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Economic and social literary criticism.

This essay offers suggestions for how material on the Great Writers Inspire site can be used as a starting point for exploration of or classroom discussion about economic and social criticism. Questions for reflection or discussion are highlighted in the text. Links in the text point to resources in the Great Writers Inspire site. The resources can also be found via the 'Economic and social criticism' start page . Further material can be found via our Library and via the various authors and theme pages.

We have chosen to combine the approaches sections on economic and social criticism because of many scholars' belief that the two are inextricable: it is the financial framework - who has and has not - that defines the structure of our society and the opportunities of the people it contains. Certainly many of the social critiques of literature are critiques of the ill or unjust treatment of those less affluent or well positioned.

The most common form of economic criticism of literature is Marxist literary criticism . Literary critic Terry Eagleton describes Marxist criticism as "not merely a 'sociology of literature', concerned with how novels get published and whether they mention the working class. Its aim is to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and meanings. But it also means grasping those forms, styles and meanings as the product of a particular history." Marxist criticism tries to determine the class constructs of a piece of literature, decide whether or not it is socially progressive, and assess the politics of the work.

Karl Marx and Frederich Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, followed by Das Kaptial in 1867. In essence, Marxist literary theory suggests that all literature is a product of the class and financial conditions in which it was created. In the early 20th century, the Soviet Union declared the ideal art to be 'socialist realism', or art that positively depicts the struggle toward socialist progress.

Yale Professor Paul Fry on Marxist Literary Theory

• In Fry's lecture on Feminist Theory , from 9:20-15:10 Fry discusses a commonly postulated theory that all novels, in their essence, deal with Marxist issues at their core.
• In the first twenty minutes of Fry's podcast on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory , Fry offers a convenient introduction to the ideology of Marx and Engels, and the ways in which Marxist criticism can present itself in literature.

An understanding of the economic and societal pressures affecting authors can provide a point of reference for comparative papers, as well as offering students a wider awareness of the contexts in which the texts were written. Many of the writers highlighted on the Great Writers Inspire website were writing to live, so it is helpful to bear in mind that these authors wrote with consideration for their need for the popular and financial success of their works.

Early Modern Theatre

Watch University of Virginia's Professor Paul A. Cantor lecture on the Commerce and Culture of Shakespeare's Theatre . It is easy to be caught up in the richness of Shakespeare's poetry and forget that he and his contemporaries’ plays were written for performance, and most importantly, written to sell tickets. How does it affect your view of Shakespeare's narrative poems, The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis , knowing they were likely written during the period of plague when the theatres were closed, and Shakespeare was dependent on the financial support of patrons?

Take a look at the dedications to see how Shakespeare uses the poems to ask for the support of a patron. What about the fact that they were by far his greatest financial and popular successes? How do his plays exploit the popularity of these poems?

Read Dr. Emma Smith's essay on Renaissance Theatre , which discusses the popularity of the Renaissance Theatres as an institution for entertainment and the religious and political pressures working against the theatres.

Read the essay on Ben Jonson and take a look at Jonson's works

How did Jonson position himself as a popular author? How do his works court the favour of the court and wealthy patrons?

Listen to Dr. Emma Smith's podcast on Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday .

How does the comedy, by virtue of being an antidote to contemporary financial and social problems, reflects on those concerns and on class distinction within the play?

Read the works of Christopher Marlowe , an author who was born poor, attended school through scholarships, and rose and fell quickly from political grace. In his poem Hero and Leander , Marlowe goes on a lengthy tangent about the myth of why scholars are doomed to be forever poor. In The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus , among Faustus' list of what he will do with the demonic powers he intends to claim, he says, "I'll have them fill the public schools with silk,/ Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad." The only real opportunity for the financial advancement of a poor student at that time was a place in the church.

How did Christopher Marlowe balk these expectations in his own life?

18th Century Fiction

Our High and Low Culture Section , including Dr. Abigail Williams' introductory essay , discusses the financial and social concerns motivating the 18th century obsession with the distinction between high and low culture, the rise of the literary marketplace, the Grub Street writers, the professional woman writer, and the deterioration of the elite culture of literary patronage.

Our Labouring-Class Writing Section offers an introductory essay by Dr. Jennifer Batt that describes the challenges faced by the financially impaired labouring-class writers of the 18th century.

Dr. Jennifer Batt's podcast and essay on Mary Leapor discusses the 18th century household servant and poet. Leapor addressed and made use of her lower-class background in her poetry.

In Batt's podcast on Stephen Duck , she discusses how Duck offers a glimpse at the reality of the life of a rural labourer, and of the opportunities allowed Duck by the impression his poetry made on Queen Caroline. The podcast also discusses the transformation of his poetry with his rise through the social ranks.

In Dr. Abigail Williams' adapted lecture Aphra Behn and the Poetic Culture , Williams discusses Behn's attempts to break through the class and gender barriers she faced by establishing herself in the male poetic tradition, while trying to balance her desire for social standing with her need for her writing to bring her financial success, since she was the first English woman to live by her pen.

Victorian Fiction

Examine the works of Jane Austen not just as romances, but also as critical social satires revealing class conflict, social rules, and the problems with England's legal laws of inheritance. The latter half of the essay The Anonymous Jane Austen discusses the financial difficulty of the Austen women after the death of Mr. Austen and Jane's struggles with commercial publication.

Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre also deals intimately with the precarious financial position of a woman alone in the world, and of the vulnerabilities of a governess without the protection of wealth, social standing, or family. The essay Charlotte Brontë: A Wish for Wings discusses Brontë's systematic exploration of social ills in her writing.

Charles Dickens arguably provides the richest fodder of Victorian writers for exploration of economic and class issues. Dr. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's podcast Why Dickens? discusses how Dickens' own impoverished background and fear of financial hardship imbues his plots, characters, and writing style.

Gresham College lecture Dickens’s law makers and law breakers: Barnard's Inn and Beyond discusses how Dickens' legal background and his proximity to London's slums and criminals influenced the settings and characters of his novels.

How does it affect your analysis of Charles Dickens' writing style to know that he was paid by the word? What about the fact that novels like Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities were serialised for publications, necessitating cliffhangers that would compel readers to purchase the next issue?

On a note that is more related to social than economic criticism, take a look at Oscar Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol , the poem he wrote after he was released from prison. The poem addresses the ill treatment of prisoners in the English penal system. The poem may surprise readers used to Wilde's more light-hearted comedies. Yet once you have read the poem, take another look at his comedies.

Where does Wilde critique, albeit humourously or subtly, his contemporary social structure and the treatment of the lower classes or those on the fringes of society? Consider, for example, the treatment of Mrs. Erlynne in Lady Windermere's Fan .

Modernist Fiction

In Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own , Woolf discusses not just the disadvantages faced by female writers, but the necessity of economic security to produce truly great writing, uninfluenced by market forces. Woolf postulates one must be able to afford a room of one's own before one can become a great writer.

Do you agree with Virginia Woolf? To what extent are great writers dependent on their works' financial success? Can a novel be examined properly without regard to the economic circumstances of its writer?

If reusing this resource please attribute as follows: Economic and Social Literary Criticism at http://writersinspire.org/content/economic-social-literary-criticism by Kate O'Connor, licensed as Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (2.0 UK).

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What is Sociological Criticism?

WHAT IS SOCIOLOGICAL CRITICISM? Before I begin this review in earnest, I want to clarify my terminology. Instead of referring to "sociological" criticism, I will discuss "social-scientific" criticism. I have three reasons for this decision. First, all the contributors to this week's primary textbook use models from the social sciences and refer to their enterprise as "social-scientific criticism." 1 Secondly, the label "sociological" causes confusion, especially between North American and European contexts. 2 Finally, lest one should think that the loss of the term "sociological" necessitates the abdication of social-historical research, scholars widely understand the practice of "social-scientific criticism" to encompass both the social-historical study of the biblical world and the application of modern social-scientific models to the text. 3 So, then, what is social-scientific criticism? On the one hand, no simple definition exists, for scholars speak of plural criticisms. 4 On the other hand, and through a unique combination of social-historical and social-scientific research (as briefly discussed above), it is quite simply "a method resulting from a merger of exegesis and historical research with the research, theory and methods of the social sciences." 5 In other words, social-scientific (or sociological) criticism attempts to fill various gaps in historical-critical methods (i.e., those that are merely descriptive in nature) by "using social theory to analyze the dynamics of the Roman-Hellenistic world in general and its religious movements in particular." 6 Moreover, through rich description and this kind of social analysis, the practitioners of social-scientific criticism (like other exegetes) seek to comprehend authorial intention and the initial audience's understanding of the biblical text. 7 Unlike other sundry exegetes, however, scholars who employ social-scientific criticism to interpret Scripture assume that present-day insights from the social sciences regarding institutions (e.g., kinship and patron/client models), cultures (e.g., purity and honor/shame models), and human personalities (modal versus individualistic models) can legitimately illumine the biblical text. 8 Corresponding to this assumption, proponents of this method presume that the employment of these models is required to prevent ethnocentric and anachronistic readings. 9

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John Elliott

Dwight van Kan

Since the 1970 the use of the social science has played an increasingly prominent role in the New Testament studies. Of course, the application of a sociological perspective to the New Testament is not a new idea, but it is currently undergoing something of a revival. Early efforts concentrated on applying specific sociological theories to biblical studies, but more recent research has drawn from a wider range of social scientific disciplines and sub-disciplines including anthropology, peasant studies, political science, economics and Mediterranean sociology, 1 also more explicit sociological concepts such as, 'sect', 'millenarian', 'cult', 'class', 'role', and 'charismatic authority' .2 Assessing this movement this paper introduces some of the recent discussion in this area and gives an account of sources of literatures that have raised interests in this field. To do this, this paper traces its needs and historical development in the ...

HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies

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This essay falls into three parts, the first of which deals with the major shifts or switches that have occurred in the history of biblical hermeneutics. While the most recent shift is away from the diachronic historical method as the touchstone of criticism, its usefulness in partnership with synchronic methods like sociological exegesis is widely recognised. It is this method which we will discuss in the second part. In the third part, our attention will be focused on the sociological approach, which is a more than useful complement to historical criticism.

Wagner Floriani

"Literary Theory," in The Encyclopedia of Biblical Reception, de Gruyter, pp. 823–827, 2018.

Since its emergence as a modern discipline, literary criticism has evaded many of the constraints of philology and rhetoric – fields which had required readers to have an extensive training and familiarity with an array of tropes, languages, and literary texts. Since the late 18th century, modern textual interpretation opened the engagement with the humanistic canon to a large audience. The conception of interpretation as a universal capacity emerged concurrently with theological attempts at defining scriptural reading as a process geared toward the understanding of the biblical authors’ intention and of the culture that produced the Scripture.

Dominic S Irudayaraj

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How To Write A Social Criticism Essay

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• Author Sandra W.

Social Criticism Essay Writing Example Step-By-Step

An essay that the writer tries to express certain feeling in relation to an issue that he she feels is ineffective or corrupt on is known as social criticism essay. Bureaucracy and big government are the topics that work well with this type of essays. The writer should try as much as possible to effectively display his/her feeling in relation to the issue that he feels is societal problem. Finally the writer should propose some solution in the same regard. Writing such an essay is important not just to the said society but also to the writer. It helps the writer discover and display his own belief and express the feeling he has in regard to the society he is living in.

Steps To Follow When Writing Social Criticism Essay

• Write the topic first in free style with no much complication. Starting with free writing is always the easiest way to narrow down your focus and help you to come up with good content as you write a social criticism essay.
• When writing writers are advised to follow all the basic free writing rules that include; little concern on grammar, writing at any time and writing about anything that comes to mind with no much worry. As you free write place down your thoughts on a paper in point form.
• Identify one issue in the society that you want to deal with. Using the notes you composed when free writing, define theme for your work. Try to place your focus on a particular problem that you will be able to express your feelings well about. At the introduction of your social criticism essay explain the basics of problem.
• Use very specific examples to elaborate on the problem that you have already identified. This will help your work to be under stable to the readers. Use as many examples as possible within different paragraphs to elaborate how the said problem has affected members of the society that you are in.
• Write the body of your essay by making more notes as you elaborate about the examples that you give out at the introduction part.  This will help the reader to understand how relay the issue is a problem and its effect to the society.
• Finally write the conclusion paragraph of your social criticism essay. This is where you try to provide solution to stated problem that you have already discussed.  This is a requirement to all social criticism essays that you don’t just discuss the problem but also offer solution.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Analysis of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism

Analysis of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 8, 2020 • ( 1 )

An Essay on Criticism (1711) was Pope’s first independent work, published anonymously through an obscure bookseller [12–13]. Its implicit claim to authority is not based on a lifetime’s creative work or a prestigious commission but, riskily, on the skill and argument of the poem alone. It offers a sort of master-class not only in doing criticism but in being a critic:addressed to those – it could be anyone – who would rise above scandal,envy, politics and pride to true judgement, it leads the reader through a qualifying course. At the end, one does not become a professional critic –the association with hired writing would have been a contaminating one for Pope – but an educated judge of important critical matters.

But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ Offence, To tire our Patience, than mislead our Sense: Some few in that, but Numbers err in this, Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss; A Fool might once himself alone expose, Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.

The simple opposition we began with develops into a more complex suggestion that more unqualified people are likely to set up for critic than for poet, and that such a proliferation is serious. Pope’s typographically-emphasised oppositions between poetry and criticism, verse and prose,patience and sense, develop through the passage into a wider account of the problem than first proposed: the even-handed balance of the couplets extends beyond a simple contrast. Nonetheless, though Pope’s oppositions divide, they also keep within a single framework different categories of writing: Pope often seems to be addressing poets as much as critics. The critical function may well depend on a poetic function: this is after all an essay on criticism delivered in verse, and thus acting also as poetry and offering itself for criticism. Its blurring of categories which might otherwise be seen as fundamentally distinct, and its often slippery transitions from area to area, are part of the poem’s comprehensive,educative character.

Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope

Addison, who considered the poem ‘a Master-piece’, declared that its tone was conversational and its lack of order was not problematic: ‘The Observations follow one another like those in Horace’s Art of Poetry, without that Methodical Regularity which would have been requisite in a Prose Author’ (Barnard 1973: 78). Pope, however, decided during the revision of the work for the 1736 Works to divide the poem into three sections, with numbered sub-sections summarizing each segment of argument. This impluse towards order is itself illustrative of tensions between creative and critical faculties, an apparent casualness of expression being given rigour by a prose skeleton. The three sections are not equally balanced, but offer something like the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of logical argumentation – something which exceeds the positive-negative opposition suggested by the couplet format. The first section (1–200) establishes the basic possibilities for critical judgement;the second (201–559) elaborates the factors which hinder such judgement;and the third (560–744) celebrates the elements which make up true critical behaviour.

Part One seems to begin by setting poetic genius and critical taste against each other, while at the same time limiting the operation of teaching to those ‘who have written well ’ ( EC, 11–18). The poem immediately stakes an implicit claim for the poet to be included in the category of those who can ‘write well’ by providing a flamboyant example of poetic skill in the increasingly satiric portrayal of the process by which failed writers become critics: ‘Each burns alike, who can, or cannot write,/Or with a Rival’s, or an Eunuch ’s spite’ ( EC, 29–30). At the bottom of the heap are ‘half-learn’d Witlings, num’rous in our Isle’, pictured as insects in an early example of Pope’s favourite image of teeming, writerly promiscuity (36–45). Pope then turns his attention back to the reader,conspicuously differentiated from this satiric extreme: ‘ you who seek to give and merit Fame’ (the combination of giving and meriting reputation again links criticism with creativity). The would-be critic, thus selected, is advised to criticise himself first of all, examining his limits and talents and keeping to the bounds of what he knows (46-67); this leads him to the most major of Pope’s abstract quantities within the poem (and within his thought in general): Nature.

First follow NATURE, and your Judgment frame By her just Standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchang’d, and Universal Light, Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart, At once the Source, and End, and Te s t of Art.

( EC, 68–73)

Dennis complained that Pope should have specified ‘what he means by Nature, and what it is to write or to judge according to Nature’ ( TE I: 219),and modern analyses have the burden of Romantic deifications of Nature to discard: Pope’s Nature is certainly not some pantheistic, powerful nurturer, located outside social settings, as it would be for Wordsworth,though like the later poets Pope always characterises Nature as female,something to be quested for by male poets [172]. Nature would include all aspects of the created world, including the non-human, physical world, but the advice on following Nature immediately follows the advice to study one’s own internal ‘Nature’, and thus means something like an instinctively-recognised principle of ordering, derived from the original,timeless, cosmic ordering of God (the language of the lines implicitly aligns Nature with God; those that follow explicitly align it with the soul). Art should be derived from Nature, should seek to replicate Nature, and can be tested against the unaltering standard of Nature, which thus includes Reason and Truth as reflections of the mind of the original poet-creator, God.

In a fallen universe, however, apprehension of Nature requires assistance: internal gifts alone do not suffice.

Some, to whom Heav’n in Wit has been profuse, Want as much more, to turn it to its use; For Wit and Judgment often are at strife, Tho’ meant each other’s Aid, like Man and Wife.

( EC, 80–03)

Wit, the second of Pope’s abstract qualities, is here seamlessly conjoined with the discussion of Nature: for Pope, Wit means not merely quick verbal humour but something almost as important as Nature – a power of invention and perception not very different from what we would mean by intelligence or imagination. Early critics again seized on the first version of these lines (which Pope eventually altered to the reading given here) as evidence of Pope’s inability to make proper distinctions: he seems to suggest that a supply of Wit sometimes needs more Wit to manage it, and then goes on to replace this conundrum with a more familiar opposition between Wit (invention) and Judgment (correction). But Pope stood by the essential point that Wit itself could be a form of Judgment and insisted that though the marriage between these qualities might be strained, no divorce was possible.

Nonetheless, some external prop to Wit was necessary, and Pope finds this in those ‘RULES’ of criticism derived from Nature:

Those RULES of old discover’d, not devis’d, Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d; Nature, like Liberty , is but restrain’d By the same Laws which first herself ordain’d.

( EC, 88–91)

Nature, as Godlike principle of order, is ‘discover’d’ to operate according to certain principles stated in critical treatises such as Aristotle’s Poetics or Horace’s Ars Poetica (or Pope’s Essay on Criticism ). In the golden age of Greece (92–103), Criticism identified these Rules of Nature in early poetry and taught their use to aspiring poets. Pope contrasts this with the activities of critics in the modern world, where often criticism is actively hostile to poetry, or has become an end in itself (114–17). Right judgement must separate itself out from such blind alleys by reading Homer: ‘ You then whose Judgment the right Course would steer’ ( EC, 118) can see yourself in the fable of ‘young Maro ’ (Virgil), who is pictured discovering to his amazement the perfect original equivalence between Homer, Nature, and the Rules (130–40). Virgil the poet becomes a sort of critical commentary on the original source poet of Western literature,Homer. With assurance bordering consciously on hyperbole, Pope can instruct us: ‘Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem;/To copy Nature is to copy Them ’ ( EC, 139–40).

Despite the potential for neat conclusion here, Pope has a rider to offer,and again it is one which could be addressed to poet or critic: ‘Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare,/For there’s a Happiness as well as Care ’ ( EC, 141–2). As well as the prescriptions of Aristotelian poetics,Pope draws on the ancient treatise ascribed to Longinus and known as On the Sublime [12]. Celebrating imaginative ‘flights’ rather than representation of nature, Longinus figures in Pope’s poem as a sort of paradox:

Great Wits sometimes may gloriously offend, And rise to Faults true Criticks dare not mend; From vulgar Bounds with brave Disorder part, And snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art, Which, without passing thro’ the Judgment , gains The Heart, and all its End at once attains.

( EC, 152–7)

This occasional imaginative rapture, not predictable by rule, is an important concession, emphasised by careful typographic signalling of its paradoxical nature (‘ gloriously offend ’, and so on); but it is itself countered by the caution that ‘The Critick’ may ‘put his Laws in force’ if such licence is unjustifiably used. Pope here seems to align the ‘you’ in the audience with poet rather than critic, and in the final lines of the first section it is the classical ‘ Bards Triumphant ’ who remain unassailably immortal, leavingPope to pray for ‘some Spark of your Coelestial Fire’ ( EC, 195) to inspire his own efforts (as ‘The last, the meanest of your Sons’, EC, 196) to instruct criticism through poetry.

Following this ringing prayer for the possibility of reestablishing a critical art based on poetry, Part II (200-559) elaborates all the human psychological causes which inhibit such a project: pride, envy,sectarianism, a love of some favourite device at the expense of overall design. The ideal critic will reflect the creative mind, and will seek to understand the whole work rather than concentrate on minute infractions of critical laws:

A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit With the same Spirit that its Author writ, Survey the Whole, nor seek slight Faults to find, Where Nature moves, and Rapture warms the Mind;

( EC, 233–6)

Most critics (and poets) err by having a fatal predisposition towards some partial aspect of poetry: ornament, conceit, style, or metre, which they use as an inflexible test of far more subtle creations. Pope aims for akind of poetry which is recognisable and accessible in its entirety:

True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest, Something, whose Truth convinc’d at Sight we find, That gives us back the Image of our Mind:

( EC, 296–300)

This is not to say that style alone will do, as Pope immediately makesplain (305–6): the music of poetry, the ornament of its ‘numbers’ or rhythm, is only worth having because ‘The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense ’ ( EC, 365). Pope performs and illustrates a series of poetic clichés – the use of open vowels, monosyllabic lines, and cheap rhymes:

Tho’ oft the Ear the open Vowels tire … ( EC , 345) And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line … ( EC , 347) Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze, In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the Trees … ( EC, 350–1)

These gaffes are contrasted with more positive kinds of imitative effect:

Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows; But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore, The hoarse, rough Verse shou’d like the Torrent roar.

( EC, 366–9)

Again, this functions both as poetic instance and as critical test, working examples for both classes of writer.

After a long series of satiric vignettes of false critics, who merely parrot the popular opinion, or change their minds all the time, or flatter aristocratic versifiers, or criticise poets rather than poetry (384-473), Pope again switches attention to educated readers, encouraging (or cajoling)them towards staunchly independent and generous judgment within what is described as an increasingly fraught cultural context, threatened with decay and critical warfare (474–525). But, acknowledging that even‘Noble minds’ will have some ‘Dregs … of Spleen and sow’r Disdain’ ( EC ,526–7), Pope advises the critic to ‘Discharge that Rage on more ProvokingCrimes,/Nor fear a Dearth in these Flagitious Times’ (EC, 528–9): obscenity and blasphemy are unpardonable and offer a kind of lightning conductor for critics to purify their own wit against some demonised object of scorn.

If the first parts of An Essay on Criticism outline a positive classical past and troubled modern present, Part III seeks some sort of resolved position whereby the virtues of one age can be maintained during the squabbles of the other. The opening seeks to instill the correct behaviour in the critic –not merely rules for written criticism, but, so to speak, for enacted criticism, a sort of ‘ Good Breeding ’ (EC, 576) which politely enforces without seeming to enforce:

LEARN then what MORALS Criticks ought to show, For ’tis but half a Judge’s Task , to Know. ’Tis not enough, Taste, Judgment, Learning, join; In all you speak, let Truth and Candor shine … Be silent always when you doubt your Sense; And speak, tho’ sure , with seeming Diffidence …Men must be taught as if you taught them not; And Things unknown propos’d as Things forgot:

( EC , 560–3, 566–7, 574–5)

This ideally-poised man of social grace cannot be universally successful: some poets, as some critics, are incorrigible and it is part of Pope’s education of the poet-critic to leave them well alone. Synthesis, if that is being offered in this final part, does not consist of gathering all writers into one tidy fold but in a careful discrimination of true wit from irredeemable ‘dulness’ (584–630).

Thereafter, Pope has two things to say. One is to set a challenge to contemporary culture by asking ‘where’s the Man’ who can unite all necessary humane and intellectual qualifications for the critic ( EC, 631–42), and be a sort of walking oxymoron, ‘Modestly bold, and humanly severe’ in his judgements. The other is to insinuate an answer. Pope offers deft characterisations of critics from Aristotle to Pope who achieve the necessary independence from extreme positions: Aristotle’s primary treatise is likened to an imaginative voyage into the land of Homer which becomes the source of legislative power; Horace is the poetic model for friendly conversational advice; Quintilian is a useful store of ‘the justest Rules, and clearest Method join’d’; Longinus is inspired by the Muses,who ‘bless their Critick with a Poet’s Fire’ ( EC, 676). These pairs include and encapsulate all the precepts recommended in the body of the poem. But the empire of good sense, Pope reminds us, fell apart after the fall of Rome,leaving nothing but monkish superstition, until the scholar Erasmus,always Pope’s model of an ecumenical humanist, reformed continental scholarship (693-696). Renaissance Italy shows a revival of arts, including criticism; France, ‘a Nation born to serve’ ( EC , 713) fossilised critical and poetic practice into unbending rules; Britain, on the other hand, ‘ Foreign Laws despis’d,/And kept unconquer’d, and unciviliz’d’ ( EC, 715–16) – a deftly ironic modulation of what appears to be a patriotic celebration intosomething more muted. Pope does however cite two earlier verse essays (by John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, and Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon) [13] before paying tribute to his own early critical mentor, William Walsh, who had died in 1708 [9]. Sheffield and Dillon were both poets who wrote criticism in verse, but Walsh was not a poet; in becoming the nearest modern embodiment of the ideal critic, his ‘poetic’ aspect becomes Pope himself, depicted as a mixture of moderated qualities which reminds us of the earlier ‘Where’s the man’ passage: he is quite possibly here,

Careless of Censure , nor too fond of Fame, Still pleas’d to praise, yet not afraid to blame, Averse alike to Flatter , or Offend, Not free from Faults, nor yet too vain to mend.

( EC , 741–44)

It is a kind of leading from the front, or tuition by example, as recommended and practised by the poem. From an apparently secondary,even negative, position (writing on criticism, which the poem sees as secondary to poetry), the poem ends up founding criticism on poetry, and deriving poetry from the (ideal) critic.

Early criticism celebrated the way the poem seemed to master and exemplify its own stated ideals, just as Pope had said of Longinus that he ‘Is himself that great Sublime he draws’ ( EC, 680). It is a poem profuse with images, comparisons and similes. Johnson thought the longest example,that simile comparing student’s progress in learning with a traveller’s journey in Alps was ‘perhaps the best that English poetry can shew’: ‘The simile of the Alps has no useless parts, yet affords a striking picture by itself: it makes the foregoing position better understood, and enables it to take faster hold on the attention; it assists the apprehension, and elevates the fancy’ (Johnson 1905: 229–30). Many of the abstract precepts aremade visible in this way: private judgment is like one’s reliance on one’s(slightly unreliable) watch (9– 10); wit and judgment are like man and wife(82–3); critics are like pharmacists trying to be doctors (108–11). Much ofthe imagery is military or political, indicating something of the social role(as legislator in the universal empire of poetry) the critic is expected toadopt; we are also reminded of the decay of empires, and the potentialdecay of cultures (there is something of The Dunciad in the poem). Muchof it is religious, as with the most famous phrases from the poem (‘For Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’; ‘To err is human, to forgive, divine’), indicating the level of seriousness which Pope accords the matterof poetry. Much of it is sexual: creativity is a kind of manliness, wooing Nature, or the Muse, to ‘generate’ poetic issue, and false criticism, likeobscenity, derives from a kind of inner ‘impotence’. Patterns of suchimagery can be harnessed to ‘organic’ readings of the poem’s wholeness. But part of the life of the poem, underlying its surface statements andmetaphors, is its continual shifts of focus, its reminders of that which liesoutside the tidying power of couplets, its continual reinvention of the ‘you’opposed to the ‘they’ of false criticism, its progressive displacement of theopposition you thought you were looking at with another one whichrequires your attention.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Atkins, G. Douglas (1986): Quests of Difference: Reading Pope’s Poems (Lexing-ton: Kentucky State University Press) Barnard, John, ed. (1973): Pope: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston:Routledge and Kegan Paul) Bateson, F.W. and Joukovsky, N.A., eds, (1971): Alexander Pope: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books) Brower, Reuben (1959): Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press) Brown, Laura (1985): Alexander Pope (Oxford: Basil Blackwell) Davis, Herbert ed. (1966): Pope: Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress Dixon, Peter, ed. (1972): Alexander Pope (London: G. Bell and Sons) Empson, William (1950): ‘Wit in the Essay on Criticism ’, Hudson Review, 2: 559–77 Erskine-Hill, Howard and Smith, Anne, eds (1979): The Art of Alexander Pope (London: Vision Press) Erskine-Hill, Howard (1982): ‘Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in his Time’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15: 123–148 Fairer, David (1984): Pope’s Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press) Fairer, David, ed. (1990): Pope: New Contexts (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf) Morris, David B. (1984): Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Nuttall, A.D. (1984): Pope’s ‘ Essay on Man’ (London: George Allen and Unwin) Rideout, Tania (1992): ‘The Reasoning Eye: Alexander Pope’s Typographic Vi-sion in the Essay on Man’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55:249–62 Rogers, Pat (1993a): Alexander Pope (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Rogers, Pat (1993b): Essay s on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Savage, Roger (1988) ‘Antiquity as Nature: Pope’s Fable of “Young Maro”’, in An Essay on Criticism, in Nicholson (1988), 83–116 Schmitz, R. M. (1962): Pope’s Essay on Criticism 1709: A Study of the BodleianMS Text, with Facsimiles, Transcripts and Variants (St Louis: Washington University Press) Warren, Austin (1929): Alexander Pope as Critic and Humanist (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press) Woodman, Thomas (1989): Politeness and Poetry in the Age of Pope (Rutherford,New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press)

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• Analysis of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man | Literary Theory and Criticism

An Essay on Criticism Summary & Analysis by Alexander Pope

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism" seeks to lay down rules of good taste in poetry criticism, and in poetry itself. Structured as an essay in rhyming verse, it offers advice to the aspiring critic while satirizing amateurish criticism and poetry. The famous passage beginning "A little learning is a dangerous thing" advises would-be critics to learn their field in depth, warning that the arts demand much longer and more arduous study than beginners expect. The passage can also be read as a warning against shallow learning in general. Published in 1711, when Alexander Pope was just 23, the "Essay" brought its author fame and notoriety while he was still a young poet himself.

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The Full Text of “From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing”

1 A little learning is a dangerous thing;

2 Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

3 There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

4 And drinking largely sobers us again.

5 Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,

6 In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts,

7 While from the bounded level of our mind,

8 Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,

9 But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise

10 New, distant scenes of endless science rise!

11 So pleased at first, the towering Alps we try,

12 Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky;

13 The eternal snows appear already past,

14 And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;

15 But those attained, we tremble to survey

16 The growing labours of the lengthened way,

17 The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,

18 Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

“From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing” Summary

“from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” themes.

Shallow Learning vs. Deep Understanding

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing”

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.

Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts, While from the bounded level of our mind, Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,

But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise New, distant scenes of endless science rise!

Lines 11-14

So pleased at first, the towering Alps we try, Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky; The eternal snows appear already past, And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;

Lines 15-18

But those attained, we tremble to survey The growing labours of the lengthened way, The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes, Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

“From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing” Symbols

The Mountains/Alps

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“From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Alliteration.

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Extended Metaphor

“from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” vocabulary.

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• A little learning
• Pierian spring
• Bounded level
• Short views
• The lengthened way
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing”

Rhyme scheme, “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” speaker, “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” setting, literary and historical context of “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing”, more “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” resources, external resources.

The Poem Aloud — Listen to an audiobook of Pope's "Essay on Criticism" (the "A little learning" passage starts at 12:57).

The Poet's Life — Read a biography of Alexander Pope at the Poetry Foundation.

"Alexander Pope: Rediscovering a Genius" — Watch a BBC documentary on Alexander Pope.

More on Pope's Life — A summary of Pope's life and work at Poets.org.

Pope at the British Library — More resources and articles on the poet.

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