes.

This short poem, first published in 1717, became one of Pope's best-known verse works.