Pope originally designed An Essay on Man, which comprises four separate epistles, as part of a work that was planned to be very much larger, his grand poetical enterprise, or “opus magnum”, as he called it in a letter to Swift, which was to offer a “system of ethics in the Horatian way”. Pope uses the word “man” throughout the poem in its abstract, generic sense to refer to human kind, rather than in its specific meaning to refer to male members of the species. This essay adopts the same usage. The initial overall design was for a group of moral poems, or “Ethic Epistles”, that dealt with human life and manners in a wide variety of aspects, including a book on the “Nature and State of Man” (An Essay on Man) and one o

This article in full comprises 3696 words but only the first 150 or so words are available to non-members.

All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors. To read about membership, please click here.

Published 13 March 2002

Citation: Gordon, Ian. "An Essay on Man". The Literary Encyclopedia. 13 March 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6675, accessed 20 November 2009.]