L2L An Essay on Man (Epistle I)

“An Essay on Man” (Epistle I)

Alexander Pope

Leigh and P. T. survey the first epistle of Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century “An Essay on Man.” The poem was dedicated to the disgraced Lord Bolingbroke, and some say his ideas inspired Pope. Pope attempts to connect God and natural law to human affairs. Is he right? Or as Houseman says, “beer does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man”? Leigh and P. T. look into the matter.