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…
“Yet sure upon the whole, a bad Author deserves better usage than a bad Critic.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Wonder
Edward Taylor was born about 1642, probably in Sketchley, Leicestershire, England, into a world in which political upheaval and religious conviction entered ordinary life with unusual force. He died on 24 June 1729 in Westfield, Massachusetts, after nearly six decades as that frontier town’s minister, physician, teacher, community counselor, and private poet. During his lifetime he was known chiefly as a learned and…
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Colonial American Poets, Devotional Poets, Metaphysical Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Sorrow, Despair
