SOURCE: “Fair Art's ‘Treach'rous Colours’: The Fate of ‘Gen'rous Converse’ in An Essay on Criticism,” in Quests of Difference: Reading Pope's Poems, The University Press of Kentucky, 1986, pp. 16-38.

In the following essay, Atkins identifies a number of thematic relations between reading, language, and texts in An Essay on Criticism, focusing on the differences among them that structure and unify the poem.

How better to begin a critical reading of Pope's poems than by attending to what he writes about reading? Though he thematizes reading most prominently in the moral epistles and satires of the 1730s, Pope's first major poem, An Essay on Criticism, already offers clear insight into a range of related issues. Here Pope treats not only reading but also language, the relation of language to thought, the relation of readers to texts, and much more. In discussing the Essay, I shall focus on this matter...