There is something peculiarly poignant about a poet who burns with such fierce satirical energy, who seems to embody the very spirit of angry, impatient youth, and who then dies at thirty years old — as if the intensity of the flame had consumed the wick. John Oldham lived only three decades, yet in that brief span he produced a body of work remarkable for its ferocity, its metrical daring, and its willingness to dra…
“I wear my Pen as others do their Sword. To each affronting sot I meet, the word is Satisfaction: straight to thrusts I go, and pointed satire runs him through and through.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Restoration Poets, Satirical Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Spirituality
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
