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When Lord Petre had the effrontery of cutting off a lock of Lady Arabella Fermor's hair, a veritable war erupted between the two noble families. A mutual friend, saddened by their estrangement, asked Alexander Pope, then a young poet, to write a poem about it, in order to make a joke of it and "laugh them together again". But the result - which in its ingenuity and poetical brilliance reaches peaks of epic sublime - concealed darker and more dangerous undertones that unleashed an even greater storm between the parties involved
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.
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