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…
“I writ because it amused me; I corrected because it was as pleasant to me to correct as to write; and I publish'd because I was told I might please such as it was a credit to please.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Wonder
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known in English as Horace, was born on 8 December 65 BC at Venusia, a Roman colony near the borderlands of Apulia and Lucania in southern Italy, and died at Rome on 27 November 8 BC. He lived through one of the most violent transformations in Roman history: the final collapse of the Republic, the civil wars that followed Julius Caesar’s assassination, and the consolidation of Augustus’ new…
“He has achieved every vote who has combined the useful with the agreeable, delighting the reader while instructing him.”
Neighbourhood:
Ancient & Classical Poets, Classical & Ancient Poets, Death & Mortality, Love Poets, Nature Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Sensuality
