Pope [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONAlexander Pope was bom in London in 1688, the son of elderly parents. His father, Alexander Pope, a Roman Catholic, was a merchant and linen-draper; in 1700, the family moved to Binfield in Windsor Forest where there was a Catholic colony, probably in conformity with the anti-Catholic legislation to depart from London. Pope inherited a small income from his father. A precocious boy, he was briefly at one or two Catholic schools, but mostly studied at home. When he was about twelve, he had the first of several illnesses which left him with ruined health, and finally a tubercular spine, though he continued his intensive reading and writing. He was taken up and encouraged as a prodigy by several retired men of letters in the neighbourhood, particularly William Walsh, and about 1705 he began to know something of the London writers through William Wycherley. In May 1709, Pope's Pastorals were published in Tonson's Miscellany (vol. vi) and gained him some fame. The opening of Pope's career is marked by ambition, consciousness of genius, narrow but intensive education, obtrusive help from older men of which he was vain but understandably felt imprisoning, and ill-health. The Pastorals are assured exercises in an almost dead poetic kind, marked by virtuoso writing. His next work. An Essay on Criticism (May 1711), is a brilliant epigrammatic statement of codified neo-classical critical doctrine, particularly defining the critic's social function. Pope's conception of the function of the poet and his most profound critical insights are best seen in his own practice, and conclusions based on this early work must be modified; it was, however, very influential and praised in the Spectator in which Pope printed 'Messiah', an imitation of Virgil's fourth 'Eclogue'.vii