Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
From the portrait Pope had done, his hunchback is hidden. In light of the fact that he thought a lot about the relation between form and content, we wonder what he thought about his form in relation to his being a poet, a producer of beauty. Sometimes critics of Pope even attacked his bodily form (he was only four and a half feet tall). Pope was in constant pain in what he called "this scurvy tenement of my body" (source).
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said of Pope's poem, "I admired Mr. Pope's Essay on Criticism at first, very much, because I had not then read any of the ancient critics, and did not know that it was all stolen." Ouch! Pope had to struggle against this reputation, and still does (source).