1. Alexander Pope ( )

2. A voice of the Enlightenment
Pope defended the Enlightenment belief in rational thought and moderate action—values he believed would produce an ordered and harmonious society modeled on the harmony of the natural world.
Pope looked back on Roman and Greek classical literature as a guide to these values.
He articulated the voice of England’s cultural elite and saw himself as the preserver of classical values.

3. Although he was a Tory (conservative and royalist) by inclination, he didn’t hesitate to satirize the more trivial values of the upper class.
Pope’s ethic emphasizes social civility which included the qualities of personal respect and rationality.
Ethic: a. A set of principles of right conduct.
b. A theory or a system of moral values: "An ethic of service is at war with a craving for gain" (Gregg Easterbrook).

4. Other qualities Pope emphasizes are Nature, Wit, and Judgment.
Nature: God’s created world, manifest in the divine order, the great chain of being, through which the natural world functions. Pope believed that the true artist tries to express this balanced, divine order in his works.

5. Wit: intellectual quickness and liveliness, inventiveness, and the capacity to see resemblances between unlike things: emphasizes similes, metaphors, playful language, puns.
In An Essay on Criticism, Pope remarks:
“True wit is Nature to advantage dressed: What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.”

6. Judgment: the exercise of those critical faculties, both moral and aesthetic, that brings man into harmony with the universal principles of the natural world and with his fellow men.

7. The Heroic Couplet Pope employs the Heroic or Pentameter Couplet:
--two lines that rhyme
--each line always contains five feet
--each foot usually contains one unstressed and one stressed syllable, in that order

8. For Pope and his audience, the couplet form was proper and natural for poetry. There is a tension between the metre of the poem and the natural emphasis or rhythm we employ when speaking. The metre is the natural rhythm running underneath the lines and is like a natural, persistent heartbeat. What requires art or wit is the intonation of the speaking voice, the exercise of which relies on judgment. The metre doesn’t tell you which words to stress—it just gives you the beat. The speaker’s (or writer’s) judgment provides the right choice of which words to emphasize.

9. Light: a typical metaphor for Pope
Light: a typical metaphor for Pope. Light = divine reason, which is available to those who seek it, and which correctly guides judgment. In other words, divine reason is the light which guides the reasonable human being.

10. Another thing revealed in Nature is God’s infallible order: those who are trained to see it are saved from error by God’s gift of judgment. Those who are guide by their own taste only are doomed to error.
First follow Nature, and your judgement frame By her just standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchanged, and universal light, Life, force, and beauty, must. . . impart, At once the source, and end, and test of art.