Applying+Shepherd+to+Pope

Pope's "An Essay on Criticism" was hard to read for me. As I explained in another post, I could not ignore the rhythm and the rhyme, and these elements blocked my mind from hearing the meaning. Once I took it line by line, the meaning was not extremely difficult to derive from the words. But then I would have to take time to put together everything I took from the stanza and overall. What type of difficulty would Reginald Shepherd call it? There was, of course, lexical difficulty, and a bit of syntactical, but other than that I'm not sure. This is a poem, but I want to say it is mutated. The word essay could be tripping me up. I wish that it wouldn't have been named that. I suppose with poems it is alright to be immersed and experience a poem, but the words were fairly literal, which made the poetic form seem like a mask the essay was wearing.

Can anyone see any justification for writing this way, other than as an exercise for controlling writing and meaning at the same time? I don't believe that this was just an exercise Pope did for fun. To me it doesn't give anything to the literary work, only takes.1204075137

KLe, I had the same exact problems that you did with the rhymes; it was so hard for me to concentrate on the meaning, especially because there is virtually no emjambment, so that hard rhyme hits me in the face at the end of every line. It was also hard for me to see this as an essay; yes, it presents an argument, explains the two sides to it, and then challenges one side and defends the other like a prose-essay does, but it was almost hard for me to take it seriously. I admire Pope for pulling this off: it's a great achievement not only to write and essay in poetry form, but also to make it rhyme. However, he did seem to be trying to entertain with all his clever play on words and witty couplets intermingled into the essay. Good essay to me just dig into the subject and present convincing evidence to sway the reader to believe the point the writer is making. Not that Pope's doesn't give evidence or anything, but it does spend a lot of time entertaining.1204149877

I found that Pope's essay was even more convincing since he used the poetic form. It is clearly an essay and clearly a poem; it has every necessary element of each, so I will consider it to be both. When you think about it, how would this poem come across in prose, paragraph form? I think it would be decidedly less humorous and decidedly less convincing. It would be too easy to understand as a traditional essay, which is something that Shepherd brought up in his essay. If you think about it, his arguments are nothing new, and without the witty couplets, what would it be? Also, poetic form forces the reader to analyze it more closely than prose, and truly focus on his argument in a way that could not be accomplished in paragraph, prose form. user:PSp-c

On the most basic level, I can see a very good reason to write this particular piece of literature the way that he did. This is a safeguard against critics who want to call him a hypocrite. If a critic were to say that his criticism was poorly written, he could reply "Well this is not a prose critique; it is verse." On the other hand, a poetic critic who would say the poem lacked skilled writing would be rebuked by the argument: "This is not true poetry; this is a critique on the very profession in which you practice." Either way, everyone has to pay attention to him. At the same time, he is really adjusting criticism through this work. He writes that "The gen'rous critic fann'd the poet's fire." Pope is not condemning criticism; he is showing us a better way to do it; so that it might benefit poetry.

How does this relate to Shepherd's essay? That is hard to say. I disagree that there is lexical difficult in this poem; the only words that I did not understand were those that elated to the ancients. As for semantic difficulty, I will admit that this poem requires slow reading. But the individual ideas are not hard to grasp, once you figure out what he says. Syntactical difficulty is the most pressing form, but even that is not hard once we get into the rhythm of his writing. But it is difficult, and that is without a doubt what makes it interesting. Maybe the difficulty comes through many venues, and so we cannot pinpoint any particular problem. It is an interesting question... 1204167361