Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, born Mary Pierrepont in May 1689 and dead on 21 August 1762, was one of the most formidable and variously gifted figures of the eighteenth century: poet, letter writer, satirist, aristocrat, traveller, political observer, mother, friend, adversary, and advocate for a medical practice that helped alter the history of public health. She lived in an age that praised female modesty while avidly…
“I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is not my nature. My attachments are always excessively strong.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, LGBTQ+ Poets, Love Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Tenderness
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
