Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was an English poet, satirist and translator, the leading poet of the Age of Reason and a master of the heroic couplet. His philosophical poem An Essay on Man is his great philosophical poem on the order of the universe: "Whatever is, is right."

Small, sickly and Catholic in a Protestant state, Pope rose to fame in his twenties with the satiric The Rape of the Lock and then with translations of Homer that made him the first poet able to live on his earnings. With The Dunciad he turned personal satire into a defence of taste and learning, becoming the arbiter of the Age of Enlightenment's poetic voice.