SOURCE: "The Mighty Maze: An Essay on Man," in Alexander Pope, edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1986, pp. 37-50.

Edwards was an American educator who has written extensively on poetry and politics. In the following essay, originally published in his This Dark Estate: A Reading of Pope (1963), he discusses problems in reasoning in An Essay on Man, concluding that "no one could deny that the poem would be better if its argument were more consistently reasoned …[but its poetic failure is the curious measure of its human success."]

Pope is shown confronting a difficult poetic problem in An Essay on Man (1729-1734). As an "official" argument for philosophical optimism the poem cannot avoid simplification and direct statement; yet there are signs in the verse that Pope was uncomfortable with didactic strategies. He was not a very gifted thinker, if by that word we...