The first of these
epistles appeared in 1733. Pope, being apparently nervous on his first
appearance as a philosopher, withheld his name. The other parts followed
in the course of 1733 and 1734, and the authorship was soon avowed. The
Essay on Man is Pope's most ambitious performance, and the one by which
he was best known beyond his own country. It has been frequently
translated, it was imitated both in France and Germany, and provoked a
controversy, not like others in Pope's history of the purely personal
kind.
The Essay on Man professes to be a theodicy. Pope, with an echo of the
Miltonic phrase, proposes to
Vindicate the ways of God to man.
He is thus attempting the greatest task to which poet or philosopher can
devote himself--the exhibition of an organic and harmonious view of the
universe. In a time when men's minds are dominated by a definite
religious creed, the poet may hope to achieve success in such an
undertaking without departing from his legitimate method. His vision
pierces to the world hidden from our senses, and realizes in the
transitory present a scene in the slow development of a divine drama. To
make us share his vision is to give his justification of Providence.
When Milton told the story of the war in heaven and the fall of man, he
gave implicitly his theory of the true relations of man to his Creator,
but the abstract doctrine was clothed in the flesh and blood of a
concrete mythology.
In Pope's day the traditional belief had lost its hold upon men's minds
too completely to be used for imaginative purposes.
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