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…
“So much so, Sir, that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Despair
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…
“every single character in Shakespeare is as much an Individual as those in Life itself; it is as impossible to find any two alike.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Wonder
