Aphra Behn, born around 1640 and dead on 16 April 1689, occupies a singular position in English literary history: she was a successful Restoration playwright, a daring poet, an innovator in prose fiction, a political writer, and, most importantly for later generations, a woman who openly made writing her profession. Her precise origins remain uncertain, a fact that has invited both scholarly caution and romantic spec…
“He was a person of a shape and countenance that could give us no idea of a barbarous country.”
Neighbourhood:
LGBTQ+ Poets, Love Poets, Political Poets, Restoration Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality
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…
“One may be ashamed to consume half one's days in bringing sense and rhyme together.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Light Verse Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Peace, Wonder
