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…
“the better half of Criticism, namely the pointing out an Author's excellencies.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Wonder
William Broome was born on 30 April 1689 and baptized three days later, on 3 May, at Haslington in Cheshire, near Crewe. He died at Bath on 16 November 1745. Although his name survives most readily in accounts of Alexander Pope’s Homer, Broome deserves attention as more than a subordinate craftsman in a famous enterprise. He was a clergyman, classicist, translator, occasional poet, schoolmaster, and ambitious partici…
“I prefix your Name to the following Poem, as a Monument of the long, and sincere Friendship I have born you: I am sensible you are too good a Judge of Poetry to approve it; however it will be a Testimony of my Respect.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Georgian Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Tenderness
