As part of the much loved and much collected ‘Britain in Pictures’ series Lord David Cecil contributed ‘The English Poets’ (1942, this reprint 1943). The book offers a concise (48 pages) chronological account of what Cecil considered the key figures and themes of English poetry. Cecil saw something intrinsic in English as a language which made it especially suitable as the language of poetry.
“English is a poet’s language.”
When he reaches Pope around p. 22 it is immediately after Dryden (1631-1700). Cecil saw Dryden as marking the beginning of a new era; a previous era ending with the work of Milton. Whereas, Cecil noted, Milton had lived in a period of civil and religious wars, Dryden and Pope lived in a settled civilisation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The beauty and lightness of the mock heroic style embodied in ‘The Rape of the Lock’ can only belong to that sort of time and society. Only an acceptance of the society as is, with its customs and tastes, could have produced this description of Belinda’s dressing table…
The Solitary Reader 