C 18 - Age of Reason (Age of Englightenment) vs C 19 Romantic Period

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
• societal values
• high/low
• 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.