Augustan Poetry
Quick answer: Augustan poetry names the polished satiric English verse of the early 18th century, the age of Pope and Swift. Learn its style, forms and key works.
Augustan poetry is the English verse of the early eighteenth century, roughly 1700 to 1745, written in conscious emulation of the Roman poets who flourished under the emperor Augustus: Virgil, Horace and Ovid. The name flatters both parties; English writers saw their own age of trade, empire and coffee-house debate mirrored in Augustan Rome, and adopted its ideals of polish, urbanity and civic wit. Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift are the era's twin peaks.
For today's readers, Augustan poetry can look forbiddingly formal, all couplets and classical furniture. Look closer and it is gossip, rage and comedy conducted with surgical instruments: mock epics about stolen locks of hair, satires that ended reputations, epistles that read like the best letters ever written in rhyme.
History and Key Figures
Pope stands at the centre. 'The Rape of the Lock' (1712) inflates a society quarrel over a snipped curl into full epic machinery, sylphs, battles, a voyage on the Thames, mocking both the epic and the society at once. 'The Dunciad' crowns the age's hack writers in an empire of Dullness, and the 'Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot' (1735) remains the most elegant act of literary self-defence in English. Around him: Swift, whose verse is deliberately rough and savagely funny; John Gay, whose 'Beggar's Opera' and fables mocked politely; and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who traded barbs with Pope as an equal.
The Scriblerus Club, where Pope, Swift, Gay and Arbuthnot plotted satires together, gives the era its clubbable image: literature as a team sport played against dullness.
The Augustan Style
The heroic couplet is the age's signature: paired rhymed lines of iambic pentameter, usually closed, with the caesura placed to balance phrase against phrase. The style prizes antithesis, compression and the zeugma, one verb yoking mismatched objects, and its politeness is a delivery system for venom. An invented couplet in the manner: 'She mourned the fashion, then she mourned the friend, / and found both griefs were easier to mend.' The balance is the joke, and the joke is a moral observation.
Mock epic was the era's great invention: applying the grandest style to the smallest matter, so both the triviality of the subject and the vanity of grandeur stand exposed.
How to Use the Tradition in Your Own Poems
Mock epic transfers beautifully to modern material. Office politics, group chats, gym rivalries and parking disputes all deserve invocations, epic similes and catalogues of arms. The form teaches proportion by violating it deliberately, and it forces your satire to be craftsmanlike rather than merely cross.
Practise the couplet as a thinking tool. Writing balanced, closed couplets trains you to weigh phrase against phrase and to end lines on their strongest words, habits that survive into free verse. A poet who can close a couplet cleanly rarely writes a slack line ending again.
What poets can take from this
- Try mock epic on modern trivia: invocation, epic simile, catalogue, battle.
- Practise closed couplets to train balance and strong line endings.
- Use politeness as a weapon; the courteous surface sharpens the cut.
- Deploy zeugma for instant Augustan flavour: one verb, two mismatched objects.
- Read Pope aloud slowly; the pleasure is in the placement of every stress.
Try it yourself
Write the opening of a mock epic, twelve to twenty lines, about a genuinely tiny modern conflict: the last parking space, a disputed thermostat, a stolen lunch from the office fridge. Include an invocation and at least one epic simile.
Questions
Why is it called Augustan poetry?
After the Roman emperor Augustus, under whom Virgil, Horace and Ovid wrote. Early eighteenth-century English writers saw their own era as a parallel golden age and imitated those Roman models in style and civic outlook.
What is a heroic couplet?
Two rhymed lines of iambic pentameter, usually forming a complete unit of sense. It was the dominant form of Augustan poetry, perfected by Dryden and Pope, and suits epigram, satire and argument because each pair closes with a snap.
Is Augustan poetry the same as neoclassical poetry?
Augustan poetry is the high central phase of English neoclassicism, roughly 1700 to 1745. Neoclassicism is the broader movement running from about 1660 to 1780, so the terms overlap without being identical.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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