Metaphysical poets the Metaphysical style. The choice of style by the young Milton and the young Dryden can therefore be explained in part as contextual. Both went on to develop radically different ways of writing; neither could be counted as potentially Metaphysical poets. Nor could Alexander Pope, yet his early poetry evidences an interest in his Metaphysical forebears. Among his juvenilia appear imitations of Cowley. As a young man he began work on adapting Donne's second satire, to which he had added the fourth satire too by 1735. Pope also wrote his “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” (1717) while
Richard Leigh (poet) York's or King's Company. There were two other actors named "Leigh" during that period in the company, Anthony Leigh and John Leigh, but no records of a Richard Leigh in either company survive. While he was a young man, Leigh wrote a prose tract attacking poet John Dryden (1631–1700), entitled "The Censure of the Rota on Mr. Dryden's Conquest of Granada, an attack which annoyed Dryden who subsequently called Leigh "the Fastidious Brisk of Oxford". Some of Leigh's works include "Poems on Several Occasions and to Several Persons", "Greatness in Little" (1675), "Sleeping on her Couch", and "The Eccho". His