Creativity, Singularity, Ethics in Pope's Essay on Criticism

Abstract

This paper discusses Pope’s Essay on Criticism in terms of Derek Attridge’s theory of creativity. It argues that Pope’s text is fundamentally based on the same commitment to the other that Attridge describes as constitutive of the singularity of literature and hence the 300-year-old Essay is a vital text which communicates itself to the present in significant ways. The success of poetry for Pope depends primarily on an appropriate relation to nature and the first chapter of this paper argues that the way Pope describes this relation is very similar to Attridge’s description of the relation to the other. The three subsequent chapters discuss how Pope’s concept of “expression” continues this theme and describes the pitfalls as well as the success of relating to nature as the other. The last two sections discuss the Essay’s treatment of the rules. It is shown that the way the rules are presented in the Essay reflects Pope’s fundamental ethical commitment no less than his concepts of nature and “true expression” do.