By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
What connects the well-known proverbs ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread’, ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’, and ‘to err is human, to forgive divine’? The answer is that not only do we have the same man to thank for all three, but he originated them all in the same poem, and he did so when he was only 21 years old.
The author in question is Alexander Pope (1688-1744), one of the most widely studied and critically esteemed English poets of the eighteenth century. Just as we talk about the age of Shakespeare, the age of Dryden, or the age of Wordsworth, so we might talk of ‘the age of Pope’, for his literary reputation dominated the first half of the eighteenth century and, when English Literature degrees were first established at Oxford and Cambridge, he was part of the ‘canon’ of great poets whose work was deemed worthy of study, perhaps in part because his work reflects so many of the classical virtues which had long been prized at Oxbridge (English Literature was very much the young upstart in comparison with the more august subject, Classics, which it has largely replaced in terms of its popularity and relevance).
An Essay on Criticism was published in May 1711, when Pope had just turned 23. But in fact he wrote the poem in 1709, when he was barely 21 years old, so he was even more precocious than he first appears. And Pope even wrote parts of the poem when he was still a teenager, in 1707!
An Essay on Criticism is a didactic poem written in heroic couplets (rhyming couplets written in iambic pentameter) that establishes rules which Pope feels literary critics should follow. He urges critics to embrace humility, study nature, and follow classical traditions: the Roman poet Horace, the author of Ars Poetica, is mentioned approvingly, among other classical figures.
Pope takes aim at both poor writing and poor criticism. He argues that critics shouldn’t forget their humanity and sense of sympathy in their rush to show off their ‘wit’: a word which, in Pope’s day, meant not just verbal dexterity or humour but intellectual ability more widely. Indeed, one of the three famous proverbial axioms from the poem, ‘To err is human; to forgive, divine’ appears at precisely this point in Pope’s argument. Critics, in their rush to tear down bad writing, should remember that forgiveness is a virtue, and that even ‘Homer nods’ (an expression first used by Horace, and quoted by Pope in his poem).
And one of the other famous lines from An Essay on Criticism also counsels the reader on the danger of a little wisdom or learning: ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’ reminds us that having but a little learning can be bad for the critic because it gives them the illusion that they’re cleverer – and wiser – than they actually are.
In other words, a little learning is more dangerous than having no learning and knowing that you know nothing. As the next line has it: ‘Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring’ (a mythical fountain in ancient Greece which was sacred to the Muses and considered a source of knowledge, art, and inspiration). Study things properly or don’t bother at all.
Pope champions nature as a model guide for the writer and critic, but this isn’t some proto-Romantic embrace of the wild and unpredictable power found in the natural world: for Pope, ‘nature’ is synonymous with universal truth and order, and should be the standard for both poets and critics. Art should be true to life, as well as intellectually satisfying.
The poem is perhaps less satisfying as a cohesive ‘essay’ with a coherent and overarching argument – though it does, loosely, have that – than it is as a series of beautifully and succinctly phrased apothegms on the broader theme. Because Pope is using closed couplets – where each pair of rhyming lines is concluded with some kind of punctuation – it’s endlessly quotable, lending itself well to pithy one-liners (well, technically two-liners) and witty gobbets of advice.
So it’s here that we find such gems as, ‘Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, / Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found’ (‘empty vessels make the most noise’, but phrased even more elegantly), and ‘True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
/ As those move easiest who have learned to dance.’
These examples show how readable Pope still is, and whatever our reservations about whether this is ‘poetry’ in the way we might personally define it (Oscar Wilde once famously quipped that there were two ways of disliking poetry: one is to dislike it, and the other is to read Pope), as neoclassical verse in the didactic style, it is still effortlessly accessible, and occasionally, genuinely funny.
Take this moment, where Pope is taking aim at bad writers who fall back on clichés:
Where’er you find ‘the cooling western breeze,’
In the next line, it ‘whispers through the trees;’
If crystal streams ‘with pleasing murmurs creep,’
The reader’s threatened (not in vain) with ‘sleep.’
Then, at the last and only couplet fraught
With some unmeaning thing they call a thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.
That delicious parenthesis of ‘(not in vain)’ is a perfect little aside, showing how yawningly predictable such off-the-peg imagery had become by Pope’s time, while that final line not only describes the alexandrine (a line of iambic hexameter, so containing one additional foot compared with the usual pentameter line) but embodies it, especially with the use of ‘along’ (a pun on how the alexandrine goes ‘a long’ way?).
I’ll confess that Dryden and Pope did little for me when I was an undergraduate myself (and pretty much the same age Pope was when he wrote An Essay on Criticism). I wanted to read Housman, Larkin, Rossetti, Dickinson, Hopkins: poets who could make the reader feel things.
Pope doesn’t, as a rule, set out to move us. But he does remind us how beautifully ideas can be phrased, especially in the narrow confines of the heroic couplet. His work is, for want of a more critically useful phrase, so very well put. Or, as he puts it (far more eloquently) in An Essay on Criticism itself: ‘True wit is nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’.