Exploring Alexander Pope's Biography and His 'Essay on Man'
The English poet and satirist Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the greatest poet and verse satirist of the Augustan period. No distinctive poet in the records of English literature has handled the heroic couplet with equal flexibility and brilliance. In this paper we will explore Alexander Pope's “Essay on man” which is available in pdf format for reading via Internet sources.
Alexander Pope inherited from John Dryden the verse from that he chose to perfect. He polished his work with meticulous care and, like all exquisite poets, used language with true inventiveness. His traits of creativeness are seen in the originality with which he dealt with ordinary forms, in his satiric creative and prescient of the current world, and in his inspired use of classical models.After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 his household moved out of and settled about 1700 at Binfield in Windsor Forest. Pope had little formal schooling, commonly instructing himself through vast reading. Sir William Trumbull, a retired statesman of literary pastimes who lived nearby, did a exceptional deal to motivate the younger poet. So did the dramatist and poet William Wycherley and the poet-critic William Walsh, with whom Pope grew to come to be acquainted when he used to be about 17 and whose advice to motive at 'correctness' contributed to the flawless texture and targeted brilliance of Pope's verse. A sweet-tempered toddler with a fresh, plump face, Pope reduced in size a tubercular infection in his later childhood and in no way grew taller than 4 toes 6 inches. He suffered curvature of the backbone (necessitating the carrying of a stiff canvas brace) and steady headaches. His features, however, were striking, and the young Joshua Reynolds noticed in his “sharp, keen countenance some thing grand, like Cicero's”. His bodily appearance, regularly ridiculed with the useful resource of his enemies, without doubt gave an place to Pope's satire; however he used to be constantly warmhearted and beneficiant in his affection for his many friends. Pope used to be as soon as born into a Catholic household in. His father, in addition named Alexander, used to be as quickly as a lucrative linen merchant, and his mother, Edith, used to be from a core classification family. Pope's early existence coincided with most important upheaval in; the same 12 months he used to be as quickly as as quickly as born, William and Mary deposed James II in the Glorious Revolution. Because of the intense restrictions on the public lives of Catholics, Pope was skilled at Catholic faculties in that had been technically illegal, then again quietly tolerated.
When Pope used to be twelve, his family moved away from to a village in Berkshire, due to jail pointers forbidding Catholics to stay inner ten miles of and a corresponding wave of anti-Catholic sentiment and action. Pope used to be as soon as once unable to proceed his formal training whilst residing in the countryside, on the other hand as an preference taught himself with the aid of inspecting texts with the resource of classical authors and poetry in a huge range of languages. Pope's fitness moreover in a similar trend remoted him; he suffered from a structure of spinal tuberculosis at the age of twelve that stunted his increase and left him with a hunchback, persistent pain, and respiratory problems.Despite these struggles, Pope was once as soon as as soon as delivered to the literary organization as a younger man, commonly thanks to the mentorship of the poet John Carell, who took Pope below his wing. William Walsh, a lesser-known poet, helped Pope revise his first foremost work, The Pastorals, and the Blunt sisters, Teresa and Martha, grew to be lifelong friends.
When Pope published his first work, The Pastorals, in 1709, it met with almost immediate acclaim. Two years later he published An Essay on Criticism, which contains some of the earliest famous quotes from Pope's writings ('To irritate is human, to forget godly' and “Fools rush in”) and was also very well received. Around this time, Pope befriended a group of contemporary writers: Jonathan Swift, Thomas Parnell, and John Arbuthnot.The authors founded a satirical quartet called the Scriblerus Club, which with the figure of 'Martinus Scriblerus' took equal action against ignorance and pedantry.In 1712, Pope's sharp satirical tongue turned to a real-life scandal in high society with his most famous poem, The Rape of the Lock. The scandal revolved around an aristocrat cutting off a strand of hair from a beautiful woman without her permission, and Pope's poem satirized both high society and consumerism and its relationship to human agency. During the period of trouble after the death of Queen Anne in 1714 and the Jacobite rising in 1715, Pope remained publicly neutral, despite his Catholic upbringing.During this time he also worked on a translation of Homer's Iliad. For a number of years he lived at his parents' house in Chiswick, but in 1719 the profit from his translation of Homer enabled him to buy his own house, a villa at Twickenham.The villa, later known simply as 'the Pope's villa', became a quiet place for Pope, where he created a garden and a grotto.The grotto still stands, although much of the rest of the villa has been destroyed or rebuilt. career as a satirist.
As Pope's career progressed, his satirical writings became increasingly poignant.The Dunciad, first published anonymously in 1728, was supposed to be considered a masterful poem, but it earned him a lot of hostility.The poem is a mock-heroic narrative that celebrates an imaginary goddess and her human agents who bring about Britain's downfall.The allusions in the poem were aimed at many prominent and aristocratic figures of the day, as well as the Whi-led government.Pope's satire earned him so many enemies that for a time whenever he left the house he carried his Great Dane and pistols with him in case of a surprise attack by one of his targets or their supporters. In contrast, his An Essay on Man was more philosophical, reflecting on the natural order of the universe and suggesting that even the imperfections in the world are part of a rational order. An Essay on Man differs from many of Pope's works in its optimism.It argues that life functions according to a divine and rational order, even when things seem confusing from the eye of the storm, so to speak. However, he returned to his satirical roots with 'Imitations of Horace,' a satire on what Pope saw as corruption and poor cultural taste during the reign of George II.
General Notions About His Essays
Essays are a collection of four outstanding poems by Alexander Pope. Written as letters to various people, the poems comment on four key themes of social morality - the character of men, the character of women, the use of wealth, and the virtue of taste. In each poem, Pope describes the importance of understanding the ruling passion, a concept he first explored in his magnificent poem An Essay on Man. Pope now began to think about a new work on the relationships between man, nature and society - a magnificent organization of human experience and intuition, but he was destined never to complete it. An Essay on Man was intended as an introductory book discussing the overall structure of this work. The poem has often been accused of superficiality and philosophical contradictions, and indeed there is little originality in its thinking, almost all of which can be traced in the works of the great thinkers of Western civilization. Subtopics were found in Of the Use of Riches, an Epistle to Bathurst, An Epistle toCobham, of the Knowledge and Characters of Men, and Of the Characters of Women: A Letter to a Lady. Pope was distracted from this 'horatic system of ethics' by a renewed need for self-defense.Critical attacks caused him to reconsider his position as a satirist. He decided to adapt, in his own defense, the first satire of Horace's second book, which sets out the ethics of satire, and after raising the question in correspondence with Dr. John Arbuthnot had discussed, he addressed a letter in verse to him.: one of the best of his later poems, containing fragments written over several years.His case in “A Letter to Dr. Arbuthnot” was a traditional one: this depravity of public morals had led him to stigmatize outstanding offenders outside the reach of the law, hiding the names of some and portraying others as types, and at that. He was innocent of personal grudges and usually lenient with attacks. Pope's favorite meter was the 10-syllable iambic pentameter-rhyming couplet. He handled it with increasing skill, adapting it for purposes as diverse as the epigrammatic summary of An Essay on Criticism, the pathos of Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, the mock heroism of The Rape of the Lock, the discursive tones of An essay on man, the rapid narration of the Homer translation, and the Milton grandeur at the end of The Dunciad. But his greatest triumphs of verse are found in the Epilogue to the Satires, where he moves effortlessly from witty to spirited dialogue to noble and lofty declamations, and in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot' which opens with a fitting domestic scene Irritation in broken rhythm.
Alexander Pope's poem named “Essay on Man”
The Essay on Man is a philosophical poem, written in heroic couplets and posted between 1732 and 1734. Pope supposed this poem to be the centrepiece of a proposed computing device of ethics that was as soon as to be put forth in poetic form. It was as soon as a piece of work that Pope intended to make into a giant work; however, he did now not continue to be to complete it. The poem is an attempt to “vindicate the strategies of God to Man”, a model on Milton's attempt in Paradise Lost to “justify the procedures of God to Man”. It challenges as prideful an anthropocentric world-view. The poem is no longer honestly Christian; however, it makes an assumption that man has fallen and have to are looking for his private salvation.It consists of 4 epistles that are addressed to Lord Bolingbroke. Pope affords an questioning on his view on the Universe; he says that no count number range how imperfect, complex, inscrutable and hectic the Universe appears to be, it features in a rational vogue in accordance to the natural laws.
The natural laws think about the Universe as a whole a best work of God. To people it appears to be evil and imperfect in many ways; however, Pope elements out that this is due to our confined frame of mind and limited mental capacity. Pope receives the message across that humans ought to be given their position in the “Great Chain of Being” which is at a middle stage between the angels and the beasts of the world. If we are capable to accomplish this then we doubtlessly can also additionally prefer to lead without a doubt thrilled and virtuous lives.
The poem is an affirmative poem of faith: life appears to be chaotic and difficult to man when he is in the core of it, on the different hand in accordance to Pope it is surely divinely ordered. In Pope's world, God exists and is what he centres the Universe spherical in order to have an ordered structure. The restrained Genius of man can totally take in tiny parts of this order and can ride completely partial truths, in outcome man depend on hope which then leads into faith. Man need to be aware of his existence in the Universe and what he brings to it, in phrases of riches, electrical energy and fame. It is man's accountability to attempt to be god regardless of other situations: this is the message Pope is making an strive to get throughout to the reader
Alexander Pope's writing style and main ideas of “Essay on Man”
Pope is known for his interesting style of writing, using heroic couplets at a time when they were not widelyused, and for using satire to criticize the society in which he lived, which he did not fully accept. Pope wrote most of his poetry in heroic couplets, which was a fairly new poetic form at the time.His metric skills made him famous and enabled Pope to join a wider circle of authors in.Pope also enjoyed writing satirical works and writing mock epics.These poems evoke heroism and incorporate sylphs and other Romance themes that were successful in their attempt to perpetuate high society in 18th-century.Pope's poetry has often been misunderstood as supporting what he was criticizing.In his earlier poems, such as An Essay on Criticism, Pope used the heroic couplet.A heroic couplet is a poetic form in which two lines written in iambic pentameter end in perfect.
Pope denied that he was indebted to Leibnitz for the ideas that inform his poem, and his word may be accepted. Those ideas were first set forth in by Anthony Ashley Cowper, Earl of Shaftesbury. They pervade all his works but especially the “Moralist”. Indeed, several lines in the “Essay on Man”, particularly in the first Epistle, are simply statements from the “Moralist” done in verse. Although the question is unsettled and probably will remain so, it is generally believed that Pope was indoctrinated by having read the letters that were prepared for him by Bolingbroke and that provided an exegesis of Shaftesbury's philosophy. The main tenet of this system of natural theology was that one God, all-wise and all-merciful, governed the world providentially for the best. Most important for Shaftesbury was the principle of Harmony and Balance, which he based not on reason but on the general ground of good taste. Believing that God's most characteristic attribute was benevolence, Shaftesbury provided an emphatic endorsement of providentialism. Following are the major ideas in “Essay on Man”:
- a God of infinite wisdom exists;
- He created a world that is the best of all possible ones;
- The plenum, or all-embracing whole of the universe, is real and hierarchical;
- Authentic good is that of the whole, not of isolated parts;
- Self-love and social love both motivate humans' conduct;
- Virtue is attainable;
- “One truth is clear, whatever is right”.
Partial evil, according to Pope, contributes to the universal good. 'God sends not ill, if rightly understood.' According to this principle, vices, themselves to be deplored, may lead to virtues. For example, motivated by envy, a person may develop courage and wish to emulate the accomplishments of another; and the avaricious person may attain the virtue of prudence. One can easily understand why, from the beginning, many felt that Pope had depended on Leibnitz.
By reading the poem “Essay on man” I understand that the main idea of the poem is that the universe has an order to it created by God. All the creatures of God put on the earth for a purpose. Man may not always understand see the orders by God because only God truly understands it.
