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…
“writers and readers are under equal obligations, for as much fame, or pleasure, as each affords the other.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Wonder
Samuel Johnson stands as one of the most imposing and fascinating figures in the history of English literature, a man whose physical bulk was matched only by the magnitude of his intellectual achievements and the breadth of his influence on the language itself. Born on September 18, 1709, in Lichfield, Staffordshire, and dying in London on December 13, 1784, Johnson's seventy-five years encompassed a journey from pro…
“No man forgets his original trade: the rights of nations and of kings sink into questions of grammar, if grammarians discuss them.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Despair
