Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was an English poet, the dominant literary figure of the early eighteenth century. The son of a Catholic linen merchant, barred by his religion from university and office and crippled from childhood by tuberculosis of the spine, he educated himself and published the Essay on Criticism at twenty-three. The Rape of the Lock (1712), his translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, which made him financially independent, The Dunciad (1728), An Essay on Man (1733–34) and the Imitations of Horace followed. A master of the heroic couplet and of satire, he lived at Twickenham with his grotto and garden and quarreled with half the writers of London.