Neoclassicism in Augustans
So, the Augustans were obsessed with antiquity. No, we're not talking about cute coffee tables in your neighborhood antique shop; we're talking about ancient Greece and Rome. The Augustans loved them some classic lit: stuff like the Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, the poetry of Horace, and anything else written by two-thousand-year-old old dudes (and the occasional dudette).
Because they loved the classics so much, the Augustans often modeled their own work after the example of these classics. They adopted and adapted classical genres like the epic and the ode, and redeployed them to fit their own needs and the framework of their time.
Shmoops:
Pope takes the classical epic genre and transforms it into mock epic in The Rape of the Lock. Check out how he does this here.
In "Sound and Sense," Pope praises Homer for writing lines that reflect the sense. Have a look here (Quote #2).