Topics so far –
Now –
14. The Age of Classicism
Next –
15. The Transition Age
16. The Romantic Age
The Age of Classicism – 1702 to 1740
The literary
career of Pope forms the axis of this age. One might therefore consider it as
roughly ending a few years before his death, about 1740. From 1702 to 1740
there reigns the relative unity of a literary age. Its general traits originate
in those of the Restoration, which they continue, accentuate and also in
reaction modify.
The Classical School of Poetry: Pope
Alexander Pope was, like Dryden after 1685,
a Catholic, and therefore an outsider in the Protestant-dominated society of
the early eighteenth century. The two men were, however, of totally different
generations and background. Pope was 12 when Dryden died, and was suffering
from the spinal disease which left him deformed and sickly for the rest of his life.
Pope had, in common with Dryden,
considerable success in translating Greek and Latin classics – especially Homer
– into English, and also prepared a noted, if flawed, edition of Shakespeare,
in 1725. But he never engaged in serious political, philosophical, and
religious debate on the scale that Dryden achieved. Perhaps because of his poor
health, Pope was something of a recluse, but he was very involved in high
society, and took sides on most of the political issues of his day. His satires
are full of savage invective against real or imagined enemies. Pope’s sphere
was social and intellectual. The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), written when he was in his mid-twenties, is the
essence of the mock heroic. It makes a family quarrel, over a lock of hair, into
the subject of a playful poem full of paradoxes and witty observations on the
self-regarding world it depicts, as the stolen lock is transported to the heavens
to become a new star. ‘Fair tresses man’s imperial race insnare’ makes
Belinda’s hair an 
