Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope was a Catholic, barred from university and public office, and a hunchback from tuberculosis of the spine who stood four foot six, and he made himself by his pen the first English poet to live on his writing, through translations of Homer that earned him a villa at Twickenham. An Essay on Criticism was written at twenty-one; The Rape of the Lock is the perfect mock epic; An Essay on Man the philosophy of the age in couplets. He wrote more lines that people quote without knowing it than anyone but Shakespeare, and The Dunciad buried his enemies alive.