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 Nature her self that 'tis a sort of injury to call them by so distant a name as Copies of her.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Wonder
Thomas Paine, born 9 February 1737 and dead on 8 June 1809, was one of the most consequential writers of the revolutionary Atlantic world. He was not primarily a poet in the conventional sense, nor should his occasional verses be allowed to obscure the achievement for which he is remembered: he made political argument into a popular literary force. In pamphlets, newspaper essays, public letters, and philosophical tre…
“My own mind is my own church.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Enlightenment Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Sensuality, Joy
