A baron snips a curl from a young woman's hair at a card party, and the resulting outrage is rendered in the language of epic warfare, complete with sylphs and divine machinery. Alexander Pope published this mock-heroic poem in 1712 to reconcile two feuding Catholic families and produced instead the most dazzling satirical poem in English. Belinda's toilette becomes an arming scene, her coffee table a battlefield, her severed lock a constellation. Pope's couplets are miracles of compression, each line balanced on a fulcrum of wit that elevates the trivial to expose the vanity of polite society. The satire is affectionate but precise, laughing at a world it clearly loves. Beauty and absurdity prove to be the same bright, perishable thing.