[Auden was an English poet and critic who belonged to the generation of British writers strongly influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud; he considered social and psychological commentary important functions of literary criticism. In the following excerpt, Auden offers a general appraisal of Pope's verse.]

As a poet, [Pope] was limited to a single verse form, the end-stopped couplet; his rare attempts at other forms were failures. To limitation of form was added limitation of interest. He had no interest in nature as we understand the term, no interest in love, no interest in abstract ideas, and none in Tom, Dick and Harry….

Pope was interested in three things, himself and what other people thought of him, his art, and the manners and characters of society. Not even Flaubert or Mallarmé was more devoted to his craft. "What his nature was unfitted to do, circumstance excused him from doing"; and he was never compelled to write to order, or to hurry over his work. He missed nothing. If he thought of something in the midst of the night, he rang for the servant to bring paper; if something struck him during a conversation, he would immediately write it down for future use. He constantly altered and rewrote, and always for the better. The introduction of sylphs and gnomes into the Rape of the Lock, and the conclusion of the Dunciad were not first thoughts….

The beauties and variety of his verse have been so brilliantly displayed by others, notably Miss Sitwell, that I shall confine myself to considering two popular ideas about Pope. That his language is either falsely poetic, or "a classic of our prose" and that his poetry is cold and unemotional. The question of poetic diction was the gravamen of the Romantic's charge. The answer is that Pope and his contemporaries were interested in different fields of experience, in a different "nature." If their descriptions of cows and cottages and birds are vague, it is because their focus of interest is sharp elsewhere, and equal definition over the whole picture would spoil its proportion and obscure its design. They are conventional, not because the poets thought that "the waterpudge, the pilewort, the petty chap, and the pooty" were unpoetic in their naked nature and must be suitably dressed, but because they are intended to be conventional, a backcloth to the more important human stage figures. When Pope writes in his preface to the Odyssey, "There is a real beauty in an easy, pure, perspicuous description even of a low action," he is saying something which he both believes and practises….

Those who complain of Pope's use of periphrasis, of his refusal to call a spade a spade, cannot have read him carefully. When he chooses he is as direct as you please.

So morning insects that in muck begun
Shine, buzz, and flyblow in the setting sun.

And when he does use a periphrasis, in his best work at least, it is because an effect is to be gained by doing so.

While China's earth receives the smoking tide.

To say that Pope was afraid to write, as Wordsworth might have written,

While boiling water on the tea was poured

is nonsense. To the microscopic image of tea-making is added the macroscopic image of a flood, a favourite device of Pope's, and the opposite kind of synthesis to Dante's, "A single moment maketh a deeper lethargy for use than twenty and five centuries have wrought on the emprise that erst threw Neptune in amaze at Argo's shadow."

There are places in Pope, as in all poets, where his imagination is forced, where one feels a division between the object and the word, but at his best there are few poets who can rival his fusion of vision and language.

Chicane in furs, and casuistry in lawn

Bare the mean heart that lurks beneath a star.

How hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie,
How new-born nonsense first is taught to cry,
Maggots half-formed in rhyme exactly meet,
And learn to crawl upon poetic feet.
Here one poor word an hundred clenches makes,
And ductile Dulness new maeanders takes;
There motley images her fancy strike,
Figures ill paired, and Similes unlike….

Like Dante, Pope had a passionate and quite undonnish interest in classical literature. The transformation of the heroic epic into The Rape of the Lock and the Dunciad, is not cheap parody; it is the vision of a man who can see in Homer, in eighteenth century society, in Grub Street, similarities of motive, character, and conduct whereby an understanding of all is deepened. Rams and young bullocks are changed to folios and Birthday odes, and

Could all our care elude the gloomy grave
Which claims no less the fearful than the brave

For lust of fame I should not vainly dare
In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war

becomes

O if to dance all night and dress all day,
Charmed the small pox, or chased old age away;
Who would not scorn what housewife cares produce,
Or who would learn an earthly thing of use?

Literature and life are once more happily married. We laugh and we love. Unlike Dryden, Pope is not a dramatic poet. He is at his best only when he is writing directly out of his own experience. I cannot feel that his Homer is anything but a set task, honourably executed: the diction gives it away. But show him the drawing-rooms where he longed to be received as a real gentleman, let him hear a disparaging remark about himself, and his poetry is beyond praise. The Essay on Man is smug and jaunty to a degree, until we come to Happiness and Fame

All that we feel of it begins and ends
In the small circle of our foes and friends.
To all beside as much an empty shade
An England living, as a Caesar dead.

Pope knew what it was to be flattered and libelled, to be ambitious, to be snubbed, to have enemies, to be short, and ugly, and ill, and unhappy, and out of his knowledge he made his poetry, succeeded, as Rilke puts it, in

transmuting himself into the words.
Doggedly, as the carver of a cathedral
Transfers himself to the stone's constancy.