Alexander Pope defends his practice in the…
1735 CE
Alexander Pope defends his practice in the genre of satire and attacks those who had been his opponents and rivals throughout his career in his poem Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, published on January 2, 1735, in London.
Both in composition and in publication, the poem has a checkered history.
In its canonical form, it is composed of four hundred and nineteen lines of heroic couplets.
Epistle to Arbuthnot is notable as the source of the phrase "damn with faint praise," used so often it has become a cliché or idiom.
Another of its notable lines is "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" (John Arbuthnot will die February 27, 1735, eight weeks after the poem is published.)
Known as a man of wit, Arbuthnot, formerly the physician of Queen Anne, had been a member of the Martinus Scriblerus Club, along with Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and John Gay.
Arbuthnot had written to Pope on July 17, 1734, to tell him that he had a terminal illness.
Pope, in a response dated August 2, indicates that he planned to write more satire, and on August 25 told Arbuthnot that he was going to address one of his epistles to him, later characterizing it as a memorial to their friendship.
In this year, Pope acknowledges authorship of An Essay on Man, published in 1734 as a rationalistic effort to use philosophy in order to "vindicate the ways of God to man" (l.16), a variation of John Milton's claim in the opening lines of Paradise Lost, that he will "justify the ways of God to men".
It is concerned with the natural order God has decreed for man.
Because man cannot know God's purposes, he cannot complain about his position in the Great Chain of Being (ll.33-34) and must accept that "Whatever IS, is RIGHT" (l.292), a theme that will be satirized by Voltaire in Candide (1759).
More than any other work, it will popularize optimistic philosophy throughout England and the rest of Europe.
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