英国新古典主义代表 Alexander Pope.doc

The Representative of Neo-Classicism in English Literature : Alexander Pope Alexander Pope wrote verse early and his Pastorals were said to have been written in his 16 years old, but they were not published till 1709, and two years later, in 1711, appeared Pope s famous Essay on Criticism which first established his reputation as a poet. In his youth Pope was first introduced to the literary world of London by the then elderly dramatist Wycherley. Later, about 1713, he and a group of his friends, including Swift, formed a Scriblerus Club to write together the Memoris of Martinus Scriblerus to ridicule all the false tastes in learning . In 1712,when Pope knew of a quarrel between two aristocratic families because a Roman Catholic Lord Petre had forcibly cut off a lock of hair of a Miss Arabella Fermor, he was persuaded by his friends to write a poem to burlesque the incident and make it explode in laughter. The result was The Rape of the Lock which first appeared in two cantoes and enjoyed a great and instantaneous success, and then it was expanded by the poet into five cantoes republished in 1747. Pope did not side definitely either with the Whigs or with the Tories. He was familiar with the literary men of the Whigs Addison and Steel, and wrote a prologue for Addisons tragedy Cato , yet in his descriptive poem Windsor Forest, he made political allusions meant to the Tories. Pope spent nearly ten years on the translation of Homer, finishing the Iliad in 1720 and the Odessey in 1726, with the help of two Cambridge scholars in the case of the Odessey. After that he wrote two well-known works An Essay on Man and the four Moral Essays . In the meantime Pope spend a number of years writing and touching up his great satirical poem The Dunciad , in which he attacked many of his personal enemies, including Louis and then Colley Cibber the poet laureate of the time.In the last years of his life he also wrote Satires in imitation of the great satirical poet of an