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An Essay on Criticism (1711) was Popeās first independent work, published anonymously through an obscure bookseller. Its implicit claim to authority is not based on a lifetimeās creative work or a prestigious commission but, riskily, on the skill and argument of the poem alone. It offers a sort of master-class not only in doing criticism but in being a critic: addressed to those ā it could be anyone ā who would rise above scandal,envy, politics and pride to true judgement, it leads the reader through a qualifying course. At the end, one does not become a professional critic ā the association with hired writing would have been a contaminating one for Pope ā but an educated judge of important critical matters. Much of the poem is delivered as a series of instructions, but the opening is tentative, presenting a problem to be solved: āāTis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill/Appear in Writing or in Judging illā. The next six lines ring the changes on the differences to be weighed in deciding the question: But, of the two, less dangārous is thā Offence, To tire our Patience, than mislead our Sense: Some few in that, but Numbers err in this, Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss; A Fool might once himself alone expose, Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.
The simple opposition develops into a more complex suggestion that more unqualified people are likely to set up for critic than for poet, and that such a proliferation is serious. Popeās typographically-emphasized oppositions between poetry and criticism, verse and prose, patience and sense, develop through the passage into a wider account of the problem than first proposed: the even-handed balance of the couplets extends beyond a simple contrast. Nonetheless, though Popeās oppositions divide, they also keep within a single framework different categories of writing: Pope often seems to be addressing poets as much as critics. The critical function may well depend on a poetic function: this is after all an essay on criticism delivered in verse, and thus acting also as poetry and offering itself for criticism. Its blurring of categories which might otherwise be seen as fundamentally distinct, and its often slippery transitions from area to area, are part of the poemās comprehensive, educative character.
Addison, who considered the poem āa Master-pieceā, declared that its tone was conversational and its lack of order was not problematic: āThe Observations follow one another like those in Horaceās Art of Poetry, without that Methodical
Regularity which would have been requisite in a Prose Author. Pope, however, decided during the revision of the work to divide the poem into three sections, with numbered sub-sections summarizing each segment of argument. This impluse towards order is itself illustrative of tensions between creative and critical faculties, an apparent casualness of expression being given rigour by a prose skeleton. The three sections are not equally balanced, but offer something like the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of logical argumentation ā something which exceeds the positive-negative opposition suggested by the couplet format. The first section (1ā 200 ) establishes the basic possibilities for critical judgement; the second (201ā559) elaborates the factors which hinder such judgement;and the third (560ā744) celebrates the elements which make up true critical behaviour. Part One seems to begin by setting poetic genius and critical taste against each other, while at the same time limiting the operation of teaching to those āwho have written well ā. The poem immediately stakes an implicit claim for the poet to be included in the category of those who can āwrite wellā by providing a flamboyant example of poetic skill in the increasingly satiric portrayal of the process by which failed writers become critics: āEach burns alike, who can, or cannot write,/Or with a Rivalās, or an Eunuch ās spiteā. At the bottom of the heap are āhalf-learnād Witlings, numārous in our Isleā, pictured as insects in an early example of Popeās favourite image of teeming, writerly promiscuity. Pope then turns his attention back to the reader, conspicuously differentiated from this satiric extreme: ā you who seek to give and merit Fameā (the combination of giving and meriting reputation again links criticism with creativity). The would-be critic, thus selected, is advised to criticize himself first of all, examining his limits and talents and keeping to the bounds of what he knows ; this leads him to the most major of Popeās abstract quantities within the poem (and within his thought in general): Nature. First follow NATURE, and your Judgment frame By her just Standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchangād, and Universal Light, Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart, At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art.
Dennis complained that Pope should have specified āwhat he means by Nature, and what it is to write or to judge according to Natureā ,and modern analyses have the burden of Romantic deifications of Nature to discard: Popeās Nature is certainly not some pantheistic, powerful nurturer, located outside social settings,
Nature, like Liberty , is but restrainād By the same Laws which first herself ordainād. ( EC, 88 ā 91) Nature, as Godlike principle of order, is ādiscoverādā to operate according to certain principles stated in critical treatises such as Aristotleās Poetics or Horaceās Ars Poetica (or Popeās Essay on Criticism ). In the golden age of Greece (92ā103), Criticism identified these Rules of Nature in early poetry and taught their use to aspiring poets. Pope contrasts this with the activities of critics in the modern world, where often criticism is actively hostile to poetry, or has become an end in itself. Right judgement must separate itself out from such blind alleys by reading Homer: ā You then whose Judgment the right Course would steerā ( EC, 118) can see yourself in the fable of āyoung Maro ā (Virgil), who is pictured discovering to his amazement the perfect original equivalence between Homer, Nature, and the Rules. Virgil the poet becomes a sort of critical commentary on the original source poet of Western literature,Homer. With assurance bordering consciously on hyperbole, Pope can instruct us: āLearn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem;/To copy Nature is to copy Them ā. Despite the potential for neat conclusion here, Pope has a rider to offer,and again it is one which could be addressed to poet or critic: āSome Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare,/For thereās a Happiness as well as Care ā. As well as the prescriptions of Aristotelian poetics,Pope draws on the ancient treatise ascribed to Longinus and known as On the Sublime. Celebrating imaginative āflightsā rather than representation of nature, Longinus figures in Popeās poem as a sort of paradox: Great Wits sometimes may gloriously offend, And rise to Faults true Criticks dare not mend; From vulgar Bounds with brave Disorder part, And snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art, Which, without passing throā the Judgment , gains The Heart, and all its End at once attains.
This occasional imaginative rapture, not predictable by rule, is an important concession, emphasised by careful typographic signalling of its paradoxical nature (ā gloriously offend ā, and so on); but it is itself countered by the caution that āThe Critickā may āput his Laws in forceā if such licence is unjustifiably used. Pope here seems to align the āyouā in the audience with poet rather than critic, and in the final lines of the first section it is the classical ā Bards Triumphant ā who remain unassailably immortal, leaving Pope to pray for āsome Spark
of your Coelestial Fireā to inspire his own efforts as āThe last, the meanest of your Sonsā, to instruct criticism through poetry.
Following this ringing prayer for the possibility of reestablishing a critical art based on poetry, Part II (200-559) elaborates all the human psychological causes which inhibit such a project: pride, envy,sectarianism, a love of some favourite device at the expense of overall design. The ideal critic will reflect the creative mind, and will seek to understand the whole work rather than concentrate on minute infractions of critical laws:
A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit With the same Spirit that its Author writ, Survey the Whole, nor seek slight Faults to find, Where Nature moves, and Rapture warms the Mind;
Most critics (and poets) err by having a fatal predisposition towards some partial aspect of poetry: ornament, conceit, style, or metre, which they use as an inflexible test of far more subtle creations. Pope aims for a kind of poetry which is recognisable and accessible in its entirety:
True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, What oft was Thought, but neāer so well Exprest, Something, whose Truth convincād at Sight we find, That gives us back the Image of our Mind:
This is not to say that style alone will do, as Pope immediately makes plain the music of poetry, the ornament of its ānumbersā or rhythm, is only worth having because āThe Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense ā. Pope performs and illustrates a series of poetic clichĆ©s ā the use of open vowels, monosyllabic lines, and cheap rhymes: Thoā oft the Ear the open Vowels tire ā¦ ( EC , 345) And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line ā¦ ( EC , 347) Where-eāer you find the cooling Western Breeze, In the next Line, it whispers throā the Trees ā¦ ( EC, 350 ā 1)
These gaffes are contrasted with more positive kinds of imitative effect:
Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows;
Thereafter, Pope has two things to say. One is to set a challenge to contemporary culture by asking āwhereās the Manā who can unite all necessary humane and intellectual qualifications for the critic , and be a sort of walking oxymoron, āModestly bold, and humanly severeā in his judgements. The other is to insinuate an answer. Pope offers deft characterisations of critics from Aristotle to Pope who achieve the necessary independence from extreme positions: Aristotleās primary treatise is likened to an imaginative voyage into the land of Homer which becomes the source of legislative power; Horace is the poetic model for friendly conversational advice; Quintilian is a useful store of āthe justest Rules, and clearest Method joinādā; Longinus is inspired by the Muses,who ābless their Critick with a Poetās Fireā. These pairs include and encapsulate all the precepts recommended in the body of the poem. But the empire of good sense, Pope reminds us, fell apart after the fall of Rome,leaving nothing but monkish superstition, until the scholar Erasmus,always Popeās model of an ecumenical humanist, reformed continental scholarship. Renaissance Italy shows a revival of arts, including criticism; France, āa Nation born to serveā fossilised critical and poetic practice into unbending rules; Britain, on the other hand, āā a deftly ironic modulation of what appears to be a patriotic celebration intosomething more muted. Pope does however cite two earlier verse essays (by John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, and Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon) before paying tribute to his own early critical mentor, William Walsh, who had died in 1708. Sheffield and Dillon were both poets who wrote criticism in verse, but Walsh was not a poet; in becoming the nearest modern embodiment of the ideal critic, his āpoeticā aspect becomes Pope himself, depicted as a mixture of moderated qualities which reminds us of the earlier āWhereās the manā passage: he is quite possibly here, Careless of Censure , nor too fond of Fame, Still pleasād to praise, yet not afraid to blame, Averse alike to Flatter , or Offend, Not free from Faults, nor yet too vain to mend.
It is a kind of leading from the front, or tuition by example, as recommended and practised by the poem. From an apparently secondary,even negative, position (writing on criticism, which the poem sees as secondary to poetry), the poem ends up founding criticism on poetry, and deriving poetry from the (ideal) critic.
Early criticism celebrated the way the poem seemed to master and exemplify its own stated ideals, just as Pope had said of Longinus that he āIs himself that
great Sublime he drawsā. It is a poem profuse with images, comparisons and similes.
