Alexander Pope

Born in 1688 in London to a Catholic linen merchant, Pope was barred by his religion from attending university, voting, or living within ten miles of the capital. A spinal deformity, likely Pott's disease contracted in childhood, left him hunchbacked and barely four feet six inches tall, wracked by headaches for the rest of his life. He educated himself ferociously, mastering Latin, Greek, French, and Italian before his teens. His Pastorals (1709), published when he was twenty-one, announced a prodigious talent, and An Essay on Criticism (1711) made him famous at twenty-three. The Rape of the Lock (1712, revised 1714) turned a petty quarrel between Catholic families into the finest mock-epic in the English language. His translation of Homer's Iliad (1715-1720), published by subscription, earned him enough to buy a villa at Twickenham, making him one of the first English writers to live entirely by his pen. The Dunciad (1728, revised 1743) savaged the hacks and pedants of Grub Street with a ferocity that still stings. An Essay on Man (1733-1734) attempted nothing less than a philosophical justification of the human condition in heroic couplets. Pope perfected the closed couplet as an instrument of wit, compression, and devastating precision. He died at Twickenham on May 30, 1744, at fifty-six, murmuring that there was nothing to be said for the life of a wit beyond its misery.