POPE, ALESSANDRO. - English poet, b. in London on 21 May 1688, d. at Twickenham on 30 May 1744. He began his poetic career at a very early age with the Pastorals (1709), imitating the classics, who always remained his models and whose study he advocates in the Essay on Criticism (1711).
With several collaborators he translated the Homeric poems (from 1715); his imitation of Ovid produced its finest flower in the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, based on the well-known correspondence of the two lovers, in which cloistered life is depicted in the gloomy colours then fashionable; that of Horace produced the Imitations of Horace and several epistles to friends. Like Horace, P. is above all a “satirist,” and his principal works in this respect are the Rape of the lock (1st ed., later greatly enlarged, 1712), in which he portrays a futile episode of high society with sublime poetry; the Dunciad (1728), a most violent satire against men of letters, especially against those who had offended him; and the Essay on Man (1733), philosophical and moral in character, not without merit in its apt little scenes of everyday life.