The life of Jonathan Swift presents one of literature's most fascinating paradoxes: a clergyman who wrote with brutal satirical force, an Irishman who felt himself English, a conservative who championed the oppressed, and a misanthrope whose fury arose from disappointed idealism. Born into poverty and obscurity, Swift became one of the most powerful prose writers in the English language, creating works that continue…
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Irish Poets, Light Verse Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Joy, Fear
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…
“hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Wonder
