A few lines of "The Dunciad":

Read more lines of "The Dunciad" poem Click here

Alexander Pope gave the world important contributions in the form of statements of universal appeal, known now as proverbs:

"To err is human; to forgive divine."

Pope's "The Dunciad"  poem, published in 1728, was intended to get back at his detractors. Notice also that from the first stanza Pope is saying to his enemies, "Stop attacking me and listen to the poet!"
To speak about Pope's difficulties one must beguin almost from his birth. Here, however, we'll refer only to the problems with his colleagues. Two of his principal enemies were Lewis Theobald, the leading Shakespeare scholar of the time, and the poet and stage actor, Calley Cibber, (1671-1757). Theobald criticized Pope's work as early as 1726 and Cibber was elevated to Poet Laureate in 1730. This later event inflamed most of the leading intellectuals of the day, and especially Pope because the only reason Cibber was awarded that title was because of his untiring support of the so-called prime minister, the Whig, Sir Robert Walpole. He was governing only, on behalf of George I, who lived in Hannover, Germany and had never learned English. Pope was so irritated by the Cibber appointment that in the newly-published Book IX of The Dunciad in 1741, he even mentioned Cibber directly, in a line of the poem.

A poem by Cibber:

There was an intense discussion about the role of poetry. This discussion was manned on the one side, by the "Parnassians," or Neo-Classical deffenders, who leaned on Horace and Boileau, and on the other by the pro-modernists, who disliked the old style, because Parnassians claimed that beauty is the prime objective of poetry, while they believed that poetry should play a social role.

Also, it is important to note that there were not, in this century, so many poets as renowned as Pope. The more noticeable ones were John Gay, poet and dramatist; William Blake, poet and painter ; and for the first time, two women appeared in the English poetic world. They were Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the Afro-American, Phillis Wheatley.

Excellent fiction writers of the century were Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe and a few others who enthralled their readers with their stories, and took away much of poetry's audience.

At the time poets were squabbling about old and modern poetry in this so-called "Century of Science,", on the political side important events were happening in the world, and especially in North America. By that time, there were about 275,000 people in the new nation, and the principal town was Boston. New York started to come into prominence, with the arrival of, not only Englishmen, but other European immigrants as well, including a sizable influx of Germans. It should be noted that the first German immigrats lived among the English settlers at Jamestown, in 1608. Therein lies one of the reasons why North America thrieved better than South America. While the northern colonies were open to other non-English settlers and international commerce was embraced, in the south, the Spanish kings prohibited the entrance of non-spaniards to their New World possessions. If a non-Spanish person wanted to immigrate to Mexico, Peru or any other southern country, he had to first acquire the Spanish citizenship.

In 1706, Benjamin Franklin was born and in 1732, George Washington. These two men native-born Americans were bound to play important roles in changing the New World. In the Europe, another giant of the political and military world was born in Corsica, just a few months after France bought that isle from Italy (1769). This other latter bigger-than-life figure would set Europe ablaze, by the end of the century.
And what was about England's longtime archenemy, Spain? Well, that country was still living on what it could strip from its colonies abroad. A seemingly endless supply of gold and other treasures poured into Spain by the armada-load.