essay on criticism traduzione

FONETICA INGLESE: regole generiche
FONETICA INGLESE: vocali
FONETICA INGLESE: consonanti
FONETICA INGLESE: appendice
PRONOMI PERSONALI
SI IMPERSONALE
THERE INTRODUTTIVO
PRONOMI RIFLESSIVI
PRONOMI RECIPROCI
PRONOMI INDEFINITI
VERBO INGLESE
VERBO TO BE
VERBO TO HAVE
SIMPLE PRESENT
PRESENT CONTINUOUS
SIMPLE PAST
PAST CONTINUOUS
PRESENT PERFECT
PAST PERFECT
FORMA DI DURATA
CONGIUNTIVO
CONDIZIONALE
VERBI MODALI
MUST-HAVE TO
LA FRASE IN INGLESE
FRASE NEGATIVA
FRASE INTERROGATIVA
SHORT ANSWERS
QUESTION TAGS
ESCLAMAZIONI
PRONOMI INTERROGATIVI
PRONOMI RELATIVI
PRONOMI POSSESSIVI
SAXON GENITIVE
COMPARATIVI
AGGETTIVI DIMOSTRATIVI
AGGETTIVI INDEFINITI
PREPOSIZIONI
PREPOSITIONAL PHRASAL VERBS
FRASE SUBORDINATA
REPORTED SPEECH
VERBI DI PERCEZIONE
PERIODO IPOTETICO
CONGIUNZIONI
Esercizi di inglese
Paradigmi verbi irregolari
Tempo atmosferico
Stagioni mesi giorni
Aggettivi nazionalità
Frutta verdura
Corpo umano
Buone maniere
Espressioni inglesi
Fare in inglese
VOCABOLARIO
FALSE FRIENDS INGLESI
ESPRESSIONI IDIOMATICHE INGLESI
SUFFISSI E PREFISSI INGLESI
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INGLESE SHAKESPEARIANO
ROMEO E GIULIETTA
BALLATE INGLESI
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
TEATRO ELISABETTIANO
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
JOHN MILTON
JOHN DRYDEN
PERIODO AUGUSTEO
ALEXANDER POPE
LAURENCE STERNE
THOMAS GRAY
WILLIAM BLAKE
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
SAMUEL COLERIDGE
GEORGE BYRON
PERCY SHELLEY
WALTER SCOTT
EPOCA VITTORIANA
OSCAR WILDE
AGATHA CHRISTIE
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Alexander pope (1688 - 1744).

VERSIONE ITALIANA:

Alexander Pope è sicuramente il miglior scrittore del suo periodo, il più grande poeta del 18° secolo. Così tanto che questo periodo è spesso chiamato " l'età di Pope ".

Era nato a Londra nel 1688 . Era l'unico figlio di una famiglia cattolica, che gli dette una educazione formale.

Una grave malattia, quando aveva dodici anni, lo rese deforme, ma aveva comunque un grande amore per la cultura e riuscì a ottenere una vasta istruzione. Divenne un famoso scrittore, e con alcuni suoi amici fondò il club SCRIBLERUS , che fu chiuso quando la regina Anna Stuart morì.

Sarebbe diventato un " POET LAUREATE " (un titolo dato dal monarca ai migliori poeti del paese, che avevano il privilegio di comporre versi per occasioni ufficiali), ma questo non fu possibile, perché era un cattolico e contro la politica del Primo Ministro ( Sir Robert Walpole ). Per questo Alexander Pope è un grande esempio di poeta diventato famoso senza il patrocinio del re.

Alexander Pope morì nel 1744 .

ENGLISH VERSION:

Alexander Pope is surely the best writer of his period, the greatest poet of the 18th century. So that this period is often called “ the Age of Pope ”.

He was born in London in 1688 . He was the only son of a Catholic family, that gave him a formal education.

A serious illness, when he was twelve years old, made him deformed, but he had a great love for culture and he managed to get a wide education. He became a famous writer and with some friends of his he founded the SCRIBLERUS CLUB , that was closed when Queen Anne died.

He would have become a POET LAUREATE , but this wasn’t possible because he was a Catholic and against the Prime Minister’s policy ( Sir Robert Walpole ). Therefore Alexander Pope's a great example of a poet that became famous without the king’s patronage.

Alexander Pope died in 1744 .

OPERE DI ALEXANDER POPE/ ALEXANDER POPE'S WORKS

Alexander Pope scrisse la sua prima opera quando aveva sedici anni: le Pastorali , e riuscì a entrare nei circoli letterari e diventare amico dei più famosi scrittori di quel periodo. Tra loro c'era Addison , che Alexander Pope, quando la loro amicizia finì, ridicolizzò.

Nelle sue poesie, Alexander Pope esalta sempre le grandi virtù augustee : esse sono uno specchio della sua società frivola. Era solito scrivere con un linguaggio naturale e facile. L'unica eccezione è quando traduce Omero , dove usa un linguaggio complesso per nobilitare i versi.

Pope mostra sempre anche un grande amore per la natura . La natura rappresenta per Pope l'armonia divina, qualcosa di ideale che gli uomini non riusciranno mai ad imitare.

Spesso tentò di scrivere qualcosa di simile alla famosa opera " Canto per il giorno di Santa Cecilia " di John Dryden , come " The rape of the lock " ( il ratto della ciocca ), poesie d'amore ed opere filosofiche. Come Dryden , Alexander Pope cercò di utilizzare equilibrio e ordine quando scriveva, e lo superò in immaginazione e sentimenti.

Gli scrittori pensavano che lo stile utilizzato dovesse essere " perfetto ". Ma questo portò ad una cristallizzazione dello stile, che era quindi pieno di parole e frasi banali per descrivere le cose più comuni. Pope, invece, come Dryden , pensava che la poesia dovesse rispettare un equilibrio tra spirito e natura .

Questo periodo è chiamato anche " Età della Ragione ". Uno di generi letterari preferiti era la satira . Questo genere si addiceva al carattere di Alexander Pope, che era triste e segnato da un'infanzia terribile: prese la tubercolosi, che lo rese deforme, e, essendo cattolico, si sentiva isolato.

Nelle sue satire egli attacca la sua società, come nell'opera " The rape of the lock " (sua opera più famosa), dove un giovane ragazzo taglia una ciocca di capelli di una giovane ragazza provocando una reazione esagerata della famiglia di lei.

Alexander Pope wrote his first work when he was sixteen: the Pastorals , and managed to enter literary circles and become friend of the most famous writers of that period. Among them there was Addison , that Alexander Pope, when their friendship finished, ridiculed.

In his poems, Alexander Pope always exalts the great Augustan virtues : they are a mirror of his frivolous society. He used to write with a natural and easy language. The only exception is when he translates Homer , where he uses a complex language to dignify the verses.

Pope always shows a great love for nature, too. Nature represents to Pope divine harmony, something ideal that men will never manage to imitate.

He often tried to write something similar to the famous work “ Song for St. Cecilia’s day ” by John Dryden , like “ The rape of the lock ”, love poems and philosophical works. Like Dryden , Alexander Pope tried to use balance and order when he wrote, and surpassed him in imagination and feelings.

Writers thought that the style used had to be “ perfect ”. But this led to a cristallisation of the style that was therefore full of standard words and sentences to describe the most common things. Pope instead, like Dryden , thought poetry had to respect a balance between wit and nature .

This period is also called “ the Age of Reason ”. One of the favourite literary genre was satire . This genre suited Alexander Pope’s character, that was sad and marked by a terrible childhood: he caught tubercolosis, that made him deformed, and, beign a catholic, he felt isolated.

In his satires he attacks his stupid society, like in the work “ The rape of the lock ” (his most famous work), where a young boy cuts a lock of hair from a young girl causing an exaggerated reaction from her family.

SI RIPORTANO QUI DI SEGUITO LE TRADUZIONI IN ITALIANO DI DUE ESTRATTI TRATTI DALLE SEGUENTI OPERE DI ALEXANDER POPE:

" HERE HILLS AND VALES " ( QUI COLLINE E VALLI ), TRATTO DA WINDSOR FOREST ( LA FORESTA DI WINDSOR )

" FIRST FOLLOW NATURE " ( PRIMA SEGUI LA NATURA ), TRATTO DA AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM ( UN SAGGIO SUL CRITICISMO ).

HERE HILLS AND VALES (QUI COLLINE E VALLI) DI ALEXANDER POPE

TESTO IN INGLESE:

Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain, Here earth and water, seem to strive again; Not Chaos like together crush'd and bruis'd, But as the world, harmoniously confus'd: Where order in variety we see, And where, tho' all things differ, all agree. Here waving groves a checquer'd scene display, And part admit, and part exclude the day; As some coy nymph her lover's warm address Nor quite indulges, nor can quite repress.

TRADUZIONE IN ITALIANO:

Qui colline e valli, la boscaglia e la pianura, qui terra e acqua sembrano contendersi di nuovo; non schiacciate e fuse insieme caoticamente, Ma, come il mondo, fuse insieme armoniosamente: Dove vediamo ordine nella varietà E dove, sebbene tutte le cose differiscano, tutto concorda. Qui boschetti ondeggianti presentano una scena a quadretti, E in parte ammettono, in parte escludono il giorno; Come una timida ninfa indirizza il caldo amore del suo amante Né incoraggia abbastanza, né esprime abbastanza.

FIRST FOLLOW NATURE (PRIMA SEGUI LA NATURA) DI ALEXANDER POPE

First follow NATURE, and your judgment frame By her just standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchang'd, and universal light, Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart, At once the source, and end, and test of art. [...]

Those RULES of old discover'd, not devis'd, Are Nature still, but Nature methodis'd; Nature, like liberty, is but restrain'd By the same laws which first herself ordain'd. [...]

When first young Maro in his boundless mind A work t' outlast immortal Rome design'd, Perhaps he seem'd above the critic's law, And but from Nature's fountains scorn'd to draw: But when t' examine ev'ry part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. Convinc'd, amaz'd, he checks the bold design, And rules as strict his labour'd work confine, As if the Stagirite o'erlook'd each line. Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; To copy nature is to copy them.[...]

True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd; Something whose truth convinced at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind. [...]

Prima segui la Natura, e forma il tuo giudizio Secondo il suo giusto modello, che è ancora lo stesso: L’infallibile natura, ancora divinamente luminosa, Una luce chiara, immutata e universale, Vita, forza e bellezza deve impartire a tutto, In una volta sorgente, fine e prova dell’arte.[...]

Quelle regole scoperte anticamente, non inventate, sono ancora Natura, ma Natura ordinata; La Natura, come la libertà, è trattenuta solo Dalle stesse leggi che per prime le ordinarono.[...]

Quando per la prima volta il giovane Marone nella sua mente sconfinata Progettò un’opera per durare più a lungo dell’immortale Roma, Forse sembrò al di sopra della legge della critica, E rifiutò di trarre insegnamenti tranne che dalla Natura: Ma quando venne ad esaminare ogni parte, La natura e Omero erano, trovò, gli stessi: Convinto, sorpreso, controlla l’audace progetto, E le regole severamente limitano il suo lavoro faticato, Come se lo Stagirite sorvegliasse ogni linea. Da questo momento impara per regole antiche una giusta stima; Copiare la natura è copiare loro.[...]

Vero brio è la natura, ornata a suo vantaggio, Ciò che fu spesso pensato, ma mai così ben espresso, Qualcosa, la cui verità troviamo che abbia convinto (convinta) a vista, che ci ridà l’immagine della nostra mente.[...]

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Analysis of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism

Analysis of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 8, 2020 • ( 1 )

An Essay on Criticism (1711) was Pope’s first independent work, published anonymously through an obscure bookseller [12–13]. Its implicit claim to authority is not based on a lifetime’s 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 – it could be anyone – 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 –the association with hired writing would have been a contaminating one for Pope – but an educated judge of important critical matters.

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.

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 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 poem’s comprehensive,educative character.

Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope

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: 78). 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 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 – 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.

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-learn’d Witlings, num’rous 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, unchang’d, 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)

Dennis complained that Pope should have specified ‘what he means by Nature, and what it is to write or to judge according to Nature’ ( TE I: 219),and modern analyses have the burden of Romantic deifications of Nature to discard: Pope’s Nature is certainly not some pantheistic, powerful nurturer, located outside social settings, as it would be for Wordsworth,though like the later poets Pope always characterises Nature as female,something to be quested for by male poets [172]. Nature would include all aspects of the created world, including the non-human, physical world, but the advice on following Nature immediately follows the advice to study one’s own internal ‘Nature’, and thus means something like an instinctively-recognised principle of ordering, derived from the original,timeless, cosmic ordering of God (the language of the lines implicitly aligns Nature with God; those that follow explicitly align it with the soul). Art should be derived from Nature, should seek to replicate Nature, and can be tested against the unaltering standard of Nature, which thus includes Reason and Truth as reflections of the mind of the original poet-creator, God.

In a fallen universe, however, apprehension of Nature requires assistance: internal gifts alone do not suffice.

Some, to whom Heav’n in Wit has been profuse, Want as much more, to turn it to its use; For Wit and Judgment often are at strife, Tho’ meant each other’s Aid, like Man and Wife.

( EC, 80–03)

Wit, the second of Pope’s abstract qualities, is here seamlessly conjoined with the discussion of Nature: for Pope, Wit means not merely quick verbal humour but something almost as important as Nature – a power of invention and perception not very different from what we would mean by intelligence or imagination. Early critics again seized on the first version of these lines (which Pope eventually altered to the reading given here) as evidence of Pope’s inability to make proper distinctions: he seems to suggest that a supply of Wit sometimes needs more Wit to manage it, and then goes on to replace this conundrum with a more familiar opposition between Wit (invention) and Judgment (correction). But Pope stood by the essential point that Wit itself could be a form of Judgment and insisted that though the marriage between these qualities might be strained, no divorce was possible.

Nonetheless, some external prop to Wit was necessary, and Pope finds this in those ‘RULES’ of criticism derived from Nature:

Those RULES of old discover’d, not devis’d, Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d; Nature, like Liberty , is but restrain’d By the same Laws which first herself ordain’d.

( EC, 88–91)

Nature, as Godlike principle of order, is ‘discover’d’ to operate according to certain principles stated in critical treatises such as Aristotle’s Poetics or Horace’s Ars Poetica (or Pope’s Essay on Criticism ). In the golden age of Greece (92–103), 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 (114–17). Right judgement must separate itself out from such blind alleys by reading Homer: ‘ You then whose Judgment the right Course would steer’ ( EC, 118) can see yourself in the fable of ‘young Maro ’ (Virgil), who is pictured discovering to his amazement the perfect original equivalence between Homer, Nature, and the Rules (130–40). 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: ‘Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem;/To copy Nature is to copy Them ’ ( EC, 139–40).

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 Criticks dare not mend; From vulgar Bounds with brave Disorder part, And snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art, Which, without passing thro’ the Judgment , gains The Heart, and all its End at once attains.

( EC, 152–7)

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 Critick’ 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, leavingPope to pray for ‘some Spark of your Coelestial Fire’ ( EC, 195) to inspire his own efforts (as ‘The last, the meanest of your Sons’, EC, 196) 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;

( EC, 233–6)

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 akind of poetry which is recognisable and accessible in its entirety:

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:

( EC, 296–300)

This is not to say that style alone will do, as Pope immediately makesplain (305–6): the music of poetry, the ornament of its ‘numbers’ or rhythm, is only worth having because ‘The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense ’ ( EC, 365). Pope performs and illustrates a series of poetic clichés – the use of open vowels, monosyllabic lines, and cheap rhymes:

Tho’ oft the Ear the open Vowels tire … ( EC , 345) And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line … ( EC , 347) Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze, In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the Trees … ( EC, 350–1)

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; But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore, The hoarse, rough Verse shou’d like the Torrent roar.

( EC, 366–9)

Again, this functions both as poetic instance and as critical test, working examples for both classes of writer.

After a long series of satiric vignettes of false critics, who merely parrot the popular opinion, or change their minds all the time, or flatter aristocratic versifiers, or criticise poets rather than poetry (384-473), Pope again switches attention to educated readers, encouraging (or cajoling)them towards staunchly independent and generous judgment within what is described as an increasingly fraught cultural context, threatened with decay and critical warfare (474–525). But, acknowledging that even‘Noble minds’ will have some ‘Dregs … of Spleen and sow’r Disdain’ ( EC ,526–7), Pope advises the critic to ‘Discharge that Rage on more ProvokingCrimes,/Nor fear a Dearth in these Flagitious Times’ (EC, 528–9): obscenity and blasphemy are unpardonable and offer a kind of lightning conductor for critics to purify their own wit against some demonised object of scorn.

If the first parts of An Essay on Criticism outline a positive classical past and troubled modern present, Part III seeks some sort of resolved position whereby the virtues of one age can be maintained during the squabbles of the other. The opening seeks to instill the correct behaviour in the critic –not merely rules for written criticism, but, so to speak, for enacted criticism, a sort of ‘ Good Breeding ’ (EC, 576) which politely enforces without seeming to enforce:

LEARN then what MORALS Criticks ought to show, For ’tis but half a Judge’s Task , to Know. ’Tis not enough, Taste, Judgment, Learning, join; In all you speak, let Truth and Candor shine … Be silent always when you doubt your Sense; And speak, tho’ sure , with seeming Diffidence …Men must be taught as if you taught them not; And Things unknown propos’d as Things forgot:

( EC , 560–3, 566–7, 574–5)

This ideally-poised man of social grace cannot be universally successful: some poets, as some critics, are incorrigible and it is part of Pope’s education of the poet-critic to leave them well alone. Synthesis, if that is being offered in this final part, does not consist of gathering all writers into one tidy fold but in a careful discrimination of true wit from irredeemable ‘dulness’ (584–630).

Thereafter, Pope has two things to say. One is to set a challenge to contemporary culture by asking ‘where’s the Man’ who can unite all necessary humane and intellectual qualifications for the critic ( EC, 631–42), and be a sort of walking oxymoron, ‘Modestly bold, and humanly severe’ 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: Aristotle’s 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 ‘the justest Rules, and clearest Method join’d’; Longinus is inspired by the Muses,who ‘bless their Critick with a Poet’s Fire’ ( EC, 676). 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 Pope’s model of an ecumenical humanist, reformed continental scholarship (693-696). Renaissance Italy shows a revival of arts, including criticism; France, ‘a Nation born to serve’ ( EC , 713) fossilised critical and poetic practice into unbending rules; Britain, on the other hand, ‘ Foreign Laws despis’d,/And kept unconquer’d, and unciviliz’d’ ( EC, 715–16) – 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) [13] before paying tribute to his own early critical mentor, William Walsh, who had died in 1708 [9]. 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 ‘poetic’ aspect becomes Pope himself, depicted as a mixture of moderated qualities which reminds us of the earlier ‘Where’s the man’ passage: he is quite possibly here,

Careless of Censure , nor too fond of Fame, Still pleas’d to praise, yet not afraid to blame, Averse alike to Flatter , or Offend, Not free from Faults, nor yet too vain to mend.

( EC , 741–44)

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 ‘Is himself that great Sublime he draws’ ( EC, 680). It is a poem profuse with images, comparisons and similes. Johnson thought the longest example,that simile comparing student’s progress in learning with a traveller’s journey in Alps was ‘perhaps the best that English poetry can shew’: ‘The simile of the Alps has no useless parts, yet affords a striking picture by itself: it makes the foregoing position better understood, and enables it to take faster hold on the attention; it assists the apprehension, and elevates the fancy’ (Johnson 1905: 229–30). Many of the abstract precepts aremade visible in this way: private judgment is like one’s reliance on one’s(slightly unreliable) watch (9– 10); wit and judgment are like man and wife(82–3); critics are like pharmacists trying to be doctors (108–11). Much ofthe imagery is military or political, indicating something of the social role(as legislator in the universal empire of poetry) the critic is expected toadopt; we are also reminded of the decay of empires, and the potentialdecay of cultures (there is something of The Dunciad in the poem). Muchof it is religious, as with the most famous phrases from the poem (‘For Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’; ‘To err is human, to forgive, divine’), indicating the level of seriousness which Pope accords the matterof poetry. Much of it is sexual: creativity is a kind of manliness, wooing Nature, or the Muse, to ‘generate’ poetic issue, and false criticism, likeobscenity, derives from a kind of inner ‘impotence’. Patterns of suchimagery can be harnessed to ‘organic’ readings of the poem’s wholeness. But part of the life of the poem, underlying its surface statements andmetaphors, is its continual shifts of focus, its reminders of that which liesoutside the tidying power of couplets, its continual reinvention of the ‘you’opposed to the ‘they’ of false criticism, its progressive displacement of theopposition you thought you were looking at with another one whichrequires your attention.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Atkins, G. Douglas (1986): Quests of Difference: Reading Pope’s Poems (Lexing-ton: Kentucky State University Press) Barnard, John, ed. (1973): Pope: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston:Routledge and Kegan Paul) Bateson, F.W. and Joukovsky, N.A., eds, (1971): Alexander Pope: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books) Brower, Reuben (1959): Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press) Brown, Laura (1985): Alexander Pope (Oxford: Basil Blackwell) Davis, Herbert ed. (1966): Pope: Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress Dixon, Peter, ed. (1972): Alexander Pope (London: G. Bell and Sons) Empson, William (1950): ‘Wit in the Essay on Criticism ’, Hudson Review, 2: 559–77 Erskine-Hill, Howard and Smith, Anne, eds (1979): The Art of Alexander Pope (London: Vision Press) Erskine-Hill, Howard (1982): ‘Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in his Time’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15: 123–148 Fairer, David (1984): Pope’s Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press) Fairer, David, ed. (1990): Pope: New Contexts (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf) Morris, David B. (1984): Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Nuttall, A.D. (1984): Pope’s ‘ Essay on Man’ (London: George Allen and Unwin) Rideout, Tania (1992): ‘The Reasoning Eye: Alexander Pope’s Typographic Vi-sion in the Essay on Man’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55:249–62 Rogers, Pat (1993a): Alexander Pope (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Rogers, Pat (1993b): Essay s on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Savage, Roger (1988) ‘Antiquity as Nature: Pope’s Fable of “Young Maro”’, in An Essay on Criticism, in Nicholson (1988), 83–116 Schmitz, R. M. (1962): Pope’s Essay on Criticism 1709: A Study of the BodleianMS Text, with Facsimiles, Transcripts and Variants (St Louis: Washington University Press) Warren, Austin (1929): Alexander Pope as Critic and Humanist (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press) Woodman, Thomas (1989): Politeness and Poetry in the Age of Pope (Rutherford,New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press)