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Alexander PopeAn Essay on Criticism
Nonfiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1711A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Ideological Context: The Glorious Revolution
Alexander Pope was born in 1688, the year of the “Glorious Revolution” in England, when James II of England was overthrown by his daughter, Queen Mary, and her Dutch husband, William of Orange (who then became William III of England). James II was overthrown in part because he was believed to be Roman Catholic and thus unfit to lead Protestant Great Britain. By the time of Pope’s rise in popularity, Queen Anne (James’s other daughter) was on the throne; she would be the last Stuart monarch before the Hanover George I was brought in to replace the Stuart line in 1714.
At this time, The Test Acts (1673) meant that Roman Catholic subjects in Great Britain could not hold public office since the government required office-holders to take communion in the Anglican (Church of England) Church; the Test Acts were not repealed until 1829. As a result, one of the most significant sociohistorical contexts for Pope’s writing, and in particular for his role as a critical voice in this era, is his overt Catholicism coupled with the anti-Catholic sentiment that prevailed in 18th-century Great Britain.
In An Essay on Criticism, Pope positions his voice between the Roman Catholic faith of ancient Britain, which he says was “[w]ith tyranny, then superstition joined” (Line 687), and the Roman Catholic figure of Erasmus, an Augustinian monk who he says “[s]temmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age” by reviving interest in classical learning (Line 695). Critic Peter Davidson notes that although Pope was “not profoundly religious in himself,” he still maintained a Catholic public persona that meant he was “willing to embrace discomfort, danger, and humiliation” as a Recusant, or one of those who “chose the marginalized and disempowered lives forced on them by penal legislation” (Davidson, Peter. “Pope’s Recusancy.” Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 38, no. 1, 2005, pp. 63).
Pope’s outsider position thus offered him a position from which to criticize the predominant culture and from which to further his theme of balance in An Essay on Criticism (between art and nature, religion and reason, part and whole, and poet and critic). For example, he uses religious and sociopolitical similes to develop his argument for attention to both the rules and the judicious breaking of rules in life and art, comparing “schismatics,” or those who break away from the main faith, to those critics who develop their positions entirely through opposition to what is popular: “[I]f the throng / By chance go right, they purposely go wrong” (Lines 426-27).
Literary Context: 18th-Century Print Culture
In An Essay on Criticism, Pope addresses the print culture and literary output of his contemporary world. In the early 18th century, there was a growing market for printed material, including books, essay periodicals, newspapers, and pamphlets. Because of this growing book market, there was also (as Pope notes) a greater market for literary criticism. Pope’s contemporaries Joseph Addison and Richard Steele knew this and took advantage of it with their publication of the essay periodicals The Tatler (1709-11) and The Spectator (1711-12), which were short papers. These were called periodicals because they were published weekly and cost one penny to buy. The papers mirrored contemporaneous “coffeehouse culture”—a reference to where the public went to discuss political and literary news. The goal of these papers was to influence the taste and culture of their upper-middle-class readers, and the fact that Addison’s praise of An Essay on Criticism in The Tatler contributed to Pope’s fame illustrates the power of the periodical press.
The commercial growth of literature is central to Pope’s An Essay on Criticism because with this growth came an anxiety about the lack of control over who was publishing and what they were publishing: Criticism of a “good” piece of poetry might negatively sway opinions about the work. Pope addresses this overabundance of print culture in his first lines of the poem, “’Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill / Appear in writing or in judging ill” (Lines 1-2). Near the end of the poem, he suggests that British critics “take a contrary extreme, / They judge with fury, but they write with phlegm” (Lines 661-62): What he means is that those who are the harshest critics are not always those who write the best poetry themselves. This, he suggests throughout the poem, is a direct result of the growth of the press that occurred in the early 18th century.
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