Today’s Poem: An Essay on Criticism

an excerpt from Alexander Pope

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sappho and Alcaeus, 1881 (Wikimedia Commons)

---

An Essay on Criticism (an excerpt from Part 2)

by Alexander Pope

These Equal Syllables alone require,
Tho’ oft the Ear the open Vowels tire,
While Expletives their feeble Aid do join,
And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line,
While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze,
In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the Trees;
If Chrystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep,
The Reader’s threaten’d (not in vain) with Sleep.
Then, at the last, and only Couplet fraught
With some unmeaning Thing they call a Thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the Song,
That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along.
Leave such to tune their own dull Rhimes, and know
What’s roundly smooth, or languishingly slow;
And praise the Easie Vigor of a Line . . .

True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance,
’Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence,
The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense.
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.
When Ajax strives, some Rocks’ vast Weight to throw,
The Line too labours, and the Words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the Plain,
Flies o’er th’unbending Corn, and skims along the Main.
Hear how Timotheus’ vary’d Lays surprize,
And bid Alternate Passions fall and rise!
═══════════════════════

The verse essay has fallen out of style so definitively that even the most recalcitrant of teachers won’t bother assigning to their students the classics of the genre. Lucretius thought poetry a sufficient vehicle for 7,400 lines of philosophy in De Rerum Natura (c. 50 B.C.), and any number of British writers at the end of the 17th century and beginning of the 18th century wrote argumentative pieces in poetic forms. There’s John Dryden’s 1682 Religio Laici, for example, and Daniel Defoe’s 1701 Jure Divino.

And then there are the two major verse essays of Alexander Pope (1688–1744): “An Essay on Criticism” (1711) and “An Essay on Man” (1733). We’ve only considered two of Pope’s poems here at Poems Ancient and Modern — his early “Ode on Solitude” and the not-entirely typical “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” — in part because he tended to write long, and shorter poems go down more easily in this daily newsletter format. But at some point, we’ll need to plate up his An Essay on Man — if only for those glittering lines “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan. / The proper study of Mankind is Man.” And today we thought we’d look at his earlier verse essay on criticism, asking why the young Pope, in one of his first major poems, would devote 744 lines to an extended argument about the nature of poetry.

Part of the answer is Horace’s Ars Poetica (c. 19 B.C.), the Latin verse epistles that form one of the classic works of literary theory. We forget the confidence, the arrogance, of Pope as a young man, at age 22 already assuming he was able to converse with — and correct — the greatest poets of the past. But part of the answer, too, is Pope’s sense of the sterility of poetry at the beginning of the 18th century. Dryden’s mastery of the heroic couplet had bequeathed to English verse a precise instrument, but it seemed to Pope to have been falsely taken as sufficient for poetic writing, as though all poetry needed was to be in rhymed pentameter couplets.

Michael Dahl’s c. 1727 portrait of Alexander Pope (Wikimedia Commons)

Pope still wants highly structured verse. But he points to Timotheus of Miletus (circa 446 B.C.–357 B.C.), who added an extra string to the ancient Greeks’ musical lyre. And Pope demands that, in poetry, “sound must seem an echo to the sense.” An Essay on Criticism contains such much-quoted lines as “To err is human; to forgive, divine,” “A little learning is a dang’rous thing” and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” But in its essence, the verse essay is a young poet’s proclaiming an Ars Poetica for his own time: a correction to all the poets around him.

And so Pope opens this portion of the essay with criticism of the techniques of other poets. He does mention “Denham’s Strength” and “Waller’s Sweetness,” concluding with praise for Dryden’s “Pow’rs of Musick.” But for the rest, his invective, as so often with Pope, is sharp-edged — as when he mocks “sure Returns of still expected Rhymes” and “some unmeaning Thing they call a Thought.”

Along the way, we get such extra-textual plays as the ten low words he uses to mock in “And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line,” along with the Alexandrine he uses to ridicule the use of concluding Alexandrines in “That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along.”

It all aims, however, at Pope’s insistence on the need for the unity of sound and sense: “True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, / As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.”

---

---