Analysis on “An Essay on Man”
Analysis on “An Essay on Man”: Help
If you are writing analysis on “An Essay on Man”, you should keep in mind several simple rules of academic writing. Firstly, your essay should have a clear and specific topic. The topic should be expressed in a single thesis statement which is the last sentence of introductory paragraph. Secondly, the main body of an essay should be logically organized. You need to add transition sentences and phrases between the paragraphs to ensure smooth flow of ideas. Thirdly, conclusion section should summarize the key ideas of your essay. If you are looking for ideas for writing analysis on “An Essay on Man”, you may refer to the following excerpt. The following essay was written by our professional writer. If you want to get a custom written essay, you should use our custom college essay writing services. We can write an original essay for you in full accordance to the instruction points and requirements!
Analysis on “An Essay on Man”: Excerpt
The vicious or foolish characters are tortured, but the vice or folly is always measured against a proper, a 'correct' scale of human values, against a scale which Pope is always ready to state, to state precisely, and, as in the exciting fourth Epistle of the Essay on Man, to state at length. Indeed no other English poet (or letter-writer) puts and answers the question how to live with such sensitive and noble concern. The tone of this poetry (and this prose) must convince the reader that he is in the presence of one whose sense of virtue is as alert as the trembling, vivid eye one notes in his portraits.
Keats speaks of the 'snail-horn perception of beauty'. And Pope's perception of moral beauty, of moral depravity, and of all the subtleties compounded between them is a perception similarly tender. This is a quality rare indeed among satiric writers, and probably unique. There is certainly no other poet who combines the capacity exemplified in the character of Atticus with that exemplified, for instance, in Clarissa's speech opening Canto V of the Rape of the Lock or in any of the verses to Martha Blount: But, Madam, if the fates withstand, and you / Are destin'd Hymen's willing Victim too; Trust not too much your now resistless/ charms, / Those, Age or Sickness, soon or late disarms:/ Good humour only teaches charms to last, / Still makes new conquests, and maintains the past…
These poems are the most Virgilian poems of friendship in the language. And Pope's letters seem more concerned with friendship than with any other subject. He writes them usually 'in all friendly laziness'. He tells Swift: Now as I love you better than most I have ever met with in the world, and esteem you too the more, the longer I have compared you with the rest of the world; so inevitably I write to you more negligently, that is, more openly, and what all but such as love one another will call writing worse. Friendship was powerful indeed if it could make one write negligently who, like Ovid, had been born with literary finger tips. And turning back to the poetry, Pope is not simply the poet of Atossa or the references to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. If Sporus and Chartres are hated, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot, Berkeley and Allen, are praised.