Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Terms to Know:
- mock epic (1303)
- heroic couplet (1304)
- trochee (1304)
- spondee (1304)
- heroicomical poem (1305)
"An Essay on Man" (1733)
Things to Consider:
- Relationship between God and
Human
- Connections to previous
works: Faustus and Gulliver's Travels
Discussion Questions:
1326:
- What
was Pope the first English writer to do?
1342:
- How,
according to the editors, does "Essay on Man"
compare with Paradise
Lost?
1342-49:
- What is
the essential argument of Epistle 1?
1343:
- Explain: "Say first, of God
above, or man below/What can we reason, but from what we
know?" (1.18-19).
- Explain: "Is the great chain,
that draws all to agree,/And drawn supports, upheld by God, or
thee?" (1.33-34).
- Explain: "Respecting man,
whatever wrong we call,/May, must be right, as relative to
all" (1.51-52).
1344:
- Explain: "Hope springs
eternal in the human breast:/Man never is, but always to be
blest" (1.95-96).
1347:
- Explain: "Who finds not
Providence all good and wise,/Alike in what it gives, and what
denies?" (1.205-6).
1349:
- Summarize
Stanza 10.
- Summarize
the excerpt from Epistle 2 ("Know then thyself, presume not
God to scan," etc.)
Other Discussion Questions:
1303:
- What is the significance of
the Martin the Scribbler club?
1304:
- What problems,
according to the editors, did Pope
have with "the new commercial spirit of the nation" (1304)?
- What, according to the
editors, is the traditional focus of satirists?
- Describe the persona that
Pope develops in his poems.
1305:
- Explain Pope's belief that
"the different kinds of literature have their different and
appropriate styles" (1305).
1342-43:
- What purpose does Pope
present in the first stanza of "Essay on Man"?
1344:
- Explain: "’Tis but a part we
see, and not a whole" (1.60).
- Explain the reference to the
ox in 1.63-64.
- Explain lines 1.69-74.
- Explain the reference to the
lamb in 81-84.
1345:
- Explain the reference to the
Indian in 1.99-112.
- Explain lines 1.127-30.
1346:
1348:
- Explain: "[W]hat no eye can
see,/No glass can reach! from Infinite to thee,/From thee to
nothing" (1.239-41).
- Explain: "From Nature’s chain
whatever link you strike,/Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the
chain alike" (1.245-46).
