Alexander Pope, so of ten spoken of in the same breath as John Dryden, was his junior by more than fifty years, though because of Pope's precocity his early publications, including the Pastorals, appeared in Tonson's Miscellanies in 1709 at no great distance of time from thelast publication of Dryden's lifetime, the Fables, of 1700. Pope's quick intellectual development may have been intensified by the degree of social isolation to which his weak physique and his parents' Roman Catholicism subjected him as a child; debar.red from the normal schooling of the well-to-do he received his education from prie ts and read omnivorously in his father's library. T.S. Eliot is the only English poet who comes to mind as having a comparably intense literary culture emerging so functionallly in his work for the purpose of significant allusion, whether as parody, ironic reflection, or intellectual reinforcement.

Alexander Pope, so of ten spoken of in the same breath as John Dryden, was his junior by more than fifty years, though because of Pope's precocity his early publications, including the Pastorals, appeared in Tonson's Miscellanies in 1709 at no great distance of time from the last publication of Dryden's lifetime, the Fables, of 1700. Pope's quick intellectual development may have been intensified by the degree of social isolation to which his weak physique and his parents' Roman Catholicism subjected him as a child; debar.red from the normal schooling of the well-to-do he received his education from prie ts and read omnivorously in his father's library. T.S. Eliot is the only English poet who comes to mind as having a comparably intense literary culture emerging so functionallly in his work for the purpose of significant allusion, whether as parody, ironic reflection, or intellectual reinforcement.