Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the pre-eminent poet of his day, and is most famous for his mockheroic poem The Rape of the Lock. With John Gay, Jonathan Swift and John Arbuthnot, he formed the Scriblerus Club
As the sublime was becoming fashionable, Alexander Pope produced a brilliant guide to this tendency, his Art of Sinking in Poetry. It was a compendium of the failed sublimities of other poets, many of them contemporaries, and it introduced the word 'bathos' to the English language. The Guardian