Alexander Pope e le sue opere (Il Ricciolo Rapito)

The classical and modern anti-hero

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Life

✓ He was a Catholic; for this reason, he could not attend university, vote, or hold public office. ✓ He was the first English writer to build a lucrative, lifelong career by publishing his works. ✓ Ill health plagued him almost from birth, resulting in deformity. But he didn’t allow his infirmities to hold him back. ✓ He was encouraged by his father and began to write verses; he was already an accomplished poet in his teens. ✓ He was an important translator of Classics, including translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. ✓ His early poetry brought him to the attention of literary men; he entered among the leading wits of the town. ✓ “The life of a wit is a warfare on earth.” His very success as a poet made enemies who were to plague him in pamphlets throughout his entire literary career. He was attacked for his writings, his religion, and his physical deformity. Despite this, he was a fighter, always giving better than he got.

His Works

• Pastoral: Natural/country life poet. Nature is presented as a classical picture. Descriptive passages of ideally ordered nature. Examples include “The Pastorals” and “Windsor Forest”.
• Didactic kind of poetry: Aimed to teach values to readers. His models were Horace and Boileu. Example: “An Essay on Criticism”, where he teaches the reader to be a good critic.
• Urban, satire, burlesque: Parodic representations. He is jovial but at times a bit more harsh. For example, “The Rape of The Lock”, which proved the author a master not only in metrics but also of witty, urban satire. He had written the most brilliant mock epic in the language. Another example is “The Dunciad”, in which he stigmatized his literary enemies as agents of all that he disliked and feared in the tendencies of his time (the vulgarization of taste and the arts consequent on the rapid growth of the reading public and the development of journalism, magazines, and other popular and cheap publications, which spread scandal, sensationalism), in short, in the new commercial spirit of the nation that was corrupting not only the arts but also the national life.
• Philosophical: He moved on to philosophical, ethical, and political subjects in “An Essay on Man”. The reign of George I and II appeared to him as a period of rapid moral, political, and cultural deterioration. He saw corruption in all the aspects of national life by a vulgar class of Nouveaux Riches. Pope assumes the role of the champion of traditional values: of right reason, humanistic learning, good art, good taste, and public virtue.