[Edwards was an American educator who has written extensively on poetry and politics. In the following essay, originally published in his This Dark Estate: A Reading of Pope (1963), he discusses problems in reasoning in An Essay on Man, concluding that "no one could deny that the poem would be better if its argument were more consistently reasoned …[but its] poetic failure is the curious measure of its human success."]

Pope is shown confronting a difficult poetic problem in An Essay on Man (1729-1734). As an "official" argument for philosophical optimism the poem cannot avoid simplification and direct statement; yet there are signs in the verse that Pope was uncomfortable with didactic strategies. He was not a very gifted thinker, if by that word we mean someone capable of clear and sound consecutive reasoning; by accepting the didactic role, he incurred an obligation to be rational that he could not fulfill. Yet the Essay, even though it is unsound at its avowed center, cannot be dismissed simply as a failure. The poem is partly redeemed by just those aspects of temperament and sensibility that made Pope's didacticism unsuccessful. By this I mean that the didactic impulse (whether it originated in Pope or in Bolingbroke makes no difference) is thwarted in the poem partly by the views of experience and expression that I have called Augustan. Though the Essay lacks thoroughgoing doctrinal coherence, still in some important ways it succeeds as a poem, even at the expense of its philosophy. What we have, I think, is a case of sensibility opposing and finally killing doctrine, as Pope's grasp of real experience stubbornly resists the use of such experience as a vehicle for rational abstraction. But sensibility kills doctrine only that it may assert positive values of its own, values firmly rooted in direct apprehension of the beautiful complexity of actual things.

The Voice of God

In the opening address to Bolingbroke we seem, as has often been remarked, to overhear one of the participants in a conversation between well-bred Augustans. The contempt for the vulgarity of worldly aspirations in "leave all meaner things / To low ambition and the pride of Kings"; the discreet parenthetical admission that life is short and futile, followed by urbanely stoic determination to make the most of it; the action, an observant ramble through the woods and gardens of the world; the Chesterfieldian resolution to restrain mirth but to be "candid" about human folly whenever decorum permits—every detail works to define the speaker and his unheard companion as eighteenth-century gentlemen of leisure and cultivation. The extended metaphor of the world as a "Wild" or a "Garden" works nicely—in its rich variety the world exists to be explored by sophisticated men of sound judgment, who "expatiate" over it intellectually just as they range over their estates hunting beasts and birds. "Nature's walks" will mean more as the poem progress; Pope has his eye on actual nature at the same time that his inner eye contemplates a larger, more abstract nature. But what is most significant here is simply the decorum of tone with which the subject is introduced.

This tone of urbane detachment is conversational, but without any of the colloquial raciness of rhythm and idiom so common in the satires. "Awake, my St. John" is a rather lofty kind of informality, and in fact the conversational element in the passage soon is counterpointed by another sort of speech: "Say first, of God above, or Man below / What can we reason, but from what we know?" These lines may be addressed to Bolingbroke, posing a rhetorical question as prelude to discussing a topic on which they generally agree, but it is hard not to feel that Bolingbroke has lost most of his dramatic individuality and become something like the epic muse. The dramatic situation changes and Bolingbroke disappears for a time as Pope pays his ironic respects to the astronautical fancies of John Wilkins and the Royal Society and to the Lucretian image of the speculative philosopher as supernatural voyager. It is obviously impossible for ordinary human reason to achieve such clear perception of the universe, and the consequent irony in "thy pervading soul" indicates a shift of situation. The "thee" being addressed is no longer Bolingbroke but "Presumptuous Man." Conversation becomes oratory, a change predicted by the elevation of tone in the opening line; and it is at the oratorical level that the poem will mainly conduct its argument.

This shift of tone is of course not complete. The conversational beginning persists in the inner ear throughout the poem, providing an implicit context for the oratory. We are both Pope's equals, sharing Bolingbroke's gratification at having our own ideas expressed so handsomely for us, and also his pupils, resisting in our ignorant pride the messages of reason that are being delivered. The didactic poet runs the danger of not being able to justify his knowledgeable tone. He must sound just a little like God, which is all right when the subject is crop rotation or beekeeping, something in which his expertise (or lack of it) can be assessed; but if he ventures upon high speculation, where authority is a more uncertain matter, his voice may grow uncomfortably pontifical. Pope often does talk like God in the Essay. His subject commits him to saying that human consciousness cannot comprehend orders of being higher than its own, and yet he must himself at times speak as if the whole hierarchy were visible to him: "All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; / All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see." The frame of conversation eases some of this pontificality. Our double identity in the poem—as the speaker's peers and as his congregation—allows us to feel the full weight of the sermon even as we participate in its delivery. Although we take the preacher seriously, we usually can remember that he is not a fanatic but a gentleman like us.

Still, our suspicions are not wholly allayed by the interplay of tones. When the voice becomes markedly aloof and judicative we tend to distrust it, and it does so too frequently to allow complete reconciliation. Pope's decision to cast the Essay in the form of direct and "sincere" moralizing involved a considerable problem of rhetoric. Disinterested sincerity in Swift, for example, is almost always a sign of irony, as Martin Price notes:

The mask of impartiality, if it were not qualified by humor, was as much a questionable type as were those of partisan zeal. Constant claims of "modest proposals" to "universal benefit" were keys to pretentious and specious disinterestedness. "I burnt all my Lord—'s letters," Swift wrote to Betty Germain, "upon receiving one where he had used these words to me, 'all I pretend to is a great deal of sincerity,' which indeed, was the chief virtue he wanted."

Pope's later satires brilliantly demonstrate moral involvement; we are persuaded that he has chosen the right cause and that his vehemence marks a powerful and admirable indignation. The mask of cool disengagement, as worn by an Addison or a Chesterfield, seems unpleasantly lifeless when set next to Swift's or Pope's vigorous expressions of commitment. By choosing the disengaged man for his persona in the Essay Pope took on a difficult task, and the poem succeeds as much in the breaking of this dramatic fiction as in the observing of it.

Human Limits and Natural Harmony

The theme of the Essay on Man is the familiar one of reconciling the apparent chaos of natural experience with man's intimations of ultimate order. The traditional concept of the "correspondences," the analogies that connect the human world with the natural below and the divine above, operates in the poem as a distinctly uncertain possiblity. "Presumptuous Man" has questions to put to nature, but nature, while it seems in its variety to embody some principle of significant order, cannot tell him precisely what that order is. Both nature and man are ignorant, that is, but only man is cursed by the yearning to know. His "knowledge," as the passage on "the poor Indian" reveals, is essentially derived from mythmaking; the Indian simply projects, in all innocence, a "heaven" that is an idealized version of his known world. The results are not "true," but they serve the purposes of consolation, and the Indian, for all his pastoral naïveté, is happier than civilized man. It is the same predicament that so vexes Swift—one scarcely wants to be a fool, yet one suspects that ignorance and delusion are the only sources of serenity in a world which will not bear too much scrutiny.

Pope will not settle, however, for this view in its purest, most desperate form. Analogy can give a general sense of man's place in the scheme; man cannot look directly upward to the ultimate source of order, but he can look downward and make metaphors for his own lot from the relationships he perceives in the lower orders of the Scale of Being. But metaphor was not knowledge to the post-Hobbesian mind, and a steady skeptical undercurrent qualifies Pope's dogmatism. To assume, as Whitehead did, that Pope "was untroubled by the great perplexity which haunts the modern world," that he was "confident that the enlightened methods of modern science provided a plan adequate as a map of the 'mighty maze,'" is to ignore the complexity of Pope's view, as the lines on Newton show. Newton could answer all questions except the most important ones, those that concern the "movement of his Mind," "his own beginning, or his end." The irony places science in the right human perspective—Newton's unfolding of natural law must be contemplated in relation to his inability even to "describe," much less "explain," his own position in a universe of time and change.

This criticism of "reason" becomes explicit in the rest of Epistle II. It is a mistake to view the poem through the Victorian lens of "an age of prose and reason." As Professor Lovejoy observes, the most influential authors of the eighteenth century

made a great point of reducing man's claims to "reason" to a minimum, and of belittling the importance of the faculty in human existence; and the vice of "pride" which they so delighted to castigate was exemplified for them in any high estimate of the capacity of the human species for intellectual achievement, or in any of the more ambitious enterprises of science and philosophy, or in any moral idea which would make pure reason (as distinguished from natural "passions") the supreme power in human life.

One of the strongest forces drawing Pope away from a simple confidence in reason is his understanding that like any human faculty, it operates within the confines of "the lurking principle of death." The phrase appears only as a simile within a passage whose main subject is the power of a "ruling passion" to undermine mental health; but the idea of life being a gradual dying reminds us of that area of the whole scheme which reason cannot investigate. Reason has its value, but Pope takes the Platonic view of it as "guard," not "guide," in a world whose springs of action are passionate.

In short, all that man can know about the processes of time and change are their fragmentary effects on nature and himself. His sense of his own identity, which he yearns to define in relation to these processes, must remain disconnected and dim. There is thus a tragic paradox in Pope's use of the Scale of Being, which has lost its former metaphoric potency as a true ladder by which man might transcend his earthly condition. The concept suggests that man is a part of a cosmic perfection, but he can never experience that perfection while he remains man. The problem for the moralist lay in man's discontent with his lot. If it is a condition of his middle status, how can he be censured for feeling discontent? And yet, the whole tenor of the poem insists, it is disastrous to him to feel it! Analogy is not a solution; to know something by analogy is painfully unlike knowing it by experience, and it is for experience of perfection that man yearns. But Pope's job in the Essay is to forbid despair; he evades this impasse, not very consistently, by occasionally giving ground before the theological pressure that bears on his position: "Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar; / Wait the great teacher Death, and God adore!" While one may "adore" perfection in this world, only in some world to come can one know it—if then.

Such difficulties in defining the ultimate reality lead Pope's sermon to its essentially negative center. Whatever man should be in this world, he should at least not be proud. He is neither the center nor the master of nature. The dangers of pride are clear in I, where the ironies rebuke the arrogant anthropocentrism of supposing that the creatiorr exists to serve man and mirror his feelings; it is equally clear in this fine "anti-pastoral" passage:

Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings?
Joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings:
Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat?
Loves of his own and raptures swell the note …
The hog, that plows not nor obeys thy call,
Lives on the labours of this lord of all.

The couplets play off the imagined nature invented by human pride against the real nature which exists as much for its own purposes as for man's. The natural world is full of life and feeling, but it is independent of "this lord of all." But there are consolations in man's position:

Nature is not responsive to man, but man is responsive to nature in a way that no merely natural creature can be. Through his unique gifts of compassion and esthetic appreciation he can penetrate into nature and so in a sense participate in it. He achieves a moral dignity that no other creature can have, but by submitting to, not dominating over, the rest of creation. He is in fact a part of nature, though not in the way he would like to be. He is "Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot, / To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot." While his place in the Scale involves painful complexities of feeling from which the lower orders are free, he can nonetheless relate his own life and death to the rhythms of nature. The simile denies man's cherished illusions of freedom, even as it offers compensation in vegetable simplicity. Although reason distinguishes man from the other creatures, the "fruits" of virtue grow from "savage stocks"—the "wild Nature" working at man's roots is ultimately the same nature that gives productive life (and death) to the nonhuman creation.

The analogies of nature thus point down and not up. Man will find his place in the scheme not by yearning for higher status but by accepting his relationship with the lower creatures. Still, to know that man and nature are parts of a single order is not to resolve man's yearning for a direct, intimate bond with the things of this world. In Epistle III Pope postulates such a bond, in the pastoral innocence of Eden or the Golden Age from which man fell. Despite Hobbes, "the state of Nature was the reign of God." Human history has represented a decline from this primal perfection, as man created the social arts, commerce, secular government, and ultimately tyranny and superstition through the exercise of reason. These inventions stemmed from natural promptings to imitate the lower creatures, and thus were not originally wrong; the turning point, the beginning of man's alienation from nature, came when superstition replaced "charity" with "zeal" and secular power no longer had to reflect a spiritual order that was fundamentally benevolent. Faced with such chaos, man was "Forc'd into virtue thus by Self-defence"; through the inspired examples of the poet and the lawgiver the "shadow," if not the "image," of true divinity was rediscovered, and secular organization again became a metaphor for the great hierarchy of nature. The pyramids of "Beast, Man, or Angel" and of "Servant, Lord, or King" regained their congruence, with each order topped by the single point which is God.

Epistle III does not of course afford a very satisfying account of moral history. Nor is it poetically the strongest section of the Essay. Some of Pope's metaphors ring false; how true is it to say, for instance, that the "Ant's republic" provided a model for human society, or even (reading not historically but "mythically," as we probably should) that it affords a very enlightening analogy? Pope has his difficulties in leading the poem in a positive direction, for all the assurance of his tone. Yet in the great passage on social harmony he comes as close as he can to solving the problem of the whole poem, through an Augustan appeal to the traditional concept of the concordia discors. Harmony is simply a special condition of discordance, and as Maynard Mack observes, the metaphor's power in the Essay stems from a doubleness associated with the figure from earliest classical times: "the image brought together in one perspective man's present suffering and his faith, the partial and the whole views; [and suggested] that in some higher dialectic than men could grasp the thesis and antithesis of experienced evil would be resolved." One may wish that the image were more solidly developed out of the argument of Epistle III, but its power is undeniable. The stability of even the best human society resides in a rather precarious balance of stresses, but that even a limited harmony is conceivable in the secular world consoles us if we take that harmony as an echo, however faint, of the grand but unhearable cosmic composition. The original intimacy of man and nature vanished when man lost his innocence, but in a social order that is properly attuned to the order of nature, a measure of intimacy can be restored.

The Power of Time

This is as close as the Essay comes to expressing anything like "optimism" in our ordinary sense of the word. It is not very close, we see, when we ponder Pope's implicit comparison of the poem with Paradise Lost. The Fall of Man was marked by his subjugation to Sin and Death, which is to say to time and its fundamental enmity to human value. It is the fact of time, Professor Lovejoy argues, that ultimately invalidates the concept of the Scale of Being:

A world of time and change…is a world which can neither be deduced from nor reconciled with the postulate that existence is the expression and consequence of a system of "eternal" and "necessary" truths inherent in the very logic of being. Since such a system could manifest itself only in a static and constant world, and since empirical reality is not static and constant, the "image" (as Plato called it) does not correspond with the supposed "model" and cannot be explained by it. Any change whereby nature at one time contains other things or more things than it contains at another time is fatal to the principle of sufficient reason.

Milton reconciles a temporal world to cosmic immutability by appealing to the orthodox concept of Redemption: because of the sacrifice of Christ, man can look forward to an eventual translation out of time into a realm of being which is perfectly changeless. The Essay on Man seems at times to yield to theological pressure, but Pope must generally exclude specific Christian doctrine. Whether or not he believed in the redemption of souls, in the Essay his subject is not eternity, which cannot be known, but this world and how to endure it. And the possibilities of earthly experience seem far from cheerful.

Epistle IV is especially rich in allusions to death, which strikes capriciously, without regard for "justice." Even though by Pope's time the idea of an impersonal, mechanistic universe must have seemed considerably less terrible than it had to Shakespeare or Donne, the concept still could not have been a very comfortable one to entertain. Pope in fact does not entertain it fully; his rhetoric is addressed to the enormous task of making natural impersonality a source of comfort. Falkland, Turenne, and Sidney did not die because they were virtuous; nature cannot recognize either virtue or vice. But because the universe does not observe moral law, as men know it, does not mean that it obeys no law: "Think we, like some weak Prince, th' Eternal Cause / Prone for his fav'rites to reverse his laws?" The answer is "no"—the analogy of earthly order to supernal points out the weakness of the former only to assert the consoling perfection of the latter.

But this appeal to the "externalist pathos," the emotional power of the idea of immutability upon man's sense of his own involvement in time, cannot fully subdue the sobering fact of human mortality:

What's Fame? a fancy'd life in others breath,
A thing beyond us, ev'n before our death.
Just what you hear, you have, and what's unknown
The same (my Lord) if Tully's or your own.
All that we feel of it begins and ends
In the small circle of our foes or friends.

In this paraphrase of The Temple of Fame Pope again sees personal fame as sorry compensation for the necessity of dying. The lines, to be sure, state a positive view of personal relations, which Pope always cherished: "The only pleasure which any one either of high or low rank must depend upon receiving," he wrote to Ralph Allen, "is in the Candour or Partiality of Friends and that Smaller Circle we are conversant in." But this is tacit recognition that the pleasures of friendship are fleeting; they are valuable, they are in fact all that one has, but like everything else they will soon pass. Nor is wisdom any more reliable. When Pope returns to gentlemanly conversation with Bolingbroke, it is only to place rueful emphasis on the futility of "Parts superior." Wisdom leads finally to frustration and loneliness:

Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land?
All fear, none aid you, and few understand.
Painful preheminence! yourself to view
Above life's weakness, and its comforts too.

As wise man, Bolingbroke stands as symbol of man's dissatisfaction with his mixed nature and his ambiguous role in creation. The cost of intelligence is fearfully high: "Tis but to know how little can be known."

Hierarchy and Experience

The description of Bolingbroke has implications for the reader as well. Pope's rhetorical aim has been to put us in Bolingbroke's position, to improve our understanding so as to reveal how limited understanding must be. It is flattering to be admitted to such company, but the reader's new point of view is a difficult one—the "optimism" of the poem involves a serious recognition of its own limitations and of the oppositions that are all too likely to overcome it. But Pope's "official" theme will not permit so complex a view to prevail, and this inhibition leads to a crucial poetic difficulty. In Section vi of Epistle IV he undertakes to demolish "the false scale of Happiness" that prevents most men from understanding their roles in the true scale of Being. "External goods" cannot prevent "human Infelicity"—"the perfection of Virtue and Happiness consists in a conformity to the ORDER OF PROVIDENCE here, and a resignation to it here and hereafter." The trouble is that the false scale, since one knows it through immediate experience, lends itself more readily to poetic particularization than does the hypothetical, unexperienced "true" hierarchy.

The Essay both faces up to the difficult facts of human experience and attempts to make them bearable by assigning them functions in a hierarchical order. An appeal to hierarchy draws its rhetorical power from the useful changes of name that are made possible, and we not that Pope's arguments usually hinge on such redefinition:

Respecting Man, whatever wrong we call,
May, must be right, as relative to all.

Cease then, nor ORDER Imperfection name.

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee.

Modes of Self-love the Passions we may call.

Know then this truth (enough for Man to know)
"Virtue alone is Happiness below."

Man, that is to say, tends to call things by their "wrong" names, and in so doing he confirms his own unhappiness, since he cannot make his vocabulary jibe with any consoling conceptual scheme of order. God, however, calls things by their "right" names. If man can translate his words for experiences into a vocabulary that fits an imaginative hierarchy extending beyond the limits of his knowledge, most of his anxiety about the human condition will turn out to have been the result of terminological muddles.

Like any example of sophisticated rhetoric, then, the Essay draws much of its persuasive force from a view of language that is fundamentally magical. The translation of our names for experiences into a new vocabulary is a therapeutic act, for to change the name is to change the "fact"—or at least to make it bearable—by providing a new context of ideas and feelings in which to contemplate it. Pope again is God, for he knows the right names. At the same time, however, this transformation of terms adds to our sense that the poem is "enclosed" by the speaking voice of an individual human being with whom we have a particular social relationship. The semantic shifts appeal to common sense: we share with Pope a firm identity within a community of intelligence and taste, and so he can confidently invite us to agree with him about names, since a defining characteristic of a community is the mutual acceptance of "proper" vocabularies. For example, we share his amusement at the Neo-Platonists who call "quitting sense" "imitating God" Like "Eastern priests," they are somehow exotic, not a part of the community, and his manner of addressing us defines us as persons who share his belief that "sense" plays a vital part in any activity, religion not excepted. Once we have agreed about the right name for one kind of experience, we are inclined to accept the speaker's judgment about names in cases which are further from communal assumptions. Although the tone of such transformations is usually didactic, it is softened by our sense that we have come to occupy much the same ground from which Pope speaks.

But Pope's appeal to an explicit hierarchy of values involves him in poetic difficulties. In the Essay he expresses the complexity of human experience in a world that is at best indifferent to man; but he also attempts to resolve complexity into simplicity by relating experience to a predefined system of absolute values. In passages like Pride's speech in Epistle I there is no poetic problem, since the "right" attitude is developed out of an initial "wrong" view which is nevertheless fairly (even beautifully) expressed. Both complexity and simplicity are there, in the verse, and the adjustment between them is dramatized as argument. But as the poem draws to its close, Pope must increasingly derogate the false scale in order to emphasize the finality of the true one, as in the passage on the need for human love to "rise from Individual to the Whole":

Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
The centre mov'd, a circle strait succeeds,
Another still, and still another spreads,
Friend, parent, neighbor, first it will embrace,
His country next, and next all human race….

Pope has no better luck than any other eighteenth-century moralist in bridging the gap between self-love and social. The metaphor seems arbitrary—Addison would have called the play on "wake" and "stir" an example of false wit, dependent upon "resemblance of words" rather than of ideas, and there is nothing else to persuade us that self-love and pebbles are analogous—and it seems positively muddled unless we exclude the entire metaphorical vehicle from the "it" which embraces friends, parents, and the like. This passage is the climax of Pope's final affirmation of the true scale, and it simply does not work when we measure it against the Johnsonian description of the fate of the worldly, the great "glory, jest, and riddle" section that begins Epistle II, or any of the other passages in which Pope treats human experience with full respect for its complexity. When he rises from the individual to the whole something unfortunate happens to his verse.

The trouble seems due not only to Pope's weakness in rational argument but also to the nature of his subject. Whitehead said that both the Greek and medieval Christian views of nature were essentially "dramatic," which is to say they supposed a nature that worked toward purposes which could in some way be understood by human beings and that included human experience in its operation. The nature Pope has to work with is a very different one. He can deal dramatically with experiential reality in all its complexity, but in the Essay he must also transcend experience to knowledge of permanence and order; and since his "climate of opinion" presupposes a cosmos which is not dramatic but mechanistic, and thus largely foreign to human experience, his invocations of supernatural order are seldom fully convincing. When he can find in the natural world some evidence of the Scale—when he deals with the "esthetic" order his senses perceive—the Essay achieves its great poetic triumphs by fusing rhetoric and imaginative particularity. At such moments metaphor functions meaningfully, for the grand tenor is elucidated by solidly realized vehicles. But when natural experience is left behind in the attempt to prove that one knows what one insists is beyond knowledge, an attempt that must rely on rhetoric alone, the Essay loses much of its power. Mechanism is not only unattractive as an idea, it is also nearly impossible to dramatize in experiential terms. It is immediate experience that sustains Pope's Augustan mediations, and when doctrinal considerations exert their thinning or confusing tendencies on the experiential vehicle, he shows his weakness in the kind of poetic reasoning that a Dryden or a Wordsworth might bring off. His tendency to resort to conventional pietism illustrates this weakness. He tries to soften the concept of mechanism by hinting that the Christian God is at the controls, but this scrambles his argument; for example, at the end of the poem, when he declares that virtue is not only the sole source of earthly happiness but also a way to ascend to God, we uneasily feel that he has come close to contradicting his earlier assertion that the quality of human life, as man knows it, has no relevance to the ultimate reality. But the main problem is a literary and not just a logical one. It is not that Pope tries to make us know what he himself has called unknowable, but that the quality of the knowledge we receive is flawed by his inability to manage an abstract poetic idiom. When he treats the "true Scale" his language is less rich, less interesting, and above all less intelligible than when he expresses the perplexing imperfections of actual experience. His sensibility was attuned to the concrete, the immediate, and the Essay is not fully alive at the moments when its oratory loses touch with natural particulars.

The poem finally seems most interesting when read not as philosophy but as an expression of a conflict between views of reality as excitingly terrible and as ultimately orderly and peaceful. In such a reading one sees Pope as a man whose strong sense of the value of order makes experienced disorder a dreadful thing to consider, and who yearns for an imaginative myth of cosmic immutability to sustain and console him. The myth does not work perfectly, to be sure; when the poetic speaker invokes a hierarchy that he has not fully grasped imaginatively, the poem falters, regaining its stride only when he returns to the world he can experience directly. But another kind of drama emerges from this conflict of experience and speculation, a drama in which a human being tries out ways of coming to terms with his situation and finds that though none are entirely adequate some work better than others. A man who was wholly convinced by his own vision of order would not need to test it so often against actuality; Pope's poetic concern for real things and real feelings (another way of saying his humanity) refuses to surrender to his speculations, and the result is poetry. The poetry is intermittent, to be sure. When Mr. Mack calls the Essay on Man the greatest speculative poem in English between Paradise Lost and The Prelude, we think as much of the decline such poetry suffered in the eighteenth century as of Pope's achievement. No one could deny that the poem would be better if its argument were more consistently reasoned, if the didactic impulse were more cogently realized. But such "intentional" success would have taken the Essay even further from the Augustan mode's complex adjustment of ideal and actual, and the poem's poetic failure is the curious meausre of its human success.