我不应把我的作品全归功于自己的智慧，还应归功于我以外向我提供素材的成千成万的事情和人物！
——采于网，整于己，用于民
2021年5月12日
English poet, born in Lombard Street, London, on the 21st of May 1688. His father, also Alexander Pope, a Roman Catholic, was a linen-draper who afterwards retired from business with a small fortune, and fixed his residence about 1700 at Binfield in Windsor Forest. Pope's education was desultory. His father's religion would have excluded him from the public schools, even had there been no other impediment to his being sent there. Before he was twelve he had obtained a smattering of Latin and Greek from various masters, from a priest in Hampshire, from a schoolmaster at Twyford near Winchester, from Thomas Deane, who kept a school in Marylebone and afterwards at Hyde Park Corner, and finally from another priest at home. Between his twelfth and his seventeenth years excessive application to study undermined his health, and he developed the personal deformity which was in so many ways to distort his view of life.
Pope would have despised so easy a metamorphosis as this at any period in his career, and the work of his coadjutors in the Odyssey may be distinguished by this comparative cheapness of material. Broome's description of the clothes-washing by Nausicaa and her maidens in the sixth book may be compared with the original as a luminous specimen. Pope's wit had won for him the friendship of many distinguished men, and his small fortune enabled him to meet them on a footing of
independence. He paid long visits at many great houses, especially at Stanton Harcourt, the home of his friend Lord Chancellor Harcourt; at Oakley, the seat of Lord Bathurst; and at Prior Park, Bath, where his host was Ralph Allen. With the last named he had a temporary disagreement owing to some slight shown to Martha Blount, but he was reconciled to him before his death.
He died on the 30th of May 1744, and he was buried in the parish church of Twickenham. He left the income from his property to Martha Blount until her death, after which it was to go to his half-sister Magdalen Rackett and her children. His unpublished manuscripts were left at the discretion of Lord Bolingbroke, and his copyrights to Warburton.
If we are to judge Pope, whether as a man or as a poet, with human fairness, and not merely by comparison with standards of abstract perfection, there are two features of his times that must be kept steadily in view -- the character of political strife in those days and the political relations of men of letters. As long as the succession to the Crown was doubtful, and political failure might mean loss of property, banishment or death, politicians, playing for higher stakes, played more fiercely and unscrupulously than in modern days, and there was no controlling force of public opinion to keep them within the bounds of common honesty.
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