Word: agee
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...wrote "the proper study of mankind is man" made no great study of himself, whereas Byron was his own biographer and the actor-manager of his own theater in every line he wrote. The clues to Pope's nature are to be found in the quality of his age, with its political-theological drama. Quennell superbly evokes this quality in a biography that spans Pope's first 40 years, ending in 1728 with the appearance of The Dunciad. The bitter personal feuds spawned by that savage satire and the illness-bedeviled years before Pope died at 56 will...
Venomous Toad. Pope lived in a violent age. The celebrated Augustan calm was genuine marble, but it was a pavement laid over cellars where every violence flourished. Voltaire was cudgeled for his sharp tongue. Dr. Johnson was threatened by an offended duelist. Pope himself had seen his coreligionists, the Roman Catholic gentlemen of northern England, led, bound by halters, through the violent Protestant mobs of London. Such circumstances must give an edge of sincerity to satire. Pope's verses, light as dragonflies yet possessed of tempered strength, were written under the shadow of heavy penalties...
...milk. The affliction left him partly crippled and progressively deformed. It also arrested his growth; Pope never exceeded 4 ft. 6 in. (a "little Aesopic sort of an animal," a "venomous . . . hunchbacked toad," in the words of his tough contemporaries). Yet in the world of words of the Augustan Age, he was a Gulliver among Lilliputians...
...though the poet himself thought that he was possessed by a high moral passion, his ferocious energies sprang from psychological sources that were "dark and turbid" (even Freud conceded that genius contained mysteries inca pable of exploration). Pope's own great predecessor and model John Dryden (at the age of twelve, Pope visited Will's Coffee House to gaze at him) summed the matter up: "Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide." Pope was only 14 when an acquaintance forecast that he "will either be a madman or make a very...
...Age of Reason gave birth to England's two greatest satirists: Jonathan Swift in prose and Alexander Pope in poetry. On Quennell's showing, it is clear that Pope, who once spoke of "that long disease, my life," shared in some measure Swift's notorious horror of life itself. In Swift's case, this amounted to a pathological detestation of the bodily functions intense enough to disable the Dean from physical expression of the love he felt for women. In Pope's case, it did not prevent him from trying to play the rake...