Alexander Pope's An Essay On Man

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Alexander Pope's An Essay On Man

Alexander Pope's An Essay On Man is generally accepted as a wonderfully harmonious mass of couplets that gather a variety of philosophical doctrines in an eclectic and (because of its philosophic nature) antithetic muddle. No critic denies that Pope's Essay On Man is among the most beautifully written and best of his works, but few also deny that Pope's Essay On Man is an incoherent conglomeration of "incongruous scraps" ("A Letter..." 88) of philosophical axioms. In forming An Essay On Man into perhaps the greatest philosophical poem ever written, Pope masterfully incorporates allusions and metaphors in which to constrict a world of meaning into the compact work that verse must be, in comparison to prose. Perhaps, then, Pope's greatest flaw is that, because a work of philosophy must be coherent and complete in order to be successful in most cases, An Essay On Man is too difficult to decipher because the structure and sequence of the work, as well as allusions and metaphors, while adding to the quality of verse, diminish the quality of the philosophical work.

Pope's only mistake in writing An Essay On Man is his attempt to fit too much information into such a compressed work. However, viewed as separate thoughts, the majority of passages in the Essay seem to hold true - not a central and coherent truth, but an "angular and splintered" truth (De Quincey 224). As a philosophical argument represented in verse, the simplification of so many varying theories cannot be avoided. While the Essay lacks central doctrinal coherence, it still succeeds as a poem, even at the expense of its philosophy (Edwards 37). One must also recognize the greatness of the work itself, despite its lack of centra...

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...ondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971. 224.

Edwards, Thomas. "The Mighty Maze: An Essay on Man." Modern Critical Views: Alexander Pope. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 37-50.

Hazlitt, William. From "On Dryden and Pope." Penguin Critical Anthologies: Alexander Pope. Eds. F.W. Bateson and N.A. Joukovsky. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971. 197.

Keener, Frederick. Introduction. An Essay on Pope. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. 8.

Magill, Frank, ed. Critical Survey of Poetry: Revised Edition. Vol. 6. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1992. 2632-2635.

Pope, Alexander. An Essay On Man. Ed. Maynard Mack. Twickenham Edition. London: Methuen, 1950.

Warton, Joseph. From "An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope." Penguin Critical Anthologies: Alexander Pope. Eds. F.W. Bateson and N.A. Joukovsky. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971. 111-115.

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