Alexander Pope - Essay On Man Flashcards
1
Q
Alexander Pope - Essay On Man
Context
A
- Heroic couplets
- Addressed to Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke
- The “Letter to an Eminent Man” form:
- The form brings the writer & speaker together in a closed circle, thereby ‘authorizing’ his views
- The form also implies that its readers are, like the author & addressee, disinterested landed gentlemen who share the same views (i.e., civic humanism)
2
Q
Alexander Pope - Essay On Man
Civic humanism
A
- Full citizenship is tied to the ownership of property
- Property-owners have a stake in the future of the country; their status as land-owners ensures their commitment to the nation
- Therefore, only property-owners should have a say on political matters because only they are capable of disinterestedness
- Their individual interests & those of the nation are (theoretically) identical, inseparable
- All others (i.e., those with mobile property, the monied classes) potentially have separate interests or can abandon the nation in times of war, distress
- These disinterested landowners are Pope’s assumed audience and his self-chosen peers
3
Q
One of the two interlocking ideas that underwrite Pope’s poem:
Concordia discors
Alexander Pope - Essay On Man
A
- “Discordant harmony” or “harmonious discord”
- There is (divine) order amongst the (seeming) chaos (“Where order in variety we see, / And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree”)
- All things happen for a reason, are part of a broader plan we can’t see or understand.
- A recipe for quietism, for submission
- Poverty, abuse, corruption, social inequality = all can be configured as ‘partial evils’ that are part of the ‘larger good’
- Also configures attempts to address those** ‘partial evils’ as ignorant, impious**
4
Q
One of the two interlocking ideas that underwrite Pope’s poem:
The Great Chain of Being
Alexander Pope - Essay On Man
A
- Each living being (species), known or unknown, forms one ‘link’ of God’s great chain of existence
- Each ‘link’ is a step above or below the other, different in some essential way
- That difference is crucial; the chain is hierarchical; for one creature to pursue the ‘higher’ status of the one above is to destabilize the whole
5
Q
Alexander Pope - Essay On Man
What is Pope’s poem pushing back against the pressures & changes of his historical moment?
A
- The rise of the monied classes
- Money’s displacement of property
- Merit’s displacement of birth
- The opening up of the literary market
- The rise of social ambition, social mobility
- The reconfiguration of the self as a site of ‘becoming’ (Locke’s influence)
6
Q
Alexander Pope - Essay On Man
Pope’s system is grounded, he claims, in an empirical framework.
A
- We can ‘reason upwards’ from sensory data to infer this order he describes
- His theodicy is not a matter of faith or revelation, but rather induction
- Reasoning ‘upwards,’ from particular cases to general laws
- As opposed to deduction, reasoning ‘downwards,’ from a general theory/hypothesis to a particular case
7
Q
Alexander Pope - Essay On Man
The argument or ‘charge’ against the “dunces” (the moderns, the Whigs, the proponents of false learning).
A
- Rely on a theory or hypothesis instead of sensory data & reflections thereon
- Reason ‘downwards’
- Take a homocentric view of the world, losing sight of the ‘whole’
- Can see only ‘parts,’ to the exclusion of the ‘whole’; get lost in the minutiae
8
Q
Alexander Pope - Essay On Man
Note the coincidence of form & meaning in Pope’s poetry:
A
- Assumes there is a broader order out there we can infer
- Poetry doesn’t just reveal that order, but helps to sustain it—this is its public function; the order of language reflects the order of the cosmos
- Hence Pope’s use of heroic couplets, zeugma, & chiasmus; all reflections of an orderly cosmos
- What the poet ideally does with language (creating unity out of disparate parts, putting differing parts into a larger whole) reflects his sense of how the broader order of nature (God) functions
