Alexander Pope
English poet (1688-1744) · Writers · Died at 56
Pope wrote the lines you quote without knowing they're his - "to err is human; to forgive, divine" and "damning with faint praise" among them - couplets so clean they dissolved into the language itself.
Alexander Pope is read about 717 times a day, in 78 languages.
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Photos 7
Pope's villa at Twickenham, showing the grotto
Mawson Arms, Chiswick Lane, with blue plaque to Pope
Alexander Pope, painting attributed to English painter Jonathan Richardson, c. 1736, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The death of Alexander Pope from Museus, a threnody by William Mason. Diana holds the dying Pope, and John Milton, Edmund Spenser, and Geoffrey Chaucer prepare to welcome him to heaven.
Frontispiece and title page of a 1752 edition of Pope's Odyssey
A View of Alexander Pope's Villa, Twickenham by Samuel Scott, c.1759About this person
Alexander Pope was born 21 May 1688 and became the sharpest poet of the English Enlightenment, a master of the heroic couplet who could skewer pretension and translate Homer with equal precision. An Essay on Criticism arrived in 1711, then The Rape of the Lock between 1712 and 1717 - mock-heroic verse that turned a stolen lock of hair into high comedy. The Dunciad followed from 1728 to 1743, a long satirical assault on dullness in all its forms. He died 30 May 1744, leaving behind translations of Homer and a body of Augustan verse so quotable that The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations returns to him constantly, proof that wit outlasts its targets.
