Question

What techniques does Pope use to weave humor into the poem The Rape of the Lock?

Answer 1

Pope uses the mock-epic genre to weave humor into the poem The R*pe of the Lock.

The R*pe of the Lock is a humorous indictment of the vanities and idleness of 18th-century high society.

The mock-epic genre also known as the heroi-comic refers typically to satires or parodies that mock common Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature. Mock-heroic literary works either put a fool in the role of the hero or exaggerate the heroic qualities to an extent that they become absurd.

Answer 2

Pope used the mock-epic genre to weave humor into the poem, The Rape of the Lock.

The mock-epic genre resembles the epic in that its central concerns are serious and often moral, but deviates from the epic in the fact that the approach must now be satirical rather than earnest is symptomatic of how far the culture has fallen.

The verse form of the poem is the heroic couplet. It is composed of rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter lines -- lines of ten syllables each, alternating stressed and unstressed syllables.