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…
“His characters are so much men, that they are perfectly natural, and their sentiments are so just, that they are perfectly intelligible.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Wonder
John Milton, born in London on 9 December 1608 and dead there on 8 November 1674, lived through one of the most violent and intellectually fertile passages in English history. He was a poet, polemicist, scholar, civil servant, religious controversialist, educator, translator, and theorist of political liberty. To many readers he is above all the author of Paradise Lost, the English epic that retells the rebellion of…
“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Hymn Writers, Metaphysical Poets, Political Poets, Restoration Poets
Emotional landscape: Peace, Spirituality, Wonder
