NOTES ON THE RAPE OF THE LOCKThis is perhaps by Arabella Fermor (1696-1737), a famous beauty of London society. She was the heroine of Alexander Pope's humorous poem, 'The Rape of the Lock', about the theft of a lock of her hair. (http://www.vam.ac.uk/images/image/11948-popup.html) Did you know that "The Rape of the Lock" is such a famous poem that it even has its own website? Here is his address, as well as some other very useful websites about the poem, the mock heroic, and Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock Home Page –http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/pope/rape.htmlhttp: //www.theotherpages.org/poems/locknote.htmlhttp://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Biblio/satirebib.htmlhttp://www- unix.oit.umass.edu/~sconstan/BACKGROUND: The lock rape had its origins in a real, if trivial, episode in polite society: in 1711, twenty-one-year-old Robert, Lord Petre, had, in Binfield, had secretly cut a lock of hair from the head of the beautiful Arabella Fermor, whom he was courting. Arabella took offense and a schism developed between her family and Petre's. John Caryll, a friend of both families and an old friend of Pope, suggested that they write a humorous poem about the episode which would demonstrate to both parties that the whole affair had been blown out of proportion and would thus lead to a reconciliation between them. Pope produced his poem and seems to have achieved his aim, although Petre never married Arabella. However as time passed it became apparent (especially after a revised and expanded version of the poem, which initially existed only in manuscript copies, was published in 1714) that the poem, which according to Pope "was intended only to distract some young ladies". ," was actually something more substantial, and the Fermors took offense again, this time against Pope himself, who had to appease them with a letter, usually printed before the text, explaining that Arabella and Belinda, the heroine of the poem, are not identical. The Rape of the Lock is the finest mock-heroic or mock-epic poem in English: written on the model of Boileau's Le Lutrin, it is an exquisitely witty and balanced burlesque that displays literary virtuosity, the perfection of " "poetic" judgment, "and the exquisite sense of artistic correctness, so sought after by neoclassical artists. Repeatedly invoking classical epic devices to establish an ironic contrast between its structure and its content, it functions at once as a satire on the banalities of fashionable life, as a commentary on the distorted moral values ​​of polite society, and as an implicit indictment of human pride, and a revelation of the essentially banal nature of many of the aspects of human existence that we tend to hold dear.