Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the pre-eminent poet of his day, and is most famous for his mock-heroic poem The Rape of the Lock. With John Gay, Jonathan Swift and John Arbuthnot, he formed the Scriblerus Club.
You can almost taste the Swiftian tang in its bitterer moments. This is great satire, not simply the working out of a private joke among a powerful literary clique. Its subject is that old favourite, the perfectibility of mankind: an old favourite because it's the most comically useless of all enterprises. And this is why it's still fresh and worth reading today. -- Nicholas Lezard * Guardian *