Most of the poetry I read is from the 19th and 20th centuries. The tendency of the first is strongly in the direction of passion; of the second, of alienation and obscurity. Both tend to treat the experience of poetry, both as writer and reader, as a somewhat eccentric thing, very much off the track beaten by the society around it. After a certain amount of that, I sometimes have a yen for the solid down-to-earth common (or uncommon) sense of the 18th century, which in general did not go in much for the sublime in poetry. Under that impulse I recently turned to Pope, of whose work I had not, as far as I recall, read a word since around 1972, in a college course in 18th century literature.
I don't know why I picked An Essay on Man; it may not have been the best choice. It was written later in Pope's career, when he was in his forties--he only lived until his mid-fifties--after the mostly satirical works for which he is best known (I think--at any rate they are the ones I recall being included in high school textbooks). It is a philosophical poem, and I was left somewhat dissatisfied with both aspects.
The form, standard for the time, is a very strict and demanding one: the heroic couplet, rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter lines. Little variation in meter is considered acceptable. Rhyme was generally stretched no further than, for instance, "young" and "long" (and perhaps those were closer in pronunciation in Pope's time than in ours). Pope is a virtuoso of the device, which tends to have a playful quality, and so lends itself well to pithy aphoristic capsules of wit--in other words, to epigrams:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Some of these, from the Essay and from other works by Pope, have passed into the common vocabulary: "A little learning is a dang'rous thing", from An Essay On Criticism--note the contraction preserving the meter. Someone has probably produced a volume called something like The Quotable Pope.
The form is less suited to sustained thought or narrative, maybe least suited of all to serious abstract philosophizing, which is more or less what this poem is. And it's roughly 1200 lines long. That's 600 rhymes, and I've been told that English is relatively poor in rhymes compared to some other languages; at any rate producing that many of them as part of a sustained discourse would obviously be a difficult feat. The expression here of a complex idea over a dozen (or two or three) couplets often requires a good deal of syntactic contortion and semantic compression, which is to say, sometimes, obscurity, at least for me. Often some observation is followed by multiple complicating illustrations and amplifications, so that more that once I found myself asking "Now, what was the subject of all these predicates?"
Through much of my reading of this work I made the mistake of doing it at bedtime, and sleepiness certainly made any obscurities worse. But sometimes even when I re-read a puzzling passage the next day, with a clearer head, I was still unsure of its meaning. Here's one example:
Abstract what others feel, what others think:
All pleasures sicken, and all glories sink
The second line there is plain enough. But what about the first? The context is an assertion that happiness "subsist[s] not in the good of one, but all," and offers, by way of examples or proofs, persons who seem or wish to be self-sufficient, but are not. Is "abstract" a verb, so that the first line means "set aside what others feel, what others think"? Or is it an adjective: "what others feel, what others think, are abstractions"? Is the general sense that what others think and feel is irrelevant to the personal experience? Perhaps, but I'm still not sure.
Other obscurities were the effect of references to persons or things or places that were unclear or unknown to me and perhaps to most people in our time. The edition I'm reading, a Best of Pope compiled in 1929 (almost a century ago!), the one I used in that long-ago class, has very few notes. Newer and more accommodating ones undoubtedly exist.
Nevertheless there are long stretches that are greatly enjoyable in the way I had anticipated: cool, sharp, reasonable and reasoned, and, most essentially, poetically charming. Here's the whole section of which I quoted the beginning above:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
If you didn't enjoy that, don't bother with Pope.
Now, as to the philosophical success or failure of this philosophical work: as its verse exhibits the best of the 18th century style, its philosophy exhibits...well, perhaps not the worst, but certainly a fairly typical and fairly inadequate point of view. The (so-called) Enlightenment was at its height. Metaphysical truth was slighted or dismissed, and religion, where not attacked, as by Voltaire or Hume, was put into the background, as our culture entered the long period in which actual religious belief became an embarrassment and a difficulty, if not an impossibility. (We are still in that period, and perhaps beginning to pass out of it, but that's another topic.) I am not all that widely read, but to the extent that I'm acquainted with some of the major English literary figures of the time, there seems to be a tendency for them to be Christians engaged in a struggle, perhaps unacknowledged, to justify faith to an intellect thoroughly infiltrated, if not dominated, by the skepticism of the age.
Pope, Swift, and Johnson were all believers. Pope was a Catholic, which put him in a pretty difficult position, and might plausibly have led him to be pretty reticent on the subject of religion. But the other two were orthodox (as far as we know) Anglicans, Swift being in fact a clergyman. Yet my (limited) acquaintance with them leaves me thinking that their belief was more a matter of submissive will than of active faith, and that they were not eager to apply reason to it.
In their writings all tended to rely on what seems to me a very 18th century and not all that Christian idea of nature, or rather Nature. For some mysterious reason these lines from a poem by Swift have stuck in my mind since I read them in that class so many years ago:
As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew
From Nature, I believe 'em true
--"Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift"
That sense of Nature as the touchstone of all sound knowledge and reason is referred to throughout the Essay on Man. God is not absent from the picture, but is fairly remote--acknowledged and respected, but not much heard from, or spoken to. His revelation is in Nature, and since he orders all things rightly, we must conclude, as Pope tells us, twice (once early in the poem, again near the end), in capital letters: "WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT." (Pope was well-off financially, and one is tempted to say "Sure, that's easy for you to say." But he had severe physical ailments that left him partially disabled from the age of twelve.)
In principle this might amount to the same thing as trusting that God is in charge and that everything that is and everything that happens is ultimately in accord with his will. In context, and psychologically, it's more stoic than Christian, not too far in spirit from that popular saying of our time, "It is what it is."
There is no room for the Christian understanding of suffering, sacrificial or otherwise, no real sense of the Fall, no need of redemption. Whatever the consciously held beliefs of Pope or the others, the Deist conception of God seems predominant in many of their writings. And it really isn't adequate. So I guess this poem is, after all, precisely the 18th century voice I was seeking: strong in solid down-to-earth common (or uncommon) sense, but not profound. At any rate the Romantics and the Modernists who followed knew something was missing, and went in search of it.
Johnson had a perhaps more devastating critique: that Pope's philosophizing in An Essay on Man was no more than common sense, common both in the sense that it was plentiful and that it was ordinary. (Johnson was twenty years younger than Pope and outlived him by some forty years. His biography of Pope, from which the paragraphs below were taken, was published long after Pope's death.)
The Essay on Man was a work of great labour and long consideration, but certainly not the happiest of Pope’s performances. The subject is perhaps not very proper for poetry, and the poet was not sufficiently master of his subject; metaphysical morality was to him a new study, he was proud of his acquisitions, and, supposing himself master of great secrets, was in haste to teach what he had not learned....
Having exalted himself into the chair of wisdom he tells us much that every man knows, and much that he does not know himself; that we see but little, and that the order of the universe is beyond our comprehension, an opinion not very uncommon; and that there is a chain of subordinate beings “from infinite to nothing,” of which himself and his readers are equally ignorant. But he gives us one comfort which, without his help, he supposes unattainable, in the position “that though we are fools, yet God is wise.”
This Essay affords an egregious instance of the predominance of genius, the dazzling splendour of imagery, and the seductive powers of eloquence. Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised. The reader feels his mind full, though he learns nothing; and when he meets it in its new array no longer knows the talk of his mother and his nurse. When these wonder-working sounds sink into sense and the doctrine of the Essay, disrobed of its ornaments, is left to the powers of its naked excellence, what shall we discover? That we are, in comparison with our Creator, very weak and ignorant; that we do not uphold the chain of existence; and that we could not make one another with more skill than we are made. We may learn yet more: that the arts of human life were copied from the instinctive operations of other animals; that if the world be made for man, it may be said that man was made for geese.* To these profound principles of natural knowledge are added some moral instructions equally new: that self-interest well understood will produce social concord; that men are mutual gainers by mutual benefits; that evil is sometimes balanced by good; that human advantages are unstable and fallacious, of uncertain duration and doubtful effect; that our true honour is not to have a great part, but to act it well; that virtue only is our own; and that happiness is always in our power.
Surely a man of no very comprehensive search may venture to say that he has heard all this before, but it was never till now recommended by such a blaze of embellishment or such sweetness of melody.
*From the Essay:
While Man exclaims, "See all things for my use!"
"See man for mine!" replies a pampered goose.
There's a well-turned and playful couplet for you.