Sonnet 18
Sonnet 18 is one of the best-known of the 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare.
Alexander Pope
Pope's most famous poem is "The Rape of the Lock", first published in 1712, with a revised version published in 1714. A mock-epic, it satirises a high-society quarrel between Arabella Fermor (the "Belinda" of the poem) and Lord Petre, who had snipped a lock of hair from her head without her permission. The satirical style is tempered, however, by a genuine and almost voyeuristic interest in the "beau-monde" (fashionable world) of 18th-century English society. The revised and extended version of the poem brought more clearly into focus its true subject – the onset of acquisitive individualism and a society of conspicuous consumers. In the world of the poem purchased artefacts displace human agency, and 'trivial things' assume dominance.