AN ESSAY ON MAN: EPISTLE :
AN ESSAY ON MAN: EPISTLE I (1733-4) In his An Essay on Man, Alexender Pope turns to the philosophical which he hoped would crown his poetic career. Pope published An Essay on Man anonymously so as to wrong-foot his enemies, who were not sure whether to condemn it as Pope's, or to praise it as superior to anything Pope could have achieved. In four heroic-couplet Epistles addressed to the Tory politician Lord Bolingbroke, Pope attempts with cheerful optimism to "vindicate the ways of God to man", arguing that "WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT". Pope expounds the medieval and Renaissance concept of a "chain of being", with its primitive blend of theology and natural philosophy, and reconciles it uneasily with the modern empirical science of Sir Isaac Newton. The work becomes a kind of handbook of popular Enlightenment notions throughout Europe and has been extensively translated.
An Essay on Man expresses the Deist view that God can be apprehended through nature, and not only through revealed scriptures Epistle I makes significant observations on the nature and state of Man with respect to the universe. The poem introduces man as a "mighty maze" but not without a plan. The Epistle now goes on to vindicate the ways of God to Man: "Say first, of God above, or Man below, What can we reason, but from what we know? Of Man, what see we but station here, From which to reason, or to which we refer? Thro' worlds unnumber'dtho' the God be known, "T is ours to trace Him only in our own.
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