1. “This long Disease, my Life”
Alexander Pope
“This long Disease, my Life”

2. Neoclassical Writings
Pope was welcomed into the society of wits in London as a prodigy
How seriously he took himself as a poet is clear from the classical forms in which he began his public career
Virgilian pastorals
Horatian Essay on Criticism
A miniature epic: The Rape of the Lock
Ovidian epistles and elegies
Translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey

3. The Rape of the Lock Mock-Epic
Humorous poem written to heal the breach that had developed between two fashionable families, the Petres and the Fermors, after Robert Lord Petre cut off a lock of Arabella Fermor’s hair.
Feminine protagonist instead of epic hero
A card game for the epic battle
Cave of Spleen for the journey to the underworld
Toilet scene for the arming of the hero
The rape of Helen became that lock of hair
Sylphs and gnomes for the epic’s gods and goddesses
Aeneas’ journey up the Tiber becomes Belinda’s up the Thames
The long description of Achilles’ shield becomes a brief one of Belinda’s petticoat

4. The Rape of the Lock
There are sacrifices, prayers, laments, harangues, feasts etc.
But in addition to this mockery of the main ingredients, there is a mockery of the epic style – its invocations, exclamations, and use of similes – and
some of the speeches
follow the framework of
actual speeches in
Homer and Virgil, thus
adding parody to imitation

5. Style Written in five cantos Written in rhymed couplets
Zeugma – a comedic yoking device where one verb ties two remarkably different objects
“Here Thou, Great Anna! Whom three Realms obey,
Dost sometimes Counsel take – and sometimes Tea.”

6. Theme Ostensible theme is the battle of the sexes
Pope’s metaphoric language evaluates the human experience of being involved in the battle and its effect on the moral values of the society in which it is fought