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Imagery and Method in An Essay on Criticism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Abstract
The poetic method of Pope's An Essay on Criticism is to demonstrate how wit can operate, through imagery, as both controlling and creative power. The poem's imagery suggests the relatedness of all human endeavor, defines the special place of criticism, indicates standards of value. Images modify one another to achieve subtle effects, communicate complex and delicate judgments. The multiplicity of imagery is never random; it works by purposeful reinforcement. Even individual images supply poetic and philosophic density. Particularly important is the figure of the “good man” which emerges gradually through the poem, exemplifying a technique characteristic of much of Pope's poetry: the heightening of significant figures to emblematic proportions to exemplify the reality of key abstractions. The form as well as the content of Pope's imagery is important, with metaphors in general indicating more crucial connections than similes reveal. Pope, unlike such predecessors as Cowley, uses both metaphor and simile to convey a set of complicated paraphrasable ideas. He attempts to promulgate doctrine and to enjoin the proper feelings and beliefs about it. The Essay on Criticism indicates that metaphor can provide organization without comprising the sole substance of a poem.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970
References
1 Letter to Murray, March 1821; quoted in G. Wilson Knight, Laureate of Peace: On the Genius of Alexander Pope (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1955), p. 140.
2 Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (New York: Harcourt, Brace, n.d.), p. 134 [first publ. 1924].
3 Discussed by Aubrey Williams in his introduction to An Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope, Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, The Twickenham Ed. of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 'i“ (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), 212–218.
4 Its various meanings have been discussed by Williams (cited above) and by William Empson, “Wit in the Essay on Criticism,” The Structure of Complex Words (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1951), pp. 84–100, and E. N. Hooker, “Pope on Wit: The Essay on Criticism,” The Seventeenth Century . . . By Richard Foster Jones and Others Writing in His Honor (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1951), pp. 225–246.
5 Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer, ed. Maynard Mack, The Twickenham Ed. of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 'vii“, 'viii” (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1957), note to Iliad 'iii“, 7; 'vii”, 188.
6 Maynard Mack, in his introduction to Pope's Homer, points out the identification (Twickenham Ed., ‘vii“, xlvi–xlvii), as does Williams in his introduction to the Essay on Criticism (Twickenham Ed., ‘i”, 214).
7 Pope's Preface to the Iliad, Twickenham Ed., 'vii“, 9.
8 Jacob H. Adler, “Balance in Pope's Essays,” ES, 'xliii“ (1962), 438–439.
9 Twickenham Ed., 'i“, 224.
10 Donald Greene, ‘“Logical Structure’ in Eighteenth-Century Poetry,” PQ, 'xxxi“ (1952), 330.
11 The Augustans, ed. Maynard Mack (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961), pp. 22–23.
12 Discussed by Maynard Mack in The Auguslans and by William Bysshe Stein, “Pope's ‘An Essay on Criticism’: The Play of Sophia,” BR, 'xiii“ (1965), 73–86.
13 “‘First Follow Nature’ : Strategy and Stratification in An Essay on Criticism,” JEGP, 'iv“ (1956), 604–617.
14 The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Norton, 1958).
15 Richard Harter F ogle supports this point in connection with some of Pope's Coleridgean metaphors. See his “Metaphors of Organic Unity in Pope's Essay on Criticism” TSE, 'xiii“ (1963), 51–58.
16 Note to Iliad xiv, 457; Twickenham Ed., 'viii“, 186.
17 In Spectator 253, 20 Dec. 1711.
18 The Works of John Sheffield . . . Duke of Buckingham, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1729), 'i“, 128–129.
19 Rosemond Tuve, Elizabellian and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1947), p. 183.
20 The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland, The Twickenham Ed. of the Poems of Alexander Pope, v (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), 205–206.
21 Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 9.
22 Thomas R. Edwards, Jr., This Dark Estate: A Reading of Pope (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1963), p. 18.
23 Williams identifies a source for this idea in Quintilian. Twickenham Ed., 'i“, 231.
24 Note to Iliad v, 1054; Twickenham Ed., 'vii“, 317.
25 Structure of Complex Words, p. 84.
26 Letter to Wycherley, 10 April 1706; The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 'i“, 16.
27 Letter to Cromwell, 17 Dec. 1710; Correspondence, 'i“, 109–110.
28 Letter to Wycherley, 20 Nov. 1707; Correspondence, 'i“, 34.
29 Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, p. 61.