Pope's contempt

Today I am delighted to bring you a guest post from Cooper. Jane is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where she is writing a PhD thesis, working on the pre-Burkean sublime with an interest in the poetry of Abraham Cowley. Here she is on Twitter. I can also tell you that Jane is a splendid conversationalist about all matters literary.

There have previously been guest posts from the academics Anna McCullough, Brad Skow, and Edward McLaren.

Alexander Pope’s best-known poem is An Essay on Man (1733), a four-part epistle to the great Tory philosopher Bolingbroke, written in unremitting heroic couplets. Though many will admire his magisterial mock-heroics The Rape of the Lock (1714) and The Dunciad (1727), the latter, as John Mullan said, might be the greatest unread poem in the language. An Essay on Man is still (unconsciously) quoted in a way the others are not.

An Essay on Man is a defence of the thesis that the known world is the best possible of all worlds, a theodicy expounded by Gottfried Leibniz in his 1710 Essais de Théodicée. Pope sought to “vindicate the ways of God to man”, alluding to Milton’s famous claim to “justify the ways of God to man” in Paradise Lost. Pope’s composition is stunning. But in spite of its metrical integrity and aphoristic self-assurance, An Essay on Man buckles under its own philosophical ambition. In the words of Dr Johnson: “Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised”. Voltaire’s dismissal of the poem was equally scathing: ‘““All is well” — absurd thesis that Pope and Leibniz maintain”.

How can we read the following, taken from the poem’s first epistle, without sympathising with this criticism?

Cease, then, nor order imperfection name:
Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.
Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee.
Submit. In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing Power,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

Maynard Mack ...