An Essay on Man
Princeton University Press, 21. jun. 2016 - 248 sider
A definitive new edition of one of the greatest philosophical poems in the English language
Voltaire called it "the most sublime didactic poem ever written in any language." Rousseau rhapsodized about its intellectual consolations. Kant recited long passages of it from memory during his lectures. And Adam Smith and David Hume drew inspiration from it in their writings. This was Alexander Pope's Essay on Man (1733–34), a masterpiece of philosophical poetry, one of the most important and controversial works of the Enlightenment, and one of the most widely read, imitated, and discussed poems of eighteenth-century Europe and America. This volume, which presents the first major new edition of the poem in more than fifty years, introduces this essential work to a new generation of readers, recapturing the excitement and illuminating the debates it provoked from the moment of its publication.
Echoing Milton's purpose in Paradise Lost, Pope says his aim in An Essay on Man is to "vindicate the ways of God to man"—to explain the existence of evil and explore man's place in the universe. In a comprehensive introduction, Tom Jones describes the poem as an investigation of the fundamental question of how people should behave in a world they experience as chaotic, but which they suspect to be orderly from some higher point of view. The introduction provides a thorough discussion of the poem's attitudes, themes, composition, context, and reception, and reassesses the work's place in history. Extensive annotations to the text explain references and allusions.
The result is the most accessible, informative, and reader-friendly edition of the poem in decades and an invaluable book for students and scholars of eighteenth-century literature and thought.
... e Last and Greatest Art: Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of
Alexander Pope (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984) Justus Lipsius,
Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. by John Stradling, ed. and intro. by Rudolf Kirk,
notes by ...
But this episode provoked a substantial defense of the poem by William
Warburton, who later worked with Pope to produce a last authorized text, with
extensive notes and commentary, in 1743. In the final years of Pope's life, and
after his ...
He does not doubt observable order, but notes that when he considers the
sphere of human actions, and the high incidence of the problem of calamitous
virtue (and its sister, the problem of prosperous vice), he takes the moral world as
... and the associated social assumptions of Locke's and Pope's Essays. 9 Harry
M. Solomon, e Rape of the Text: Reading and Misreading Pope's Essay on Man
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), notes of the poem that “we ...
155; see notes for a longer citation). ... Lessing and Mendelssohn note the
important difference between things being well and things being right, and
understand that Pope can only mean the latter because the ills he has
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An Essay on ManBrukerevaluering - Book Verdict
Pope's poem An Essay on Man—formulated to "vindicate the ways of God to man"—was one of the most widely disseminated and well-known publications of the 18th century, notably impacting Enlightenment ... Les hele vurderingen