Give a brief Life-Sketch of ALEXANDER POPE.

Ans.

ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744)

Introduction: Alexander Pope (21 May, 1688-30 May, 1744) is generally regarded as the greatest English poet of the eighteenth century, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third most frequently quoted writer in the English language, after Shakespeare and Tennyson. Pope was a master of the heroic couplet.

Birth, Parentage and Education: Alexander Pope was born in London, on May 21, 1688, the year of the Glorious revolution. His father, a linen draper was forty-two, his mother forty-six. Both were Roman Catholics, and his father, Alexander Sr., retired from business after his son’s birth, perhaps because a new act of Parliament prohibited Catholics from living within ten miles of London. Between 1696 and 1700 Pope was tutored at home by a priest, and then enrolled in two Catholic schools, but he was largely self-educated. His religion would have made it impossible, at the time, to pursue a career in law or medicine or the Clergy even had he wished to: as a Catholic he was not, for example, permitted to attend a university. A precocious child, he could read Latin, Greek, French and Italian while still very young, and (according to his own account of the matter) was already, at sixteen, writing the rather sophisticated verse later published as his ‘Pastorals’. Characteristically, however, he would destroy a great deal of his juvenalia, the continued existence of which might have detracted from the image of the poet as child prodigy which he desired, later in life, to propagate.

After 1738, Pope wrote little. He toyed with the idea of composing a patriotic epic in blank verse called Brutus, but only the opening lines survived. His major work in these years was revising and expanding his masterpiece The Dunciad. Book Four appeared in 1742, and a complete revision of the whole poem in the following year. In this version, Pope replaced the ‘hero’, Lewis Theobald, with the poet Laureate Calley Cibber as ‘King of Dunces”.