An Essay on Criticism

Summary

An Essay on Criticism is a verse essay in heroic couplets that Alexander Pope published anonymously in 1711, when he was twenty-three. It sets out, in the manner of Horace's Art of Poetry and Boileau's L'Art poétique, the principles by which writers and readers should judge poems, and much of it has passed into proverb. Pope divides the poem into three parts. The first argues that good critics, like good poets, are rare, and that both must take their light from heaven and their rules from nature. The ancients, above all Homer, discovered nature's rules, and their works remain the best guides: to copy nature is to copy them. Rules are needed, yet a great writer may sometimes snatch a grace beyond the reach of art, and the critic must judge the whole work rather than hunting for faults in its parts. The second part, the longest, diagnoses the causes of bad criticism. Pride comes first, then a little learning, which Pope calls dangerous: drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring of the Muses. Critics err by judging by parts instead of the whole, by loving conceits and glittering wit, by admiring language for its own sake, by attending only to metre, and by following fashion, party or envy. In a famous passage Pope makes the sound of his own verse echo its sense, slowing for the labour of Ajax and racing with Camilla. He defines true wit as nature to advantage dressed, what was often thought but never so well expressed. The third part turns from intellect to character. A good critic must be honest, modest, courteous and generous; he should speak the truth with tact, remember that to err is human and to forgive divine, and avoid the rash folly of those who rush in where angels fear to tread. The poem ends with a short history of criticism from Aristotle and Horace through Quintilian, Longinus and the Renaissance to Pope's own day. For classical Christian students the essay is a primer in judgment: it teaches that taste can be trained, that humility and charity belong to good reading, and that rules serve a deeper order. It is also a model of the couplet, packing argument into memorable two-line units, and it pairs naturally with Horace's Ars Poetica, which Pope admired and imitated.

Top Lessons

• A little learning

  Pope warns that shallow knowledge makes people proud, while deeper study makes them humble. The lines apply to every subject.

• Judging the whole

  A good critic reads a work as a whole and does not hunt for small faults. Charity and fairness are part of good reading.

• To err is human

  Pope ends with the moral qualities of a critic: truth, modesty, courtesy and forgiveness.

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