ALEXANDER POPE 1688–1744 Scholars have noted dozens of sources— the Roman writers

horace and Quintilian (ca. 30/35–100 c.e.), the French poet- critic Nicolas Boileau (1636– 1711),
his En glish contemporary john dryden, and many more— for Alexander Pope’s versified “art of
poetry,” An Essay on Criticism (1711); but their labors, though valuable, miss the central point.
Pope advanced no claims for the originality of the views he presented, and in the final analysis
his poem is memorable less for its doctrine than for the bril liance of its style, which revitalizes
familiar teachings and makes them sparkle. It delightfully illustrates Pope’s own view of literary
“borrowing”: that “poets, like mer chants, should repay with something of their own what they
take from others, not, like pirates, make prize of all they meet.” The Essay is a sophisticated,
witty poem, a compendium of critical principles, with much reading and reflection behind it—
from an author who was astonishingly young when it was written. Pope was born in London in
1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, when the Catholic King James II was deposed in
favor of Protestant William III and Mary II. He was the son of a linen merchant who was Roman
Catholic, and thus suffered from the controls of En gland’s anti- Catholic laws. While not always
strictly enforced, these laws were onerous. Catholics were prevented from practicing their
religion freely; they could not legally reside within ten miles of London; they were not allowed to
attend the universities, vote, or hold public offices or seats in Parliament. In 1711 Pope’s family
moved to Binfield in Windsor Forest, thirty miles outside London, a place that Pope described
evocatively in one of his best early poems, “Windsor- Forest” (1713). A local priest taught Greek
and Latin to Pope, and he picked up French and Ital ian during a short term of study in London.
Pope’s father encouraged him to write verse, insisting that his son’s rhymes be perfect, and
Pope early on crafted “imita tions” of Chaucer (ca. 1343– 1400), Edmund Spenser (1552–
1599), Edmund Waller (1606– 1687), and Abraham Cowley (1618– 1667). Limitations not
simply legal but also physical encouraged him to focus on his literary efforts. Tuberculosis of the
bones in childhood had curved Pope’s spine and stunted his growth— he was only 368 /
ALEXANDER POPE four and a half feet tall— and throughout his life he suffered from frequent
and severe headaches. In addition to An Essay on Criticism and “Windsor- Forest,” Pope’s
major poems include “The Rape of the Lock” (1712; enlarged ed., 1714); The Dunciad, targeting
Pope’s literary enemies (first published anonymously in 1728; enlarged eds. 1742, 1743); Moral
Essays (1731– 35); Imitations of Horace (1733– 38) and their prologue, “An Epistle to Dr.
Arbuthnot” (1735); and An Essay on Man (1733– 34), a philo sophical poem designed to
“vindicate the ways of God to Man” (1.16). Pope also produced a magnificent translation of the
Iliad (1715– 20), co- translated the Odyssey (1725– 26), and edited the works of Shakespeare
(1725). He had concerns outside lit erature; his keen interests in painting, sculpture,
architecture, and horticulture were expressed in the garden and grotto that he built at
Twickenham, a five- acre villa he rented on the Thames, where he moved with his mother after
his father’s death in 1718. An Essay on Criticism was published anonymously on May 15, 1711,
a week before the poet’s twenty- third birthday. The manuscript we have is dated in Pope’s
hand, “Written in the year 1709,” but elsewhere he put the date of composition as early as 1706.
And though he claimed to have written the Essay quickly, the manuscript shows that he revised
his poem carefully. For later editions, Pope provided a table of contents and divided the 750-
line poem into three parts— the second starting at line 201 and the third at line 560. Pope
means his lively heroic couplets to remind readers of principles they already should know. Like
many writers in the seventeenth and eigh teenth centuries, he judges literature to be plagued by
ill- informed, careless, proud, and pompous crit ics, whose mistaken evaluations of texts mislead
authors as well as readers. John Dryden, in “The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry” (1677),
similarly laments that he and his fellow authors have “fallen into an age of illiterate, censorious,
and detracting people, who, thus qualified, set up for critics.” In the Essay Pope writes that the
dismaying state of criticism reflects a broad historical decline from the Greek and Roman past—
the golden age of art, when critics generously sought to advise authors and to instruct readers
on how to appreciate them. The best works of art, Pope maintains, derive from a deeply felt,
well- reasoned study of Nature; and studying the great works of the past leads one to see their
reli ance on the stable principles of harmony and order that Nature itself teaches. This is Pope’s
and his age’s neoclassicism— to imitate the ancient authors and adopt the critical precepts that
these authors and their texts embody. Like Jonathan Swift, joseph addison, and other significant
writers of the early to mid– eighteenth cen tury, Pope particularly admired the authors, notably
Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, who had flourished during the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus
(27 b.c.e.– 14 c.e.), and he sought through his writing to make his own era similarly “Augustan”
in its literary production. Reading Homer and Virgil, Pope believed, sharpens taste and
judgment and enables us to perceive the intimate relationship between art and Nature. The
classic texts are, like Nature, a standard and a guide. Their balance, harmony, and good
proportion are evident in their parts as well as demonstrated in the whole. In the prosody of a
poem, for example, the sound and meter in a well- proportioned and well- regulated work enact
the actions and the sense conveyed (see lines 364– 73). At moments, as when Pope rebukes
pride and envy (e.g., lines 201– 18), the Essay might strike some readers today as less about
literature and criticism than about morality. But as Pope sees it, good authors or critics must
truly know themselves and possess a finely developed moral sense and purpose. Such people
know and abide by the limits of human aspiration, seek models for right aesthetic and moral
conduct, and guard against the self- delusion and self- destructiveness of overween ing pride.
ALEXANDER POPE / 369 Some critics contend that Pope uses his chief terms, such as Nature,
wit, and judgment, too loosely, and they have claimed that the Essay lacks a coherent struc ture.
It is, like Horace’s Ars Poetica, more associative than logical. It offers encour agement and
advice in a sequence of briskly paced observations on the nature of art, the value of the
ancients, the importance of the rules, the need to observe decorum in word selection, the
connection between artistic creation and criticism, and other topics. The key words are invoked
in different passages to enliven the specific point at hand. Rather than using them loosely, Pope
deliberately draws on all of their senses. For example, wit (from the Old En glish witan, “to
know”) is a complex, multiva lent word, difficult to pin down, and Pope capitalizes on its range of
meanings and implications. It means, first, the mind or the understanding, the faculty of reason
ing and thinking. In his Dictionary (1755), samuel johnson gives as its “original signification” “the
powers of the mind; the mental faculties; the intellects.” But wit can also refer, he notes, to a
poetic conceit, figure of speech, felicitous phras ing, common sense, inventiveness, astuteness
of perception, the capacity to see resemblance in apparently unlike things, cleverness, fancy,
genius; it can mean the imaginative power that judgment must temper and control (see, e.g.,
lines 82– 83), even as it also implies judgment itself— wit curbing excessive wit. Pope offers his
own definition in perhaps the best- known couplets of the Essay: True Wit is Nature to
Advantage drest, What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest, Something, whose Truth
convinc’d at Sight we find, That gives us back the Image of our Mind. (lines 297– 300) Wit is
Nature; it instances something that we have all thought, but whose sheer truth the poet now
makes compelling through his or her language. True wit is sub tle, sharp, and, above all,
surprising— a striking image, a vivid meta phor, a para doxical figure of speech. Addison and
Johnson also delve into the nature of wit, but it is Pope who exemplifies the meanings of this
complex word and idea more inven tively than any other writer in the canon of eighteenth-
century En glish literature and criticism. The most memorable assessment of the Essay remains
Samuel Johnson’s: “[The Essay] exhibits every mode of excellence that can embellish or dignify
didactick composition, selection of matter, novelty of arrangement, justness of precept,
splendour of illustration, and propriety of digression.” It is a hopeful work, all the more affecting
in light of the po liti cal quarrels and ferocious literary feuds in which Pope engaged later in his
career. These climaxed in his gigantic satire of literary idiocy, The Dunciad, in Four Books,
published in its final form in October 1743. In this great last text of his poetic career, Pope
describes the sublime awful ness of hordes of pedants, false poets, and dunces. His dazzling
punitive wit here takes on the grotesque grandeur of mock- epic, on a scale eclipsing that
displayed in the elegant, highly cultivated early work. The Dunciad shows Pope’s angry real
ization of the difficulty in winning wide ac cep tance for the neoclassical views that he had
advocated and had described with both power and grace in An Essay on Criticism. An Essay on
Criticism Keywords: Aesthetics, Authorship, The Canon/Tradition, Defense of Criticism,
Enlightenment Theory, Poetr