Alexander Pope, the foremost English poet of the eighteenth century, was born in London in 1688. He studied and wrote poetry from childhood, with his first published poems appearing in 1709. His first major work, a poem on the art of writing called An Essay on Criticism, was published in 1711. That same year, at the instigation of his friend John Caryll, he began writing for Richard Steele and Joseph Addison’s The Spectator (also in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times), a popular forerunner of the modern magazine. He also wrote his initial version of The Rape of the Lock, a poem dealing humorously with a real-life feud between leading Catholic families, the Fermors and the Petres, instigated when young Lord Petre cut off a lock of Arabella Fermor’s hair. The outraged Arabella made a huge fuss over this loss, and Pope, to show the absurdity of the situation, elevated it still higher, into the realm of an epic battle, complete with heroic weapons, a dark underworld, and a glittering array of supernatural creatures who intervene in mortal affairs.
Rise of the first British Empire.
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