An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope (best ereader for pdf txt) 📕

always listening to himself appears

All books he reads and all he reads assails

From Dryden’s Fables down to Durfey’s Tales [617]

With him most authors steal their works or buy;

Garth did not write his own Dispensary [619]

Name a new play, and he’s the poets friend

Nay, showed his faults—but when would poets mend?

No place so sacred from such fops is barred,

Nor is Paul’s Church more safe than Paul’s Churchyard: [623]

Nay, fly to altars; there they’ll talk you dead,

For fools rush in where angels fear to tread

Distrustful sense with modest caution speaks,

It still looks home, and short excursions makes;

But rattling nonsense in full volleys breaks,

And, never shocked, and never turned aside.

Bursts out, resistless, with a thundering tide,

 

But where’s the man who counsel can bestow,

Still pleased to teach, and yet not proud to know?

Unbiased, or by favor, or in spite,

Not dully prepossessed, nor blindly right;

Though learned, well-bred, and though well bred, sincere,

Modestly bold, and humanly severe,

Who to a friend his faults can freely show,

And gladly praise the merit of a foe?

Blessed with a taste exact, yet unconfined;

A knowledge both of books and human kind;

Generous converse, a soul exempt from pride;

And love to praise, with reason on his side?

 

Such once were critics such the happy few,

Athens and Rome in better ages knew.

The mighty Stagirite first left the shore, [645]

Spread all his sails, and durst the deeps explore;

He steered securely, and discovered far,

Led by the light of the Maeonian star. [648]

Poets, a race long unconfined and free,

Still fond and proud of savage liberty,

Received his laws, and stood convinced ‘twas fit,

Who conquered nature, should preside o’er wit. [652]

 

Horace still charms with graceful negligence,

And without method talks us into sense;

Will like a friend familiarly convey

The truest notions in the easiest way.

He who supreme in judgment as in wit,

Might boldly censure, as he boldly writ,

Yet judged with coolness though he sung with fire;

His precepts teach but what his works inspire

Our critics take a contrary extreme

They judge with fury, but they write with phlegm:

Nor suffers Horace more in wrong translations

By wits than critics in as wrong quotations.

 

See Dionysius Homer’s thoughts refine, [665]

And call new beauties forth from every line!

 

Fancy and art in gay Petronius please, [667]

The scholar’s learning with the courtier’s ease.

 

In grave Quintilian’s copious work we find [669]

The justest rules and clearest method joined:

Thus useful arms in magazines we place,

All ranged in order, and disposed with grace,

But less to please the eye, than arm the hand,

Still fit for use, and ready at command.

 

Thee bold Longinus! all the Nine inspire, [675]

And bless their critic with a poet’s fire.

An ardent judge, who, zealous in his trust,

With warmth gives sentence, yet is always just:

Whose own example strengthens all his laws;

And is himself that great sublime he draws.

 

Thus long succeeding critics justly reigned,

License repressed, and useful laws ordained.

Learning and Rome alike in empire grew;

And arts still followed where her eagles flew,

From the same foes at last, both felt their doom,

And the same age saw learning fall, and Rome. [686]

With tyranny then superstition joined

As that the body, this enslaved the mind;

Much was believed but little understood,

And to be dull was construed to be good;

A second deluge learning thus o’errun,

And the monks finished what the Goths begun. [692]

 

At length Erasmus, that great injured name [693]

(The glory of the priesthood and the shame!)

Stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age,

And drove those holy Vandals off the stage. [696]

 

But see! each muse, in Leo’s golden days, [697]

Starts from her trance and trims her withered bays,

Rome’s ancient genius o’er its ruins spread

Shakes off the dust, and rears his reverent head

Then sculpture and her sister arts revive,

Stones leaped to form, and rocks began to live;

With sweeter notes each rising temple rung,

A Raphael painted, and a Vida sung [704]

Immortal Vida! on whose honored brow

The poets bays and critic’s ivy grow

Cremona now shall ever boast thy name

As next in place to Mantua, next in fame!

 

But soon by impious arms from Latium chased,

Their ancient bounds the banished muses passed.

Thence arts o’er all the northern world advance,

But critic-learning flourished most in France,

The rules a nation born to serve, obeys;

And Boileau still in right of Horace sways [714]

But we, brave Britons, foreign laws despised,

And kept unconquered and uncivilized,

Fierce for the liberties of wit and bold,

We still defied the Romans as of old.

Yet some there were, among the sounder few

Of those who less presumed and better knew,

Who durst assert the juster ancient cause,

And here restored wit’s fundamental laws.

Such was the muse, whose rule and practice tell

“Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.”

Such was Roscommon, not more learned than good,

With manners generous as his noble blood,

To him the wit of Greece and Rome was known,

And every author’s merit, but his own

Such late was Walsh—the muse’s judge and friend,

Who justly knew to blame or to commend,

To failings mild, but zealous for desert,

The clearest head, and the sincerest heart,

This humble praise, lamented shade! receive,

This praise at least a grateful muse may give.

The muse whose early voice you taught to sing

Prescribed her heights and pruned her tender wing,

(Her guide now lost) no more attempts to rise,

But in low numbers short excursions tries,

Content if hence the unlearned their wants may view,

The learned reflect on what before they knew

Careless of censure, nor too fond of fame,

Still pleased to praise, yet not afraid to blame,

Averse alike to flatter, or offend,

Not free from faults, nor yet too vain to mend.

 

*

 

LINE NOTES

 

[Line 17: Wit is used in the poem in a great variety of meanings (1) Here it seems to mean genius or fancy, (2) in line 36 a man of fancy, (3) in line 53 the understanding or powers of the mind, (4) in line 81 it means judgment.]

[Line 26: Schools—Different systems of doctrine or philosophy as taught by particular teachers.]

[Line 34: Maevius—An insignificant poet of the Augustan age, ridiculed by Virgil in his third Eclogue and by Horace in his tenth Epode.]

[Lines 80, 81: There is here a slight inaccuracy or inconsistency, since “wit” has a different meaning in the two lines: in 80, it means fancy, in 81, judgment.]

[Line 86: The winged courser.—Pegasus, a winged horse which sprang from the blood of Medusa when Perseus cut off her head. As soon as born he left the earth and flew up to heaven, or, according to Ovid, took up his abode on Mount Helicon, and was always associated with the Muses.]

[Line 94: Parnassus.—A mountain of Phocis, which received its name from Parnassus, the son of Neptune, and was sacred to the Muses, Apollo and Bacchus.]

[Line 97: Equal steps.—Steps equal to the undertaking.]

[Line 129: The Mantuan Muse—Virgil called Maro in the next line (his full name being, Virgilius Publius Maro) born near Mantua, 70 B.C.]

[Lines 130-136: It is said that Virgil first intended to write a poem on the Alban and Roman affairs which he found beyond his powers, and then he imitated Homer:

 

Cum canerem reges et proelia Cynthius aurem

Vellit—_Virg. Ecl. VI_]

[Line 138: The Stagirite—Aristotle, born at the Greek town of Stageira on the Strymonic Gulf (Gulf of Contessa, in Turkey) 384 B.C., whose treatises on Rhetoric and the Art of Poetry were the earliest development of a Philosophy of Criticism and still continue to be studied.

The poet contradicts himself with regard to the principle he is here laying down in lines 271-272 where he laughs at Dennis for

 

Concluding all were desperate sots and fools

Who durst depart from Aristotle’s rules.]

[Line 180: Homer nods—_Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus_, ‘even the good Homer nods’—Horace, Epistola ad Pisones, 359.]

[Lines 183, 184: Secure from flames.—The poet probably alludes to such fires as those in which the Alexandrine and Palatine Libraries were destroyed. From envy’s fiercer rage.—Probably he alludes to the writings of such men as Maevius (see note to line 34) and Zoilus, a sophist and grammarian of Amphipolis, who distinguished himself by his criticism on Isocrates, Plato, and Homer, receiving the nickname of Homeromastic (chastiser of Homer). Destructive war—Probably an allusion to the irruption of the barbarians into the south of Europe. And all-involving age; that is, time. This is usually explained as an allusion to ‘the long reign of ignorance and superstition in the cloisters,’ but it is surely far-fetched, and more than the language will bear.]

[Lines 193, 194:

 

‘Round the whole world this dreaded name shall sound,

And reach to worlds that must not yet be found,”—COWLEY.]

[Line 216: The Pierian spring—A fountain in Pieria, a district round Mount Olympus and the native country of the Muses.]

[Line 248: And even thine, O Rome.—The dome of St Peter’s Church, designed by Michael Angelo.]

[Line 267: La Mancha’s Knight.—Don Quixote, a fictitious Spanish knight, the hero of a book written (1605) by Cervantes, a Spanish writer.]

[Line 270: Dennis, the son of a saddler in London, born 1657, was a mediocre writer, and rather better critic of the time, with whom Pope came a good deal into collision. Addison’s tragedy of Cato, for which Pope had written a prologue, had been attacked by Dennis. Pope, to defend Addison, wrote an imaginary report, pretending to be written by a notorious quack mad-doctor of the day, entitled The Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris on the Frenz of F. D. Dennis replied to it by his Character of Mr. Pope. Ultimately Pope gave him a place in his Dunciad, and wrote a prologue for his benefit.]

[Line 308: On content.—On trust, a common use of the word in Pope’s time.]

[Lines 311, 312: Prismatic glass.—A glass prism by which light is refracted, and the component rays, which are of different colors being refracted at different angles show what is called a spectrum or series of colored bars, in the order violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.]

[Line 328: Fungoso—One of the characters in Ben Jonson’s Every Man out of his Humor who assumed the dress and tried to pass himself off for another.]

[Line 356: Alexandrine—A line of twelve syllables, so called from a French poem on the Life of Alexander the Great, written in that meter. The poet gives a remarkable example in the next line.]

[Line 361: Sir John Denham, a poet of the time of Charles I. (1615-1668). His verse is characterized by considerable smoothness and ingenuity of rhythm, with here and there a passage of some force—Edmund Waller (1606-1687) is celebrated as one of the refiners of English poetry. His rank among English poets, however, is very subordinate.]

[Line 366: Zephyr.—Zephyrus, the west wind personified by the poets and made the most mild and gentle of the sylvan deities.]

[Lines 366-373: In this passage the poet obviously intended to make “the sound seem an echo to the sense”. The success of the attempt has not been very complete except in the second two lines, expressing the dash and roar of the waves, and in the last two, expressing the skimming, continuous motion of Camilla. What he refers to is the onomatopoeia of Homer and Virgil in the passages alluded to. Ajax, the son of Telamon, was, next to Achilles, the bravest of all the Greeks in the Trojan