SOURCE: “Augustan Literary Tenets,” in A Preface to Pope, Longman Group Ltd., 1976, pp. 86-108.

In the following essay, Gordon explains common eighteenth-century literary conventions in the context of Pope's poetry, highlighting his Essay on Criticism.

A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit With the same Spirit that its Author writ, 

An Essay On Criticism, 1711, (233-4)

Any age makes certain intellectual and cultural assumptions about itself which seem dated, and sometimes totally foreign, to succeeding ages, but which come almost unconsciously to the age itself. Any twentieth-century writer, for example, assumes that his audience is familiar with Freudian or Marxist ideas. He refers to the Oedipus complex or to the class struggle without having to explain what he means. Such ideas form an area of allusion from which a modern writer freely draws, and about which he is sure of his reader's familiarity. But in two hundred...