Alexander Pope was an English poet, satirist and keen gardener of the English Augustan period, most famous for An Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock. 
He was born in London in 1688, the son of a wealthy linen merchant and as a child suffered tuberculosis of the spine, which stunted his growth and caused a lifetime of ill health. Because the Pope family was Catholic, he was barred from attending university and was mainly self-educated. He was a gifted scholar, teaching himself Latin, Greek, French and Italian and soon developed a reputation as a man of letters. Pope frequently travelled to London and befriended former members of John Dryden’s literary circle. His essays, poetry and translations were published to immense literary acclaim; he was the first English poet to achieve contemporary fame on the European continent. Pope’s religious and political views placed him in the thick of literary controversies, which he contributed to through his own satirical attacks on his enemies. When his father died in 1717, Pope and his mother moved to a villa on the Thames in Twickenham, then a popular rural retreat for Londoners. There he entertained friends such as Jonathan Swift and worked on landscaping his garden (a fashionable art amongst the wealthy in England.) continuing to write until his death in 1744.
An Essay on Criticism in 1711 launched Pope’s literary reputation. It discusses the rules of taste (or elegance and style) that should guide a critic, with reference to the ancient writers. It is famous for its sophisticated and much quoted epigrams, for example, “To err is human, to forgive, divine” and “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” The Rape of the Lock (1712 and 1714) was written in response to an actual feud between two Catholic families but is transformed into a mock-heroic epic when a man from one family steals a lock of hair from a woman in the other. Pope approaches this as akin to a mythical war between the Greeks and the Trojans, a battle amidst the wealth and luxury of drawing rooms. This mock seriousness and pageantry ridiculed the high society that cared too much for external appearances and considered slips in etiquette to be of the same magnitude as moral misdemeanours.Yet, his satire is also gentle, fanciful and stylish.
Much of Pope’s work was inspired by the themes and form of the ancient writers – be it a pastoral poem about the countryside or heroic epistles. He translated and updated according to 17th century tastes Homer’s ancient Greek heroic epics the Iliad and Odyssey and Shakespeare’s plays. This was attacked by Pope’s rivals. He responded with The Dunciad (1728) a mock-heroic satire directed at ‘Dulness’ in which he ridiculed various authors and literary vices. It was issued with miscellaneous prefaces, notes, appendixes, indexes, and errata in a parody of pedantry and laborious literalism. Typical of his later poetry is his classical styled “Epistle to the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Burlington” (1731) in which he discusses at length false taste in architecture and design, in keeping with his interest in contemporary creative ideologies.