The Rape of the Lock - Alexander Pope
- Born London 1688
- Roman Catholic under Protestant consolidation in England
- Self taught to a great extent
- learned several languages
- TB contracted at 12 --> stunted/misshaped/great pain
- never married
- Wrote during Augustan Age of England Lit (Pope's career defies the age)
- 18C writers value poetry that was learned and allusive; setting less value on originality than Romantics
- Morally & Politically engaging; satire as dominant mode
- 1712/1714 - Pope only 23 years old first draft
- 5 Cantos
- 5 cantos
- mock epic from Dryden's Macflecknoe
- 1st draft 1712, 2nd 1714, 3rd 1717
- Canto I
- Intro
- Belinda's dreamy explanation of fairies
- Associated with 4 elements
- equals 4 different kinds of women
- Arial warns of something bad, she wakes and forgets it
- Putting on make-up like a knight dresses in armor
- Satire of court and way people bundle themselves and commentary on Queen Anne
- mocks vanity, nobility, and how men/women interact
- unimportant held to the same level as important
- Sublimated sex beginning with card game up to battle
- nobility taking advantage of working class
- masons sent to deaths so judge can go eat dinner quickly
- 4 types of sylphs are the four elements
- fire, water, earth, air
- none of these are good choices
- 2 eugma - 2 different ideas yoked together, don't really go together.
- 5 canto poem, mock epic, 1714
- Themes
- Satire: The court itself, the way upper class & nobility handle themselves, mocks nobility, mocks men and women & how they interact, sublimated sex (subtle sex, the card game as foreplay, battle as sex-orgy), high to low things being equated to one another.
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