Introduction to a poet Alexander pope.pptx

1. Alexander Pope’s Rape of the
Lock

2. • (1688- 1744)
• Born on: May 21, 1688
• Born in : Lombard Street, London
• Parents : Alexander Pope Senior and Edith Turner
• Both his parents were Roman Catholic
• Before he was twelve he had obtained a bit of Latin and
Greek from various masters, from a priest in Hampshire,
from a schoolmaster at Twyford near Winchester, finally
from another priest at home.
• was an best known for his satirical verse
• He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford
Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson

3. • At the age of 12, he suffered numerous health problems,
such as Potts disease
• Humpbacked and deformed
• made friends with Tory writers John Gay, Jonathan Swift,
Thomas Parnell and John Arbuthnot, who together formed
the satirical Scriblerus Club
• May, 1709, Popes Pastorals was published, and was
followed by An Essay on Criticism, published in May 1711
• An Essay on Criticism was first published anonymously on
15 May 1711
• Final section of An Essay on Criticism discusses the moral
qualities and virtues inherent in the ideal critic, who, Pope
claims, is also the ideal man.

4. • “Rape of the Lock” Popes most famous poem
first published in 1712, with a revised version
published in 1714.
• “Essay on Man” is a philosophical poem, and
published between 1732 and 1734.

5. • Pope is the representative poet of the age.
• His famous works include
• Pastorals,
• An Essay in Criticism,
• Windsor Forest,
• The Rape of the Lock,
• translations of lliad and Odyssey,
• Elegy to the memory of an Unfortunate Lady, and
• An Essay on Man.

6. • Many foreign writers and the majority of English
poets looked to him as their model.
• Pope‘s poetry is the real picture of the spirit of
the age.
• The three poems in which he is undisputably the
spokesman of his age are:
• The Rape of the Lock, picturing its frivolities;
• Dunciad unveiling its squalor (dirt);
• The Essay on Man, echoing its philosophy.

7. Rape of the Lock

9. • A mock epic
• Social satire
• The entire poem is written in five cantos
• The story in poem is relatively simple.
• The poem deals with an actual event and thus
pokes fun at the two families, but more than
that it shows the vanities of humankind.

10. • Epic: “A long narrative poem about the actions
of a great person.”
• Mock epic: “A long narrative poem which
deals in a grand diction with trivial/ordinary
themes and produces laughter.”

11. Character list
• Belinda
• Ariel
• Baron
• Clarisse
• Umbriel (A Gnome)

12. Summary
• The action completes in one single day in the life of fashionable recusants
of London.
• Belinda gets up from bed at about noon and spends a few hours in
‘denting and painting’.
• She has to take part in a card game named ‘Ombre’ at Hampton Court
Palace.
• She along with a number of young men and ladies undertake a boat
journey in the river Thames to reach the destination in the north Bank.
• Ariel, the divine angel guesses some evil to happen on Belinda and
engages his troop of Sylphs to guard Belinda’s possessions and honors.
• An adventurous youth Baron, Belinda’s suitor, is determined to steal
Belinda’s tempting ‘Locks’ of hair.
• In the card game Belinda wins.
• This makes the Baron more adamant.

13. • Clarisse hands over a pair of scissors to the Baron.
• The Baron stealthily cuts a lock from of hair from Belinda’s
head.
• Discovering the theft, Belinda becomes utterly sorry.
• Clarisse tries to soothe her but fails.
• A gnome (an elf) named Umbriel descends to the
Underworld on Belinda’s behalf and obtains a bag of sighs
and a vial of tears from the Queen of Spleen.
• With these magical gifts, he means to comfort poor
Belinda.
• Grief overcomes her as her eyes half-drown in tears and
her head droops upon her bosom.

14. • She resolves to fight against the Baron.
• She attacks the Baron with snuff (smoke) and
hair-pin etc.
• A fearful combat ensues.
• During the fight, the Baron loses the Lock.
• So he fails to return it.
• The poem, however, ends with a note of
consolation to Belinda that her golden ‘Lock’
must have formed a constellation in the sky.

15. • The story of “the Rape of the Lock” was in fact a true
incident that happened between two people, of which
Pop’s friend, John Caryll told him.
• Belinda was actually Arabella Fermor and Baron
was Lord Petre, who was her suitor.
• On his friend’s request, to calm down the situation,
Pope wrote this epic, including supernatural creatures
and comparing the two worlds of heroism and social.
• Throughout the poem, he put emphasis on how trivial
this one event was and how much conflict it had
caused between the two families.

16. Cave of Spleen
• Pope’s fantastical Cave of Spleen is thus a kind
of hell of female bodily disfunction, where old
and sick women are found.
• It is from the Queen of Spleen herself
that Umbriel is able to collect the negative
emotions, the “Sighs, sobs and passions”

17. Characters
• Belinda
• Belinda is based on the historical Arabella Fermor, a
member of Pope’s circle of prominent Roman Catholics.
• Robert, Lord Petre (the Baron in the poem) had
precipitated a rift between their two families by snipping
off a lock of her hair.
• The Baron
• This is the pseudonym for the historical Robert, Lord Petre,
the young gentleman in Pope’s social circle who offended
Arabella Fermor and her family by cutting off a lock of her
hair.
• In the poem’s version of events, Arabella is known as
Belinda.

18. • Ariel: Belinda’s guardian sylph (spirit of air, fairy)
• Umbriel: The chief gnome, who travels to the
Cave of Spleen and returns with bundles of sighs
and tears to aggravate Belinda’s vexation
• Clarissa
• A woman in attendance at the Hampton Court
party. She lends the Baron the pair of scissors
with which he cuts Belinda’s hair, and later
delivers a moralizing lecture.