An Essay on Criticism

Alexander Pope suggests that the best poetry (and criticism) aligns itself both with literary conventions and with nature, by which he does not mean simply the natural world but rather the existing order of things. In fact, human wit and judgment themselves work within limits that are naturally designed:

Nature to all things fixed the limits fit,

And wisely curbed proud man’s pretending wit.

As on the land while here the ocean gains,

In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains;

Thus in the soul while memory prevails,

The solid power of understanding fails;

Where beams of warm imagination play,

The memory’s soft figures melt away (Lines 54-59).

This is an argument about understanding human limits, which are imposed by nature (an idea Pope underscores through the use of natural imagery). Pope further explains this balance between art and nature when he suggests that poetic rules are not artificial but rather derive from the order and reason of the world itself: These rules are “Nature methodized” because “Nature, like liberty is but restrained / By the same laws which first herself ordained” (Lines 89-90). In this sense, he sees art as acting like a mirror of nature, supported by human imagination but not supplanted by it (which would be impossible anyway, as the human mind itself is an element of nature).