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Alexander Pope |
Alexander Pope grew up outside of London, dwarfed and deformed by a childhood illness and excluded from the best schools because he was Catholic. He taught himself to read the classics in their original language and gained fame as a poet by the age of twenty-one. At twenty-five, he published The Rape of the Lock, and five years later his translations of Homer made him rich. But his poetry was growing so sarcastic and his critics so cruel that in his last years he, the greatest poet of his age, would not leave the house without his Great Dane “Bounce” and a brace of pistols.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |