It’s the birthday of Alexander Pope (1688-1744), now revered as a great poet after being ditched by the Romantics for the unRomanticness of his style and his tendency to be a teensy bit cruel, although elegantly so.

Pope was born in London, England, to newly Catholic parents who soon moved the family to Binfield, Berkshire, due to an anti-Catholic Parliament. Being Catholic barred Pope from public education or the university, but he was a brilliant child who taught himself several languages, including Greek and Latin. He was reading Homer by six.

At 12, Pope was struck with what we now know was Pott’s disease, or tuberculosis spondylitis. In this form of tuberculosis, the disease occurs outside the lungs and in the vertebrae, often causing deformity. Pope’s growth was stunted and he became hunchbacked and frail, with attendant health issues like asthma. That same year he wrote “Ode to Solitude.” At 16 he wrote Pastorals, and he traveled to London enough to pass his work around among some important connections. Jacob Tonson, the big shot publisher of the day, published Pastorals in Poetical Miscellanies (1709), and Pope’s reputation was on its way.

In 1711, Pope published his Essay on Criticism, inspired by Horace and containing many little gems we all know, such as, “A little learning is a dang’rous thing,” that are now firmly lodged in the English language. In 1712 he wrote perhaps his most famous work, Rape of the Lock, a mock epic based on—fun fact here—the true story of a little dust-up between two important Catholic families: a young man had stolen a young lady’s lock of hair. A glittering satire with many allusions to Milton’s Paradise Lost ensued. In 1713 he started a six-volume translation of the Iliad, cleverly arranging to release one volume each year to subscribers. This enabled him to live off his earnings, a rare thing for an English poet. (And might I add, it’s refreshing to come across a poet who wasn’t absolutely miserable with his finances.) He did the same with his translation of the Odyssey.

In 1728 Pope wrote his masterpiece, Dunciad, another mock epic but this one viciously satirizing his contemporary critics and scholars. He published it anonymously but fooled no one: The “hero” of Dunciad is Tibbald, son of the Goddess of Dulness, and was based on the scholar Lewis Theobald, who had criticized Pope’s edition of Shakespeare in which Pope was a little loosey-goosey with the Bard’s actual words. The poem came out, everyone on all sides got very hostile, and after that Pope “would not leave his house without two loaded pistols in his pocket” (poets.org). Note to self: don’t offend Alexander Pope. But throughout his life, Pope had many friends, including the likes of Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Henry Cromwell, and Thomas Parnell.

Pope died at the age of 56 at Twickenham, where he had lived since 1719.

Pope’s Ode to Solitude begins: Happy the man, whose wish and care / A few paternal acres bound, / Content to breathe his native air, / In his own ground… (Read the rest here.)

Have a good Monday, face bravely any deadlines that happen to be looming over your head like the sword of Damocles, and even under the most stressful of circumstances, stay scrupulously honest to the data.