An Essay on Man

It was common at that time for writers to dedicate their work to noble patrons. Pope dedicates An Essay on Man to an aristocrat by the name of Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke. In doing so, he also urges Bolingbroke to follow him in leaving behind base ambition and the petty, unimportant things of this world to examine what really matters: the nature of man in all its fascinating complexity.

In the opening to the poem, Pope is setting out his stall; his purpose is to justify God's divine plan and man's pivotal role within it. Man is part of the great chain of being. His role as a vital link in that chain has been ordained by God, and so man must accept his position in the great scheme of things. Pope invites Bolingbroke to join him in his great endeavor of justifying God's ways to man.

The opening lines of Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Man” are constructed in the form of a dedicatory epistle to Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke (“my St. John”). In these lines, Pope sets forth the task of the poem as looking over humankind, and seeing in the apparent complexity and disorder of human life, and in the plenitude of nature, a divine plan. Although others may see the world as chaotic, by showing it ordered according to Providence, Pope’s poem with “vindicate the ways of God to man” by showing that what appear like an unkempt wilderness is actually a cosmos. The passage uses exploration of a physical landscape as a metaphor for an intellectual adventure,