Alexander Pope, born on 21 May 1688 and dead on 30 May 1744, was the supreme English poet of the Augustan age and one of the most technically accomplished writers in the language. His verse made the heroic couplet seem at once inevitable, conversational, polished, and inexhaustibly flexible. In his best work, a pair of rhyming pentameter lines can carry an argument, a joke, a moral judgment, a portrait, a burst of in…
“For what I have publish'd, I can only hope to be pardon'd; but for what I have burn'd, I deserve to be prais'd.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Wonder
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born on 29 May 1874 at Campden Hill in Kensington, London, into a comfortable middle-class household whose mixture of security, imagination, and mild religious seriousness helped to form one of the most exuberant literary personalities of the twentieth century. He died on 14 June 1936 at Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, after a career that made him internationally recognizable as an essayis…
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Edwardian Poets, Georgian Poets, Hymn Writers, Light Verse Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Political Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Wonder, Longing
