An Essay on Criticism: Pope

Q.) What does Pope convey through his ‘An Essay on Criticism’, according to Addison, ‘a master-
piece’?

Ans.) Pope's "Essay on Criticism" is a didactic poem in heroic couplets, begun, perhaps, as early as
1705, and published, anonymously, in 1711. The poetic essay was a relatively new genre, and the
"Essay" itself was Pope's most ambitious work to that time. It was in part an attempt on Pope's part
to identify and refine his own positions as poet and critic, and his response to an ongoing critical
debate which centred on the question of whether poetry should be "natural" or written according to
predetermined "artificial" rules inherited from the classical past.

Much of the poem is delivered as a series of instructions, but the opening is tentative,
presenting a problem to be solved: ‘’Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill/Appear in Writing or
in Judging ill’ (EC, 1– 2). The next six lines ring the changes on the differences to be weighed in
deciding the question:

“But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ 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.”

(EC, 3–8)

The simple opposition we began with 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.
Pope’s typographically emphasised 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 Pope’s oppositions divide, they also keep within a single framework different category 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
poem’s comprehensive, educative character.

Addison, who considered the poem ‘a Master-piece’, declared that its tone was
conversational, and its lack of order was not problematic: “The Observations follow one another
like those in Horace’s Art of Poetry, without that Methodical Regularity which would have been
requisite in a Prose Author” (Barnard 1973). Pope, however, decided during the revision of the work
for the 1736 Works to divide the poem into three sections, with numbered sub-sections
summarizing each segment of argument. This impulse 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 – something which exceeds the positive-negative
opposition suggested by the couplet format. The first section (1–200) establishes the basic
possibilities for critical judgement; the second (201–559) elaborates the factors which hinder such
judgement; and the third (560–744) celebrates the elements which make up true critical behaviour.
 (2)

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 ‘who have written well’ (EC, 11–18). The
poem immediately stakes an implicit claim for the poet to be included in the category of those who
can ‘write well’ by providing a flamboyant example of poetic skill in the increasingly satiric portrayal
of the process by which failed writers become critics: “Each burns alike, who can, or cannot
write, /Or with a Rival’s, or an Eunuch’s spite” (EC, 29–30). At the bottom of the heap are ‘half-
learned Witlings, numerous in our Isle’, pictured as insects in an early example of Pope’s favourite
image of teeming, writerly promiscuity (36–45). Pope then turns his attention back to the reader,
conspicuously differentiated from this satiric extreme: ‘you who seek to give and merit Fame’ (the
combination of giving and meriting reputation again links criticism with creativity). The would-be
critic, thus selected, is advised to criticise himself first of all, examining his limits and talents and
keeping to the bounds of what he knows (46-67); this leads him to the most major of Pope’s 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, unchanged, and Universal Light,
Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart,
At once the Source, and End, and Te s t of Art.” (EC 68-73)

The poem commences with a discussion of the rules of taste which ought to govern poetry,
and which enable a critic to make sound critical judgements. In it, Pope comments, too, upon the
authority which ought properly to be accorded to the classical authors who dealt with the subject;
and concludes (in an apparent attempt to reconcile the opinions of the advocates and opponents of
rules) that the rules of the ancients are in fact identical with the rules of Nature: poetry and painting,
that is, like religion and morality, reflect natural law.

The "Essay on Criticism," then, is deliberately ambiguous: Pope seems, on the one hand, to
admit that rules are necessary for the production of and criticism of poetry, but he also notes the
existence of mysterious, apparently irrational qualities — "Nameless Graces," identified by terms
such as "Happiness" and "Lucky Licence" — with which Nature is endowed, and which permit the
true poetic genius, possessed of adequate "taste," to appear to transcend those same rules. The
critic, of course, if he is to appreciate that genius, must possess similar gifts.

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: “Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare,/For
there’s a Happiness as well as Care” (EC, 141–2). As well as the prescriptions of Aristotelian poetics,
Pope draws on the ancient treatise ascribed to Longinus and known as On the Sublime [12].
Celebrating imaginative ‘flights’ rather than representation of nature, Longinus figures in Pope’s
poem as a sort of paradox:

“Great Wits sometimes may gloriously offend,

And rise to Faults true Critics dare not mend;
From vulgar Bounds with brave Disorder part,
And snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art,
 Which, without passing through’ the Judgment, gains
The Heart, and all its End at once attains.” (EC, 152–7)

(3)

This occasional imaginative rapture, not predictable by rule, is an important concession, emphasised
by careful typographic signalling of its paradoxical nature (‘gloriously offend’, and so on); but it is
itself countered by the caution that ‘The Critic’ may ‘put his Laws in force’ if such licence is
unjustifiably used. Pope here seems to align the ‘you’ in the audience with poet rather than critic,
and in the final lines of the first section it is the classical ‘Bards Triumphant’ who remain unassailably
immortal, leaving Pope to pray for ‘some Spark of your Celestial Fire’ (EC, 195) to inspire his own
efforts (as ‘The last, the meanest of your Sons’, EC, 196) to instruct criticism through poetry.

True Art, in other words, imitates Nature, and Nature tolerates and indeed encourages
felicitous irregularities which are in reality (because Nature and the physical universe are creations
of God) aspects of the divine order of things which is eternally beyond human comprehension. Only
God, the infinite intellect, the purely rational being, can appreciate the harmony of the universe, but
the intelligent and educated critic can appreciate poetic harmonies which echo those in nature.
Because his intellect and his reason are limited, however, and because his opinions are inevitably
subjective, he finds it helpful or necessary to employ rules which are interpretations of the ancient
principles of nature to guide him — though he should never be totally dependent upon them. We
should note, in passing, that in "The Essay on Criticism" Pope is frequently concerned with "wit" —
the word occurs once, on average, in every sixteen lines of the poem. What does he mean by it?

Pope then proceeds to discuss the laws by which a critic should be guided — insisting, as any
good poet would, that critics exist to serve poets, not to attack them. He then provides, by way of
example, instances of critics who had erred in one fashion or another. What, in Pope's opinion (here
as elsewhere in his work) is the deadliest critical sin — a sin which is itself a reflection of a greater
sin? All his erring critics, each in their own way, betray the same fatal flaw.

The final section of the poem discusses the moral qualities and virtues inherent in the ideal
critic, who is also the ideal man — and who, Pope laments, no longer exists in the degenerate world
of the early eighteenth century.

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