Alexander Pope, from Essay on Criticism

The present podcast is something of a deviation for Influential Lyrics.  Rather than focusing on a single, short, self-contained lyric poem, I'll be focusing today on an excerpt from a longer work called Essay on Criticism, written and published in the early 18th century by Alexander Pope.  My reasoning for this swerve is simple enough: there is plenty to take issue with in Pope's philosophy of poetry—and much of the poetry we'll be considering in the next few episodes is a reaction to the neo-classical formality so clearly exemplified by Pope—but a familiarity with, even an affinity for, Pope's technique offers as clear an understanding of the fundamentals of English prosody as you'll find anywhere.