Episode Details

Alexander Pope stood four feet six inches tall, suffered from a spinal deformity that left him in constant pain, and became the most feared satirist in eighteenth-century England. He wrote The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Man — works of such technical perfection and savage wit that his enemies could not match them and could not ignore them. The smallest man in English letters cast the longest shadow.

This episode traces Pope from his Catholic outsider childhood through the Homer translations that made him rich, the Dunciad wars that made him feared, and the couplets that remain the sharpest weapons in English poetry.

• Pope's Catholic disability and the double outsider status that sharpened his satirical edge
• The Homer translations that made him the first English poet to live entirely from his writing
• The Dunciad and the literary vendettas that terrorized London's writing establishment
• An Essay on Man and the philosophical ambition that balanced the satirical fury