english pope
Alexander Pope The Rape of the Lock Satire - attack or critique of political, moral, economical systems; uses humor, irony to ridicule society. ... ) The occasion of this poem was a dispute between 2 Anglo-Catholic (English Catholic) families. ... Pope, an Anglo-Catholic himself, wrote the poem to try to make peace between the families. ... Influences Pope uses many of the great poets of the past as his model - Homer, Callimacus, Catulus, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, etc. ... Pope does this to show how addescent she is; every wound is fatal. ... The poet Callimachus wrote a poem about the event that gave Pope the idea for this poem. ... He was an astrologer who always predicted the death of the Pope & various rich & famous. Alexander Pope makes fun of him here & elsewhere. In 1708, Pope predicted that Partridge would die on a certain day. When the day came, Pope announced that Partridge had indeed died. ... In writing “The Rape of the Lock, Pope, of course, hoped to use humor in exactly this way. As the notes in the Norton indicate, Pope wanted to cause Arabella Fermor (the real-life Belinda), Lord Petre (the real-life baron) and their families to laugh themselves into sense after Lord Petre gave Arabella the most unfortunate haircut. “The Rape of the Lock” is also a mock epic, which means that Pope borrows literary conventions from epic poetry and presents them in satiric ways. In the beginning of the poem, Pope has an invocation to his muse, as does Milton in the beginning of Paradise Lost. However, whereas Milton hopes to “justify the ways of God to men,” Pope explores “mighty contests” that “rise from trivial things.” Throughout the poem, Pope uses epic conventions in similarly ironic ways Mock Epic A poem amusingly subverting the conventions of the epic, more often to comment on a topic satirically than to make fun of the epic.