Alexander Pope - An Essay on Criticism

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Good-nature and good-sense must ever join;
To err is human, to forgive, divine.

Alexander Pope
'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call, But the joint force and full result of all.

Alexander Pope
What woeful stuff this madrigal would be,
In some starv'd hackney sonneteer, or me!
But let a lord once own the happy lines,
How the wit brightens! how the style refines!

Alexander Pope
Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend,
And rise to faults true critics dare not mend.
From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part
And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art.

Alexander Pope
Our judgments, like our watches, none
go just alike, yet each believes his own.

Alexander Pope
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Alexander Pope
We think our Fathers Fools, so wise we grow;
Our wiser Sons, no doubt, will think us so.

Alexander Pope
But where's the man who counsel can bestow,
Still pleas'd to teach, and yet not proud to know?

Alexander Pope
At every trifle take offense, that always shows great pride or little sense.

Alexander Pope
Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song, That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

Alexander Pope
First follow NATURE, and your Judgement frame
By her just Standard, which is still the same:
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright.
One clear, unchanged and universal light.

Alexander Pope
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar.
When Ajax strives, some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move slow.

Alexander Pope
Some have at first for wits, then poets passed,
Turned critics next, and proved plain fools at last.

Alexander Pope
All seems infected that th'infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.

Alexander Pope
Trust not yourself, but your defects to know, make use of every friend and every foe.

Alexander Pope
Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows; But when loud surges lash the sounding shore, The hoarse rough verse should like the torrent roar. When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, The line too labours, and the words move slow: Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main.

Alexander Pope
Where beams of imagination play,
the memory's soft figures melt away...

Alexander Pope
Expression is the dress of thought, and still Appears more decent as more suitable; A vile conceit in pompous words express'd, Is like a clown in regal purple dress'd.

Alexander Pope
A tree is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation-robes.

Alexander Pope
So modern 'pothecaries, taught the art By doctor's bills to play the doctor's part, Bold in the practice of mistaken rules, Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools.

Alexander Pope
With Pleasure own your Errors past,
And make each day a Critic on the last.

Alexander Pope
As some to church repair,
Not for the doctrine, but the music there.
These equal syllables alone require,
Though oft the ear the open vowels tire;
While expletives their feeble aid do join,
And ten low words oft creep in one dull line.

Alexander Pope
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Alexander Pope
Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,
Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.

Alexander Pope
Men must be taught as if you taught them not,
And things unknown proposed as things forgot.

Alexander Pope