In the spring of 1265, beneath the shadow of Florence's rising towers, a child was born who would revolutionize not merely Italian literature but the entire Western imagination. Dante Alighieri entered a world of political turmoil, theological ferment, and artistic flowering, and he would spend his fifty-six years transforming personal anguish into universal art, political exile into cosmic vision, and earthly love i…
“The vernacular is the language which we learn without any rule, by imitating our nurses.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Italian Renaissance Poets, Medieval Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Political Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Tenderness, Longing
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 life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth; and the present spirit of the world is such, that to attempt to serve it one must have the constancy of a martyr.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Wonder
