No More Learning

'137' Partridge:

an almanac maker of Pope's day who was given to prophesying future
events. Shortly before this poem was written Swift had issued a mock
almanac foretelling that Partridge would die on a certain day. When that
day came Swift got out a pamphlet giving a full account of Partridge's
death. In spite of the poor man's protests, Swift and his friends kept
on insisting that he was dead. He was still living, however, when Pope
wrote this poem. Why does Pope call him "th' egregious wizard"?


'138' Galileo's eyes:

the telescope, first used by the Italian astronomer Galileo.


'140' Louis XIV of France,

the great enemy of England at this time

'--Rome:'

here used to denote the Roman Catholic Church.


'143 the shining sphere:'

an allusion to the old notion that all the stars were set in one sphere
in the sky. Belinda's lost lock, now a star, is said to add a new light
to this sphere.


147 What are the "fair suns"?





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AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM


INTRODUCTION

The 'Essay on Criticism' was the first really important work that Pope
gave to the world. He had been composing verses from early boyhood, and
had actually published a set of 'Pastorals' which had attracted some
attention. He was already known to the literary set of London
coffeehouses as a young man of keen wit and high promise, but to the
reading public at large he was as yet an unknown quantity. With the
appearance of the 'Essay', Pope not only sprang at once into the full
light of publicity, but seized almost undisputed that position as the
first of living English poets which he was to retain unchallenged till
his death.
Even after his death down to the Romantic revival, in fact,
Pope's supremacy was an article of critical faith, and this supremacy
was in no small measure founded upon the acknowledged merits of the
'Essay on Criticism. ' Johnson, the last great representative of Pope's
own school of thought in matters literary, held that the poet had never
excelled this early work and gave it as his deliberate opinion that if
Pope had written nothing else, the 'Essay' would have placed him among
the first poets and the first critics. The 'Essay on Criticism' is
hardly an epoch-making poem, but it certainly "made" Alexander Pope.

The poem was published anonymously in the spring of 1711, when Pope was
twenty-three years old. There has been considerable dispute as to the
date of its composition; but the facts seem to be that it was begun in
1707 and finished in 1709 when Pope had it printed, not for publication,
but for purposes of further correction. As it stands, therefore, it
represents a work planned at the close of Pope's precocious youth, and
executed and polished in the first flush of his manhood. And it is quite
fair to say that considering the age of its author the 'Essay on
Criticism' is one of the most remarkable works in English.

Not that there is anything particularly original about the 'Essay. ' On
the contrary, it is one of the most conventional of all Pope's works. It
has nothing of the lively fancy of 'The Rape of the Lock', little or
nothing of the personal note which stamps the later satires and epistles
as so peculiarly Pope's own. Apart from its brilliant epigrammatic
expression the 'Essay on Criticism' might have been written by almost
any man of letters in Queen Anne's day who took the trouble to think a
little about the laws of literature, and who thought about those laws
strictly in accordance with the accepted conventions of his time. Pope
is not in the least to be blamed for this lack of originality. Profound
original criticism is perhaps the very last thing to be expected of a
brilliant boy, and Pope was little more when he planned this work. But
boy as he was, he had already accomplished an immense amount of
desultory reading, not only in literature proper, but in literary
criticism as well. He told Spence in later years that in his youth he
had gone through all the best critics, naming especially Quintilian,
Rapin, and Bossu. A mere cursory reading of the Essay shows that he had
also studied Horace, Vida, and Boileau.