ALEXANDER POPE Alexander Pope was certainly the greatest poet of the Age of Reason whose poetry served

as an ideal for the writers of the 18th c. His idea of a prefect world,ordered Universe and mans preordered position in a universe was the general idea of the century in which he wrote. He had very high respect for the poets of Greece and Rome called the Ancients and believed that they had reached perfection in their form and style and that they established certain rules of writing which should be followed.According to him,the best way to write was to imitate Nature which was a prefectly ordered plan of God ,created according to certain rules which man should not try to disobey. AN ESSAY ON MAN:EPISTLE I Epistle-a formal word for letter. Popes essay is a formal essay,its written in heroic couplet ( 2 lines ,each line 10 sylables). The Essay on Man consists of ten epistles that are addressed to Lord Bolingbroke and the Earl of Shaftesbury who preached rationalism and tolerance and worked out a system of morality which was founded on a conviction that man is fundamentally good,desires happiness of others and can distinguish instinctively between good and evil,the beautiful and the ugly. There are three main issues that Pope talks about in his essay.First,the poet evokes a timeless vision of humanity in which the universe is connected to a great chain of being that extends from God to the tiniest form of life.Pope gets the message across that humans must accept their position in this Great Chain of Being which is at a middle stage between the angels and the beasts of the world.If we are able to accomplish this then we potentially could lead happy and virtious lives.Secondly,Pope discusses Gods plan in which evil must exist for the sake of the greater good,a paradox not fully understandable by human reason.Thirdly,the poem accuses human beings of being proud and impious.Pope feels that man claims more insight into the nature of existence than he posesses. All partial evil,universal good, All dicord , harmony not understood. those are the lines taken from Epistle I of this essay where Pope tried to explain the existence of evil in the perfectly created world.He presents an idea or his view of the Universe;he says that no matter how imperfect,complex,and disturbing the Universe appears to be,it functions in a rational fashion according to the natural laws. The natural laws consider the Universe as a whole a perfect work of God.To humans it appears to be evil and imperfect in many ways;however,Pope points out that this is due to our limited mindset and limited intellectual capacity.So,evil appears as a consequence of the the limited intellect of man which can perceive only a tiny portion of this order and can experience only partial truths.Popes justification for so much imperfection in the world created by a perfect being is based on the Principle of Plenitude(God sacrified perfection to plant diversity). Gods aim in creating was not human happiness,but maximum plenitude with order. Know thyself,presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. here Pope defends the idea of perfectly created world and the great chain of being and describes mans preordered place in it. God is perfect and he created a prefectly ordered world and mans position in it is in the middle between God (reason) and the beasts (chaos).Man must be cconscious of hs insignificant position and submit.This Popes picture of man as an imperfect being whose potential was limited and the glorification of the status quo had social

implications because the social order (class order) was believed to be divinely ordered just as the natural order. AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM This is a didactic essay whose goal is to teach the others how to write good works and good critics as well. It is a formal essay written in heroic couplet and dealing with the universal social issue,universal truth.The views he presents are the views of classicism:he preaches correctness in literary composition, filling and polishing phrases and lines until the perfection is reached.The main theme is the reaction against pride and ambition of human beings. First follow Nature and your judgement frame by her just standard,which is still the same.- these lines are from the essay where Pope starts with the most important concept in the 18th century and that is Nature whose role was to introduce order,unity and proportion in poetry and art.Critics and poets were referring to Nature as their standard and indentified it with the Ancients who were considered to be the best imitators of Nature,so to copy them was the same as to copy Nature.The Ancients were thought to have reached perfection in form,and if a poet wanted to write good poetry or to criticize he had to follow certain rules.The writer had to follow the conventions appropriate to each genre,to model his work on classical examples,to serve some kind of moral function and encourage an awarness of good sense and taste. True wit is nature to advantage dressed, what oft was thought,but never so well expressed.-these lines were taken as a defenition of poetry and literary theory in the Age of Reason.Popes intention was to show that if you knew the rules you could write correctly according to the strict rules that existed in literary theory and nature.In poetry writers modify their thoughts-the poet dresses his thoughts into metaphor or irony in order to make them pleasing to his readers.The poet should express sth that is general,universal,never changing and absolute.His aim is prefection in the expression of the obvious. THE RAPE OF THE LOCK A.Pope was also known as the great satirits of his time.He saw reason and Nature differently from the scientists and philosophers of that time.His criticism was set against two main targets: the new rationalism and the growing commercialism of life.For him human beings were far from being perfect but at the same time he didnt believe that rational philosophy could contribute to the moral improvement of human beings.The optimism of Pope best shows that it is possible to believe in the preordered place of man and at the same time be aware of his real life and his sinful nature. The most important satirical work of Pope is the Rape of the Lock which Pope wrote as a favour to a friend in order to reconcile two families which were actors of the real event.What Pope wanted was to criticize the growing commercialism of life(emphasis was on fashion,greed,vanity).It was written in a form of mock-epic often used by satirists in order to make fun of trivial subjects,but its purpose was not only to entertain but also to criticize the social surface of life.The poem is a mock because a true epic deals with the lives of male heroes connected to God and inspired by divine spirit to perform divine acts. In this case ,Pope chose a female as a hero of the the poem,a young lady of fashion called Belinda who becomes the victim of the the theft of a curl from her hair.Through the character of Belinda,Pope tried

to show and criticize the false conventions and values of the society in which he lived .Belinda is a young girl who is obsessed with her own beauty and very proud of it.She represents herself as a religious and educated girl but at the same time we discover that the Bible is the same as pots and poweder for her.The worry about the public disgrace after her lock had been cut off shows us that Belinda values external things above everything else. Another example of how little Pope appreciated the rules according to which the noblemen of his time lived is the way a young lord tried to defend Belindas honour over the card table instead as a real gentleman in a duel.The character of Clarissa actually represents the echo of the mind of the poet.She is the one that makes the moral of the poem, that outward beauty and appearance is transitory and what matters is the soul and inward beauty,good sense,virtue,good humour ,and merit.