Although the Age of Reason might seem particularly remote today, Pope's verse, written from the fringes of aristocratic London society, has dated no more than that of Chaucer or Shakespeare. He is the great poet of worldly and human experience, and out of the sting, erudition, passion and contradictions of his poetry he emerges, not simply as the Poet of his Age, but as one of our irreplaceable investigative geniuses.