An Essay on Criticism
British poem
An Essay on Criticism is one of the first major poems written by the English writer Alexander Pope (1688–1744), published in 1711. It is the source of the famous quotations "To err is human; to forgive, divine", "A little learning is a dang'rous thing" (frequently paraphrased as "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing"), and "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread".
Composition
The first fragmentary drafts of the work were written in Abberley in 1707. It was first published in May 1711. Many of the poem's ideas had existed in prose form since at least 1706. Composed in heroic couplets (pairs of adjacent rhyming lines of iambic pentameter) and written in the Horatian mode of satire, it is a verse essay primarily concerned with how writers and critics behave in the new literary commerce of Pope's contemporary age. The poem covers a range of good criticism and advice, and represents many of the chief literary ideals of Pope's age.
Structure and themes
The verse "essay" was not an uncommon form in eighteenth-century poetry, deriving ultimately from classical forebears including Horace's Ars Poetica and Lucretius' De rerum natura.
Pope contends in the poem's opening couplets that bad criticism does greater harm than bad writing:
Pope delineates common faults of poets, e.g., settling for easy and clichéd rhymes:
Throughout the poem, Pope refers to ancient writers such as Virgil, Homer, Aristotle, Horace and Longinus. This is a testament to his belief that the "Imitation of the ancients" is the ultimate standard for taste.
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