Critical appreciation of the poem"an essay on man"
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The philosophical poem An Essay on Man consists of four verse epistles, each of which was published separately and anonymously between February 1733 and January 1734 by a bookseller not previously associated with Pope's writings. Attesting to his belief that “the life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth,” Pope contrived the elaborate ruse partly to defuse the hostility provoked by his recent satires, notably The Dunciad (1728) and his Epistle to Burlington (1731), and partly to secure an impartial audience for the poem. Pope eventually identified himself as the author when he collected the epistles under the subtitle “Being the First Book of Ethic Epistles.” He had originally conceived of An Essay on Man as the introduction to an opus magnum on society and morality, but he later abandoned the plan. To this end, the poem addresses the question of human nature and the potential for happiness in relation to the universe, social and political hierarchies, and the individual. Articulating the values of eighteenth-century optimism, the poem employs a majestic declamatory style and underscores its arguments with a range of conventional rhetorical techniques. An Essay on Man met with international acclaim upon publication and generated no small share of controversy in ensuing decades. During the succeeding centuries, however, critics have perceived Pope's poem as fundamentally flawed, both aesthetically and philosophically. Nearly three hundred years after its publication, the poem generally merits distinction as, in David B. Morris's phrase, “a forlorn classic of ratiocination.”
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