Alexander Pope: 1688-1744

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Alexander Pope 1688-1744

• Born in London, but family relocates to Binfield,
  forests of Windsor to comply with anti-Catholic
  statute.
• Teaches himself Greek and Latin.
• At 12, develops TB of the spine.
• Early literary mentors include William Wycherley
  and William Congreve.

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Alexander Pope

• Later in Pope's life, Sir Joshua Reynolds
  described him as "about four feet six high very
  humpbacked and deformed."
• Maynard Mack has written that Pope was
  "afflicted with constant headaches, sometimes so
  severe that he could barely see the paper he
  wrote upon, frequent violent pain at bone and
  muscle joints...shortness of breath, increasing
  inability to ride horseback or even walk for
  exercise...."

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Alexander Pope Major Works

• 1711 An Essay on Criticism.
• 1712 The Rape of the Lock.
• 1713 Windsor Forest
• 1715 Homer's Iliad
• 1717 Poems on Several Occasions
• 1725 The Works of Shakespeare Collated and
  Corrected .
• 1726 Homer's Odyssey
• 1728 The Dunciad An Heroic Poem (1743).
• 1733-34 An Essay on Man .
• 1735 An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
• 1738 Imitations of Horace.

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Grant Wood American Gothic, 1930