Poem: An Essay on Criticism

Overview
Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (1711) is a didactic poem in heroic couplets that sets out a comprehensive code for literary judgment. Addressed as much to poets as to critics, it argues that sound criticism rests on good sense, humility, and a disciplined understanding of nature and classical precedent. Pope balances the claims of rule and genius, urging a middle path between pedantry and caprice. The poem also registers a social ethic: good breeding and good nature should temper severity, and the critic’s role is to refine taste without stifling creativity.

Structure and Argument
The poem moves in three broad parts. First, Pope defines criticism’s proper object: to discern the universal principles of art, grounded in nature and codified by the ancients. He insists that judgment must guide wit, because invention without measure descends into license, while rule without spirit hardens into lifeless correctness. The best critics read with the same spirit the author wrote, considering design, proportion, and decorum rather than snatching at isolated faults.

The central section diagnoses sources of bad judgment. Pride is chief among them: partial knowledge, factional spirit, and the hunger to shine produce dogmatism. A little learning is a dangerous thing; true knowledge demands depth, patience, and historical range. Critics are misled by fashion, by the glitter of novelty, by slavish adherence to petty rules, or by the seductions of sound over sense. Pope likens poetry to music: numbers should please, but the sound must seem an echo to the sense, and technical elegance must serve expression.

The final part sketches the character of an ideal critic and the manners of fair censure. Such a judge is modest, candid, and steady; he tests his impressions, checks his biases, and seeks the author’s aim before passing sentence. He reveres Aristotle, Horace, and Quintilian not as tyrants of taste but as interpreters of nature. He praises warmly, corrects gently, and remembers that to err is human. A generous spirit, not a spiteful wit, sustains the republic of letters.

Nature, Rules, and True Taste
Pope’s central reconciliation is between art and nature. By nature he means not raw impulse but the permanent forms discerned in the best works and clarified by classical criticism. True wit is nature to advantage dressed: it discovers what was often thought, but expresses it with luminous propriety. Rules are therefore aids to seeing, not substitutes for judgment. They trace the grain of nature, helping both poet and reader avoid excess, maintain proportion, and secure unity of design.

Faults Pope Rebukes
He satirizes the pedant who worships trivial rules, the flashy wit who mistakes novelty for merit, the zealot who reads by party, and the ear that judges only by jingle. He warns against extremes: servile imitation of the ancients or reckless contempt for them; blind admiration that sees no fault, or peevish severity that finds none right. No piece is faultless, and to demand perfection is to misunderstand art’s mixed nature.

Ethos and Legacy
Pope closes by honoring masters of criticism and taste, urging a culture where writers and judges labor toward correctness enlivened by fire. The poem’s maxims, drink deep of learning, let judgment lead wit, make sound echo sense, let good nature rule debate, formed a durable creed for Augustan poetics. Its enduring lesson is a moral one: criticism is a branch of good sense practiced with charity, and the best verdicts join clarity with kindness.