Abstract
An Essay on Criticism (1711) is a poem (as well as an essay) and important critical commentary: poetry as criticism, criticism as poetry. It is also centrally concerned with the parts–whole problem, which Pope both discusses and embodies and whose incarnation he shows in a range of critical attitudes, judgments, and preferences. “Anti-sectarianism” functions as a major structuring device in this work. In particular, Pope exposes the various kinds of “part-iality” with which we go about reading and evaluating and rendering judgment concerning what we read. Here, Pope dramatizes the position he described later as being “Slave to no sect,” committed to neither one “part-y” nor another.
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Notes
Alexander Pope, Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1969). For the sake of convenience and accessibility, I use this edition wherever possible.
Aubrey Williams, Introduction, the Twickenham Edition of The Poems of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1, Pastoral Poetry and “An Essay on Criticism,” ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1961), 197–235.
Ibid., 217.
Ibid., 218.
See Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” The Art of the Essay, ed. Lydia Fakundiny (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 222–30
C.S. Lewis, quoted in Clara Claiborne Park, Rejoining the Common Reader: Essays, 1962–1990 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1991), 138–39
E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1967).
T.S. Eliot, Foreword, Thoughts for Meditation: A Way to Recovery from Within, sel. and arr. N. Gangulee (London: Faber and Faber, 1951).
See my recent discussion of Dryden’s essay-poem in Literary Paths to Religious Understanding: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 15–42.
William Empson, “Wit in the Essay on Criticism,” The Structure of Complex Words (New York: New Directions, 1951), 84–100.
T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), 42–53.
Ronald Paulson, Theme and Structure in Swift’s “Tale of a Tub” (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1960), 225.
Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 45.
“Imperfect Critics,” The Sacred Wood, 33.
See T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets” and “Lancelot Andrewes,” Selected Essays, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 281–91, 341–53.
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© 2013 G. Douglas Atkins
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Atkins, G.D. (2013). “So vast is Art, so narrow Human Wit”: Subordinating Part to Whole in An Essay on Criticism. In: Alexander Pope’s Catholic Vision: “Slave to no sect”. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137344786_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137344786_2
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