Tom Jones

Argumentative Emphases in Pope’s

The subject of this chapter is the way in which changes of mind in Pope’s presentation of An Essay on Man impact upon the philosophy it offers us. The history of the poem’s composition and revision is rich and complex, with the movement of large parts of text from one position to another, and local interventions into lines that make central assertions. This chapter focuses on local rather than broader organizational changes, but will try to suggest that consideration of the poem as an evolving text shows that slight presentational changes are argumentatively very significant, and that they also contribute to the distinctive scope of Pope’s poetico-philosophical argument. Thinking about the poem in this way lends weight to one perennial response to it: its defence of order, fixity and a providential scheme that nevertheless admits the force of chaos, flux and contingency. Earlier in his career, Pope presented himself as having a claim to be a poet only because he possessed ‘the power of rejecting his own thoughts’, a claim that suggests he is able to isolate that thought which it is his fixed intention to present in his text.1 Yet An Essay on Man itself is the co-presence of different thoughts, and of different paths through the conceptual possibilities of the moment. That is what the poem’s textual evolution illustrates of its argumentative tendencies.