Alexander Pope’s witty and pointed poetic satire brought him infamy during his lifetime. It has also made critical evaluation of Pope in the years since his death more prone to interpretation based on the critic’s personal feelings about such satire than perhaps any other poet in history.

Pope was born the only child of Alexander and Edith Pope in 1688. The senior Pope, a linen-draper, had recently converted to Catholicism, and moved from London to Berkshire to avoid the anti-Catholic sentiment that ran rampant in London at the time.

His family’s Catholic faith kept young Alexander Pope from receiving a formal education, and thus Pope was mostly self-educated, teaching himself literature and languages, including Latin and Greek. Pope’s frail health also thwarted him; at twelve he both composed his earliest known work, “Ode to Solitude” and began suffering from a debilitating bone disease that stunted his growth, made him hunchbacked, and affected his health in general for the rest of his life.

In 1712, Pope published his most famous poem, “The Rape of the Lock,” which made him one of England’s most famous poets. Based on a true incident – a family feud that resulted from a stolen lock of hair – the poem’s hilarious satire won fans throughout the country.

Pope also turned his pen toward translation, beginning an epic translation of The Iliad that he wisely sold by subscription, enabling him income enough to support himself solely by writing.

Throughout his career, Pope’s satirical works, pointed toward other authors, critics, and the general public, often brought him both fame and notoriety, but never more so than upon the publication of Dunciad, a four-volume satire that mocked and lampooned critics and scholars, many well-known, of the day. Pope’s anonymous publication of the book did nothing to dissuade popular opinion that he was the author, and reaction was so hostile from both the targets of the satire and their friends that Pope would not leave home without his pistols.

Pope’s health began a further decline around 1738, and he began to write and publish less. One of his final finished projects was a revised Dunciad, no doubt to the delight of friends and enemies alike. He died at his home in Twickenham in 1744.

Pope’s critical reputation has been surrounded in controversy that did not die down with his death. Spurned by the Romantics during the Victorian period, embraced again in the 20th Century, Alexander Pope is a galvanizing poet whose work may be contentious, but is never less than fascinating – and clever.

Works by Alexander Pope:

From “The Rape of the Lock:”

From The Dunciad

Edgar Allan Poe is, without a doubt, the most famous poet in the history of American literature. Well-known for both his poetry and his short fiction, Poe’s verses are among the best known in the English language, and have become an indelible part of American culture.

Born in 1809 in Boston, Edgar Allan Poe the son of professional actors, both of who died before he was three. The Allan family of Richmond, Virginia, took Poe in and raised him, sending him to boarding school and to the University of Virginia. Despite Poe’s excellent academic performance, he had to leave school when his foster father refused to pay gambling debts Poe had incurred.

His relationship with Allan in ruins, Poe joined the U.S. Army in 1827. He published two volumes of poems to little success and attempted to attend the U.S. Military Academy, but was unable to afford schooling. He relocated to Balitmore, where he lived with an aunt.

Poe found success selling short stories, and in 1835 took over as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia. His aunt and young cousin, Virginia Clemm, relocated to Richmond with Poe, and Poe and Virginia – only a teenager – were married in 1836.

Poe spent the next ten years writing short stories and poetry, in addition to holding editorial positions on several journals. It was during this period that Poe wrote and published many of his best short stories and poems, including some of his best-known stories and poems including “The Raven,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

After his wife’s death in 1847, Poe struggled with depression and with alcoholism, both of which had troubled him for years. Although he continued writing, he often lived in dire poverty, his health nearly destroyed by alcoholism. In 1849, Poe was found in semi-conscious in Baltimore; he died four days later.

Edgar Allan Poe has been credited with inventing both the horror and detective genres of fiction with his short stories. His poetry, sometimes classified as “romantic” has nevertheless proved to be both timeless and surprisingly modern, appealing as much – or more – to today’s audiences as it did to his nineteenth century readers. Both his poetry and short fiction are part of the curriculum for students at all levels of study, from elementary school to graduate courses. Many of his stories and poems have been adapted for plays, movies, and television programs, making his work among the best known of any poet or author in history.

Some of Poe’s best-known poems include:

Annabel Lee

A Dream Within a Dream

The Raven

Irish balladeer, singer, and poet Thomas Moore gained fame in the first half of the nineteenth century both as a poet and as a society figure whose scandalous behavior may have overshadowed his talents.

Thomas Moore was born in 1779 in Dublin, Ireland, over his father’s grocery business. Moore was one of the first Catholic students allowed entry to Trinity College in London, where he studied law.

Moore’s 1803 appointment to registrar of the Admiralty in Bermuda brought him success in London society. His travels in North America were the inspiration for his first book, and upon his return to England, he married an actress, Elizabeth Dyke. As a frequent guest to London’s society gatherings, Moore gained a reputation for his singing of ballads and recitations of poetry.

Although his writing and his position provided him a good income, Moore’s attempts to live the same lifestyle as his aristocratic friends resulted in his incurring excessive debts. An accusation of embezzlement in his appointment forced him to leave England in 1819. While in Paris, he became friends with George Gordon, Lord Byron, and became Byron’s literary executor upon the poet’s death. Moore’s decision, along with Byron’s family, to destroy the infamous poet’s explicit memoirs, later did damage to Moore’s own literary reputation.

Moore returned to England after his debts were repaid, settling in Wiltshire. His poetry continued to be successful, and Moore also worked as a novelist, biographer, and translator of poetry. He published frequently, both in his own books and in the journals of the day. His reputation grew immensely upon the publication of his collection of Irish ballads, Moore’s Irish Melodies (commonly known as Moore’s Melodies) in 1846 and 1852. It is this collection that brought him renown throughout England as the Irish Bard.

However, Moore’s life after his return was one of tragedy; all five of his children died young, and Moore himself suffered a stroke which left him unable to perform, a talent that had brought him fame throughout England. Moore died in 1852, at the height of his literary fame. Although Moore spent most of his working years abroad, he is considered Ireland’s bard.

Despite his wide-ranging works, Thomas Moore is known to modern audiences primarily as an Irish balladeer. His best-known works are in the ballad genre, and include ballads that are known today as Irish standards.

Some of Moore’s works include:

Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms

The Last Rose of Summer

They Know Not My Heart

Poet Robert Lowell’s turbulent journey in life is echoed in the more personal of his poetry.

Robert Lowell was born in 1917, the son of the famous Lowells of Boston, a family that already boasted two poets, James Russell Lowell and Amy Lowell. He followed family tradition by enrolling at Harvard, but after two years – and upon the advice of his psychiatrist – transferred to Kenyon College.

At Kenyon, Lowell took up another family tradition – poetry. His studies under poet John Crowe Ransom inspired him, as did his graduate work at Louisiana State University, where his professors included Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.

Despite a myriad of personal troubles – manic depressive episodes that resulted in his institutionalization on several occasions, a conversion from the Episcopalian faith to Catholicism, political views that saw him imprisoned for conscientiously objecting to World War II – Lowell wrote accomplished, elegant poetry, and for his efforts was rewarded the Pulitzer Prize at the age of 30 for Lord Weary’s Castle.

Encouraged by psychiatrists to write about personal experiences as therapy, and inspired by the burgeoning Beat movement of the 1950s, Lowell began to abandon the formal, impersonal poetry he’d been known for. From the 1950s onward, Lowell’s poetry was more inward and personal, and as a result, stronger; his poetry collection Life Studies, released in 1959, would come to be known as The Waste Land of its day, a collection that changed the face of modern American poetry. Life Studies received the National Book Award in 1960, and its influence spread, leading to a new genre of American poetry named “confessional” by M.L. Rosenthal.

Life Studies cemented Lowell’s reputation as a poet, and during the 1960s, he began to parlay his newfound celebrity into a platform for his political views, publicly refusing an invitation to the Johnson White House as a statement against the Vietnam War, and participating on the March on the Pentagon in 1967.

Concentrating on plays nearly as much as poems throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Lowell returned to poetry in the mid 1970s. He won another Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for the collection of poems The Dolphin, and served as Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets from 1962 until 1977 when he died of a sudden heart attack in a New York taxi at the age of 60.

Poems by Robert Lowell:

Dolphin

Man and Wife

The Withdrawl

Poet Amy Lowell’s literary reputation, marred in her lifetime due to her lifestyle and at times overbearing personality, has in recent years begun to improve as new generations of readers have rediscovered her work.

Born in 1874 in Brookline Massachusetts, Amy Lowell was the daughter of a prominent New England family, one that encouraged her love of reading and writing. She began writing poetry in 1902, inspired by seeing Eleonora Duse, one of the most beloved actresses of her generation, on stage.

Lowell’s relationship with another actress, Ada Russell, would be the most important of her adult life. Lowell and Russell met in 1909 and were lovers for the remainder of Lowell’s life. Russell became the subject of many of Lowell’s poems, poems that were often written in code to disguise Lowell’s homosexual feelings toward Russell. However, as their relationship continued, Lowell’s poetry about Russell became more and more explicit about the nature of their relationship.

The confluence of Lowell’s personal and professional lives harmed her reputation as a poet. Her involvement in the promotion of the Imagist poetry movement of the early 1900s brought her the wrath of the movement’s unofficial leader, the influential poet Ezra Pound, who insulted and jeered her publicly. Her relationship with Russell, coupled with her unconventional habits of wearing men’s clothing and smoking cigars, led to her poetry being dismissed by critics who were uncomfortable with her homosexual – and eccentric – lifestyle. Her critical reputation was nearly destroyed by the controversy that surrounded Lowell.

With her family’s wealth and influence behind her, Lowell was able to overcome the critical snubs personally if not professionally. Despite the critical drubbing she and her own poetry received, Lowell made her family’s estate in Brookline, Sevenals, a hub for poetry, and became a patron of several American poets. She studied poetry avidly, and wrote a two-volume biography of the poet John Keats. Her interest in Chinese, Japanese and Early English poetry helped to popularize these poetic forms in the 20th century.

When Lowell died in 1925, her literary reputation was hardly secure. However, in 1926, she was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection What’s O’ Clock. Throughout the remainder of the 20th Century, her poetry became more and more widely anthologized and read, restoring her reputation as one of the best American poets of the early 20th Century.

Poems by Amy Lowell:

Patterns

The Taxi

The End