An Essay on Alexander Pope

An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope  

l. 566:

Be silent always when you doubt your sense;

And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence:

Some positive persisting fops we know,

Who, if once wrong, will needs always be so;

But you, with pleasure own your errors past,

And make each day a critic on the past.

Recently I’ve been reading Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose for my daily dose of poetry.  It was hard connecting to his poetry at first.  For one thing, he uses a lot of couplets. After awhile I started feeling I had been demoted back to Dr. Seuss. 


It didn’t help that the volume I’m reading out of a second-hand paperback and the previous owner decided to voice all of her (the handwriting is too “loopy” to be a man’s) opinions on the overall quality of each poem by means of a Bic ballpoint pen, as well as self-evident comments on what certain phrases mean:

“To shoot” is underlined, with “hunting metaphor” scrawled next to it.  “Really?” I scoff, “I wouldn’t have figured that out, otherwise.  How helpful of you.”

Anyway, once I got past the couplets and the unnecessary running commentary, I began to appreciate Pope more. First, I think it’s odd that he’s not more well known for his philosophy. Much of his poetry attempts to get at the origin of some problem or to understand the source of a certain aspect of human nature. And many of his poem are named essays, as he’s discussing a nonfiction topic in the attempt to persuade his audience of the truth of a certain point.

 
“This I might have done in prose,” he explains in his introduction to Essay on Man I, “but I chose verse, and even rhyme, for two reasons. The one will appear obvious; that principles, maxims, or precepts so written, both strike the reader more strongly at first, and are more easily retained by him afterwards: The other may seem odd, but is true, I found I could express them more shortly this way than in prose itself; and nothing is more certain, than that much of the force as well as grace of arguments or instructions, depends on their conciseness.”