SOURCE: “Trivializing An Essay on Man,” in The Rape of the Text: Reading and Misreading Pope's Essay on Man, University of Alabama Press, 1993, pp. 6-31.

In the following essay, Solomon details the historical development of the critical consensus that now regards An Essay on Man as a fundamentally flawed work.

If the question were asked, What ought to have been the best of Pope's poems?” Thomas De Quincey wrote, “most people would answer, the Essay on Man. If the question were asked, What is the worst? all people of judgement would say, the Essay on Man.”¹ Ours must be an age of judgment, for the current consensus is indisputable: An Essay on Man is fundamentally flawed. The textbook of eighteenth-century British literature most frequently used in American universities concludes: “To write sustainedly on Man in prose … calls for powers that few poets possess, and from the start Pope...