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…
“Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Wonder
Joseph Addison, born on 1 May 1672 at Milston in Wiltshire and dead on 17 June 1719 at Holland House in Kensington, was one of the central makers of modern English prose. Poet, critic, dramatist, journalist, civil servant, parliamentarian, and Whig public intellectual, he achieved an influence out of proportion to the comparatively small bulk of his writing. His greatest achievement was not a single poem or play, tho…
“To be perfectly just is an attribute of the divine nature; to be so to the utmost of our abilities, is the glory of man.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Hymn Writers, Light Verse Poets, Political Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Spirituality, Peace, Wonder
