Essay on Man and Other Poems

by Alexander Pope. (1996) Published by Dover Thrift Editions. 99 pages.

4 August 2007: Page 1-79.

A poem and an essay are not the same thing, are they? Just like a novel is not a newspaper article, and a screenplay is not a rock song. Today the categories are clear. Poems can serve all sorts of roles. They can be tributes or snapshots of emotions, they can be bold attempts to sabotage language by evoking bizarre images in meaningless cacophonies, or they can be straightforward, impressionistic portraits of beautiful landscapes. It can be a form of improvisation, of jazz, of competition even. What they cannot be is essays. They’re not a suitable medium for serious arguments. We turn to poetry to escape, to find something less bureaucratic and less academic than prose.
I think from Pope’s point of view, and probably from the point of view of many of his contemporaries, poetry represented the end of a stage, the last stage of a process of metamorphosis like that of grain of sand to pearl or caterpillar to butterfly. Once a truth had been argued out in dry prose, once philosophers had argued away the last absurdities and refined their arguments, the final step was to take the results and state them in verse whose rhyme and meter reflect the inner truth. While Pope allows in his “Essay on Criticism” for the fact that there’s certainly room for frivolous poetry, for poetry independent of serious philosophical intent. But he doesn’t seem to think that there’s room for serious thought that refuses to wear the beautiful vestments of poetry.
Pope himself lets his hair down in his farcical “The Rape of the Lock,” in which a petty spat amongst a bunch of foppish dandies is chronicled with all the vigor and pathos of a Homeric epic. Indeed, it contains some of the most impressive and witty poetry in the whole book, as in the section where a game of cards is described as a battle between heroic and villainous kings, queens and knaves.
I have a real soft spot for humor like this. There’s just something so satisfying in thinking that the revered elders found laughter something worth aspiring to. When I see Pope put so much of his significant, serious, craftsman’s talent fully behind the task of a silly joke, I—a frivolous and shallow person—feel somehow deeply honored.
And so it’s out of common courtesy that I lend an ear to his more serious works, such as the “Essay on Man.” At first it’s a little hard for me to accept the unabashedly circular logic with which Pope sets down his arguments about the Great Order of the Universe. It’s as absurd to doubt God as it is to have the foot rebel against the head, we are told. Man has to pursue his goals one step at a time, whereas God created the universe in a single action. Therefore, God is greater than man. And because God is greater than man, and God created the universe, it’s sheer folly for man to see any fault in the universe. If we think we see fault, it’s only because we can’t see the “big picture.”
This isn’t the way I see things. It’s not the way I think about my life, not right now. But I remember at times that I was very depressed about my life, I relied upon exactly such thoughts as these to help lift me out of despair. Furthermore, once I got past the initial arguments, I found Pope had a lot of interesting things to say about happiness and justice, about the futility of striving for power and the need to seek personal happiness through charity and kindness.
It’s just this sort of all-pleasing, totally reasonable Enlightenment Era Englishness that sent thinkers like Nietzsche around the bend. He railed against it, calling it weak, cloying, effete. But there’s a sense of viability, vigor and downright truth in Pope’s straightforward verse that puts Nietzsche’s thundering and dundering to shame. Yes, Pope was a little too formal, a little too stiff, but at the heart of his arguments is an affirmation of the value of happiness, which is the same as an affirmation of the value of life. This affirmation was echoed and enhanced later on by the more free-spirited Walt Whitman in his “Song of Myself.” In fact, it pleases me to think that just as Pope improved upon prosaic philosophy by organizing it into verse, so too did Whitman improve on Pope’s era by freeing verse of its Byzantine rules and conventions, by making the sentiments less reasonable and more fierce.

1 September 2007; p. 79 to end

There’s not much more to say about this book other than that the last two poems included are a little disappointing after what came before, filled with personal references, inside jokes and cultural minutiae that haven’t aged well.
I would like to say a word, though, about Dover Thrift Editions and how much fun they are to pick up and read. They’re printed on pulpy paper that reminds me of the pages of the drawing tablets I used to have as a child. They’re all available for $2 or less, and usually they have some very low budget but lovely image on the cover, a swatch of Victorian wallpaper or a section of intricate lacework. There’s something wonderfully monastic about reading these books, as though you’re opting out of the whole free market system, out of the whole of modern society, pared down to pure literature. Probably if there is a nuclear war, Dover Thrift editions of Kate Chopin and Anton Chekhov will be the only pieces of literature to survive, and they will serve as the basis of a new civilization. Of course, in a world where Disney keeps lobbying for extensions of copyrights, at some point there will come a day when it’s harder and harder for a company like Dover to find the sort of classic, public domain material that serves as its lifeblood. Ah, well, it’s a pity.