an essay on criticism a little learning is a dangerous thing

• Ask LitCharts AI
• Discussion Question Generator
• Essay Prompt Generator
• Quiz Question Generator

• Literature Guides
• Poetry Guides
• Shakespeare Translations
• Literary Terms

An Essay on Criticism Summary & Analysis by Alexander Pope

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism" seeks to lay down rules of good taste in poetry criticism, and in poetry itself. Structured as an essay in rhyming verse, it offers advice to the aspiring critic while satirizing amateurish criticism and poetry. The famous passage beginning "A little learning is a dangerous thing" advises would-be critics to learn their field in depth, warning that the arts demand much longer and more arduous study than beginners expect. The passage can also be read as a warning against shallow learning in general. Published in 1711, when Alexander Pope was just 23, the "Essay" brought its author fame and notoriety while he was still a young poet himself.

• Read the full text of “From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing”

The Full Text of “From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing”

1 A little learning is a dangerous thing;

2 Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:

3 There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

4 And drinking largely sobers us again.

5 Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,

6 In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts,

7 While from the bounded level of our mind,

8 Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,

9 But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise

10 New, distant scenes of endless science rise!

11 So pleased at first, the towering Alps we try,

12 Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky;

13 The eternal snows appear already past,

14 And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;

15 But those attained, we tremble to survey

16 The growing labours of the lengthened way,

17 The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,

18 Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

“From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing” Summary

“from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” themes.

Shallow Learning vs. Deep Understanding

• See where this theme is active in the poem.

Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing”

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.

Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts, While from the bounded level of our mind, Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,

But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise New, distant scenes of endless science rise!

Lines 11-14

So pleased at first, the towering Alps we try, Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky; The eternal snows appear already past, And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;

Lines 15-18

But those attained, we tremble to survey The growing labours of the lengthened way, The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes, Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

“From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing” Symbols

The Mountains/Alps

• See where this symbol appears in the poem.

“From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Alliteration.

• See where this poetic device appears in the poem.

Extended Metaphor

“from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” vocabulary.

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• A little learning
• Pierian spring
• Bounded level
• Short views
• The lengthened way
• See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “From An Essay on Criticism: A little learning is a dangerous thing”

Rhyme scheme, “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” speaker, “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” setting, literary and historical context of “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing”, more “from an essay on criticism: a little learning is a dangerous thing” resources, external resources.

The Poem Aloud — Listen to an audiobook of Pope's "Essay on Criticism" (the "A little learning" passage starts at 12:57).

The Poet's Life — Read a biography of Alexander Pope at the Poetry Foundation.

"Alexander Pope: Rediscovering a Genius" — Watch a BBC documentary on Alexander Pope.

More on Pope's Life — A summary of Pope's life and work at Poets.org.

Pope at the British Library — More resources and articles on the poet.

LitCharts on Other Poems by Alexander Pope

Ode on Solitude

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

• Quizzes, saving guides, requests, plus so much more.

The Meaning and Origin of ‘A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library , Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of a famous quotation – and its less famous source

‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’ This line is often quoted, but it’s actually, technically, a misquotation. What’s more, the meaning of this aperçu is worth analysing more closely, because it is open to misinterpretation as well as misquotation. Let’s take a look at the origins of ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ – or, more accurately, ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’.

The source and origin for this quotation is Alexander Pope (1688-1744), one of the leading neoclassical or Augustan poets of the first half of the eighteenth century. Pope was a fascinating figure: as a young boy he was expelled from Twyford School for writing a satire about one of his teachers, and he continued to lose friends and create enemies through not being afraid to speak out and criticise those with whom he disagreed. (For a time, while fearing attacks from especially vicious rivals, Pope rarely left his house without a brace of pistols and his dog, a Great Dane named Bounce.)

Sadly, outside of academia, few people read Pope now because he is perceived as dry and emotionless (and therefore dull), and even in the late nineteenth century, his fellow master of the one-liner, Oscar Wilde, was quipping, ‘There are two ways of disliking poetry. One way is to dislike it, and the other is to read Pope.’

Pope’s poem ‘An Essay on Criticism’ gave us not only ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’ but also ‘ To err is human; to forgive, divine ’ and ‘ For fools rush in where angels fear to tread .’ Given how proverbial all three of this statements have now become, that’s a pretty impressive hit rate for a single poem – and, what’s more, one written when its author was still only 23!

A little learning is a dang’rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. Fir’d at first sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts, While from the bounded level of our mind, Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind, But more advanc’d, behold with strange surprise New, distant scenes of endless science rise!

As the title of Pope’s poem, ‘An Essay on Criticism’, makes clear, Pope is specifically advising critics – especially literary critics – when he opines, ‘A little learning is a dang’rous thing’ (the elision in ‘dang’rous’, to indicate that the word should be pronounced as two syllables rather than three to keep with the iambic pentameter metre, is not often preserved when people quote Pope in their writing).

The Pierian Spring in Macedonia was sacred to the Muses, so in order to ‘taste the Pierian spring’ the critic (and poet?) needs to ‘drink deep’, i.e., read widely. A little learning is a dangerous thing because it can lead the critic to think they know it all when they, in fact, know very little. A little learning is more dangerous than complete ignorance, because it gives you the illusion of knowledge when you, in fact, have only cursory knowledge of the subject:

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.

In other words, drinking only shallowly from the spring will make you drunk with your own knowledge, but drinking deeply or ‘largely’ brings you back to reality so you have a fairer and more accurate assessment of what you do and don’t know. So it is with learning: the more we learn, as the old adage has it, the less we know.

Pope, as a classicist, would have been familiar with the Delphic Oracle of Ancient Greece, who, asked to name who the wisest person in Athens was, proclaimed that it was Socrates, ‘for he alone is aware that he knows nothing’.

Pope, then, isn’t claiming that learning in itself is dangerous: but a little (as contrasted with a great deal ) is. Anyone who’s found themselves collared by the pub bore or in an argument on social media over some historical, scientific, or even literary topic will probably be able to attest to that.

Pope’s ‘An Essay on Criticism’ is, as I say, a didactic and discursive poem recommending good things for a critic to do. Much of his advice, though, can be extrapolated beyond the realm of literary critics and reviewers of poetry. Good taste and knowing one’s own limitations, for instance, are universal rules to live by, and poets as well as critics would do well to heed them.

So in many ways, ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’ (or ‘dang’rous thing’) is a line that nearly encapsulates Pope’s argument in ‘An Essay on Criticism’. More mischief is arguably caused by those who think they know it all than those who know they know nothing.

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Type your email…

4 thoughts on “The Meaning and Origin of ‘A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing’”

• Pingback: A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing – Education Technology

Thank you very much for this very interesting post. I hadn’t given much thought to the phrase “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” as being a quote from a poem that had passed into common speech as a proverb until I spotted it in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. I enjoyed how you expanded or little bit of knowledge with very interesting facts about the author and his life. The information in this snippet is much more engaging than what I read in The Oxford Book of Quotations – which merely gives you the name of the author and sometimes a bit more of the text from which the quote was taken.

• Pingback: ‘Fools Rush in Where Angels Fear to Tread’: Meaning and Origin – Interesting Literature
• Pingback: A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing – EducatorsEdge

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

An Essay on Criticism

An Essay on Criticism was the first major poem written by the English writer Alexander Pope (1688–1744). However, despite the title, the poem is not as much an original analysis as it is a compilation of Pope's various literary opinions. A reading of the poem makes it clear that he is addressing not so much the ingenuous reader as the intending writer. It is written in a type of rhyming verse called heroic couplets .

The poem first appeared in 1711 , but was written in 1709. It is clear from Pope's correspondence that many of the poem's ideas had existed in prose form since at least 1706. It is a verse essay written in the Horatian mode and is primarily concerned with how writers and critics behave in the new literary commerce of Pope's contemporary age. The poem covers a range of good criticism and advice. It also represents many of the chief literary ideals of Pope's age.

• 1.2 Part II
• 1.3 Part III
• 3 External links
• Line 9. Compare: "But as when an authentic watch is shown, Each man winds up and rectifies his own, So in our very judgments", John Suckling , Aglaura , Epilogue.
• Line 171 - 174.
• Line 175 - 179. Compare: "Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus" (translated: "Even the worthy Homer some times nods"), Horace , De Arte Poetica , 359.
• Lines 13-14.
• Commonly misquoted as a proverb, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," which ironically illustrates the point.
• Lines 15-18. Compare: "Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel", Francis Bacon , Of Travel .
• Line 53. Compare: "'High characters', cries one, and he would see / Things that ne’er were, nor are, nor e'er will be", John Suckling , The Goblins , Epilogue.

• Part ii. Line 220.
• Lines 238-239.
• Lines 254-255.
• Part ii. Line 266.
• Lines 274-275.

• Lines 322-325. Compare: "To step aside is human ", Robert Burns , Address to the Unco Guid .

• Lines 13-16.
• Lines 63 to 66. Compare: "Wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch", William Shakespeare , King Richard III , Act I, Sc. 3.
• Line 180. Compare: " Indocti discant et ament meminisse periti " (translated: "Let the unlearned learn, and the learned delight in remembering"). This Latin hexameter, which is commonly ascribed to Horace , appeared for the first time as an epigraph to President Hénault's Abrégé Chronologique , and in the preface to the third edition of this work Hénault acknowledges that he had given it as a translation of this couplet.
• Samuel Johnson , The Life of Pope (1781).

External links

• Full text of the Essay
• Free eBook of An Essay on Criticism at Project Gutenberg (much punctuation is missing)
• A Study Guide for the Essay, by Walter Jackson Bate

• Works by Alexander Pope

Navigation menu

AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM.

Alexander pope..

This eminent English poet was born in London, May 21, 1688. His parents were Roman Catholics, and to this faith the poet adhered, thus debarring himself from public office and employment. His father, a linen merchant, having saved a moderate competency, withdrew from business, and settled on a small estate he had purchased in Windsor Forest. He died at Chiswick, in 1717. His son shortly afterwards took a long lease of a house and five acres of land at Twickenham, on the banks of the Thames, whither he retired with his widowed mother, to whom he was tenderly attached and where he resided till death, cultivating his little domain with exquisite taste and skill, and embellishing it with a grotto, temple, wilderness, and other adjuncts poetical and picturesque. In this famous villa Pope was visited by the most celebrated wits, statesmen and beauties of the day, himself being the most popular and successful poet of his age. His early years were spent at Binfield, within the range of the Royal Forest. He received some education at little Catholic schools, but was his own instructor after his twelfth year. He never was a profound or accurate scholar, but he read Latin poets with ease and delight, and acquired some Greek, French, and Italian. He was a poet almost from infancy, he "lisped in numbers," and when a mere youth surpassed all his contemporaries in metrical harmony and correctness. His pastorals and some translations appeared in 1709, but were written three or four years earlier. These were followed by the Essay on Criticism , 1711; Rape of the Lock (when completed, the most graceful, airy, and imaginative of his works), 1712-1714; Windsor Forest , 1713; Temple of Fame , 1715. In a collection of his works printed in 1717 he included the Epistle of Eloisa and Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady , two poems inimitable for pathetic beauty and finished melodious versification.

From 1715 till 1726 Pope was chiefly engaged on his translations of the Iliad and Odyssey , which, though wanting in time Homeric simplicity, naturalness, and grandeur, are splendid poems. In 1728-29 he published his greatest satire—the Dunciad , an attack on all poetasters and pretended wits, and on all other persons against whom the sensitive poet had conceived any enmity. In 1737 he gave to the world a volume of his Literary Correspondence , containing some pleasant gossip and observations, with choice passages of description but it appears that the correspondence was manufactured for publication not composed of actual letters addressed to the parties whose names are given, and the collection was introduced to the public by means of an elaborate stratagem on the part of the scheming poet. Between the years 1731 and 1739 he issued a series of poetical essays moral and philosophical, with satires and imitations of Horace, all admirable for sense, wit, spirit and brilliancy of these delightful productions, the most celebrated is the Essay on Man to which Bolingbroke is believed to have contributed the spurious philosophy and false sentiment, but its merit consists in detached passages, descriptions, and pictures. A fourth book to the Dunciad , containing many beautiful and striking lines and a general revision of his works, closed the poet's literary cares and toils. He died on the 30th of May, 1744, and was buried in the church at Twickenham.

Pope was of very diminutive stature and deformed from his birth. His physical infirmity, susceptible temperament, and incessant study rendered his life one long disease. He was, as his friend Lord Chesterfield said, "the most irritable of all the genus irritabile vatum , offended with trifles and never forgetting or forgiving them." His literary stratagems, disguises, assertions, denials, and (we must add) misrepresentations would fill volumes. Yet when no disturbing jealousy vanity, or rivalry intervened was generous and affectionate, and he had a manly, independent spirit. As a poet he was deficient in originality and creative power, and thus was inferior to his prototype, Dryden, but as a literary artist, and brilliant declaimer satirist and moralizer in verse he is still unrivaled. He is the English Horace, and will as surely descend with honors to the latest posterity.

AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM,

Written in the year 1709.

[The title, An Essay on Criticism hardly indicates all that is included in the poem. It would have been impossible to give a full and exact idea of the art of poetical criticism without entering into the consideration of the art of poetry. Accordingly Pope has interwoven the precepts of both throughout the poem which might more properly have been styled an essay on the Art of Criticism and of Poetry.]

'Tis hard to say if greater want of skill Appear in writing or in judging ill, But of the two less dangerous is the offense To tire our patience than mislead our sense Some few in that but numbers err in this, Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss, A fool might once himself alone expose, Now one in verse makes many more in prose.

'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own In poets as true genius is but rare True taste as seldom is the critic share Both must alike from Heaven derive their light, These born to judge as well as those to write Let such teach others who themselves excel, And censure freely, who have written well Authors are partial to their wit, 'tis true [ 17 ] But are not critics to their judgment too?

Yet if we look more closely we shall find Most have the seeds of judgment in their mind Nature affords at least a glimmering light The lines though touched but faintly are drawn right, But as the slightest sketch if justly traced Is by ill coloring but the more disgraced So by false learning is good sense defaced Some are bewildered in the maze of schools [ 26 ] And some made coxcombs nature meant but fools In search of wit these lose their common sense And then turn critics in their own defense Each burns alike who can or cannot write Or with a rival's or an eunuch's spite All fools have still an itching to deride And fain would be upon the laughing side If Maevius scribble in Apollo's spite [ 34 ] There are who judge still worse than he can write.

Some have at first for wits then poets passed Turned critics next and proved plain fools at last Some neither can for wits nor critics pass As heavy mules are neither horse nor ass. Those half-learned witlings, numerous in our isle, As half-formed insects on the banks of Nile Unfinished things one knows not what to call Their generation is so equivocal To tell them would a hundred tongues require, Or one vain wits that might a hundred tire.

But you who seek to give and merit fame, And justly bear a critic's noble name, Be sure yourself and your own reach to know How far your genius taste and learning go. Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet And mark that point where sense and dullness meet.

Nature to all things fixed the limits fit And wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit. As on the land while here the ocean gains. In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains Thus in the soul while memory prevails, The solid power of understanding fails Where beams of warm imagination play, The memory's soft figures melt away One science only will one genius fit, So vast is art, so narrow human wit Not only bounded to peculiar arts, But oft in those confined to single parts Like kings, we lose the conquests gained before, By vain ambition still to make them more Each might his several province well command, Would all but stoop to what they understand.

First follow nature and your judgment frame By her just standard, which is still the same. Unerring nature still divinely bright, One clear, unchanged and universal light, Life force and beauty, must to all impart, At once the source and end and test of art Art from that fund each just supply provides, Works without show and without pomp presides In some fair body thus the informing soul With spirits feeds, with vigor fills the whole, Each motion guides and every nerve sustains, Itself unseen, but in the effects remains. Some, to whom Heaven in wit has been profuse, [ 80 ] Want as much more, to turn it to its use; For wit and judgment often are at strife, Though meant each other's aid, like man and wife. 'Tis more to guide, than spur the muse's steed, Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed, The winged courser, like a generous horse, [ 86 ] Shows most true mettle when you check his course.

Those rules, of old discovered, not devised, Are nature still, but nature methodized; Nature, like liberty, is but restrained By the same laws which first herself ordained.

Hear how learned Greece her useful rules indites, When to repress and when indulge our flights. High on Parnassus' top her sons she showed, [ 94 ] And pointed out those arduous paths they trod; Held from afar, aloft, the immortal prize, And urged the rest by equal steps to rise. [ 97 ] Just precepts thus from great examples given, She drew from them what they derived from Heaven. The generous critic fanned the poet's fire, And taught the world with reason to admire. Then criticism the muse's handmaid proved, To dress her charms, and make her more beloved: But following wits from that intention strayed Who could not win the mistress, wooed the maid Against the poets their own arms they turned Sure to hate most the men from whom they learned So modern pothecaries taught the art By doctors bills to play the doctor's part. Bold in the practice of mistaken rules Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools. Some on the leaves of ancient authors prey, Nor time nor moths e'er spoil so much as they. Some dryly plain, without invention's aid, Write dull receipts how poems may be made These leave the sense their learning to display, And those explain the meaning quite away.

You then, whose judgment the right course would steer, Know well each ancient's proper character, His fable subject scope in every page, Religion, country, genius of his age Without all these at once before your eyes, Cavil you may, but never criticise. Be Homers works your study and delight, Read them by day and meditate by night, Thence form your judgment thence your maxims bring And trace the muses upward to their spring. Still with itself compared, his text peruse, And let your comment be the Mantuan Muse. [ 129 ]

When first young Maro in his boundless mind, [ 130 ] A work to outlast immortal Rome designed, Perhaps he seemed above the critic's law And but from nature's fountain scorned to draw But when to examine every part he came Nature and Homer were he found the same Convinced, amazed, he checks the bold design And rules as strict his labored work confine As if the Stagirite o'erlooked each line [ 138 ] Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem, To copy nature is to copy them.

Some beauties yet no precepts can declare, For there's a happiness as well as care. Music resembles poetry—in each Are nameless graces which no methods teach, And which a master hand alone can reach If, where the rules not far enough extend (Since rules were made but to promote their end), Some lucky license answer to the full The intent proposed that license is a rule. Thus Pegasus a nearer way to take May boldly deviate from the common track 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, Which without passing through the judgment gains The heart and all its end at once attains. In prospects, thus, some objects please our eyes, Which out of nature's common order rise, The shapeless rock or hanging precipice. But though the ancients thus their rules invade (As kings dispense with laws themselves have made), Moderns beware! or if you must offend Against the precept, ne'er transgress its end, Let it be seldom, and compelled by need, And have, at least, their precedent to plead. The critic else proceeds without remorse, Seizes your fame, and puts his laws in force.

I know there are, to whose presumptuous thoughts Those freer beauties, even in them, seem faults Some figures monstrous and misshaped appear, Considered singly, or beheld too near, Which, but proportioned to their light, or place, Due distance reconciles to form and grace. A prudent chief not always must display His powers in equal ranks and fair array, But with the occasion and the place comply. Conceal his force, nay, seem sometimes to fly. Those oft are stratagems which errors seem, Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream. [ 180 ]

Still green with bays each ancient altar stands, Above the reach of sacrilegious hands, Secure from flames, from envy's fiercer rage, [ 183 ] Destructive war, and all-involving age. See, from each clime the learned their incense bring; Hear, in all tongues consenting Paeans ring! In praise so just let every voice be joined, And fill the general chorus of mankind. Hail! bards triumphant! born in happier days; Immortal heirs of universal praise! Whose honors with increase of ages grow, As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow; Nations unborn your mighty names shall sound, [ 193 ] And worlds applaud that must not yet be found! Oh may some spark of your celestial fire, The last, the meanest of your sons inspire, (That, on weak wings, from far pursues your flights, Glows while he reads, but trembles as he writes), To teach vain wits a science little known, To admire superior sense, and doubt their own!

Of all the causes which conspire to blind Man's erring judgment and misguide the mind, What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools. Whatever nature has in worth denied, She gives in large recruits of needful pride; For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find What wants in blood and spirits, swelled with wind: Pride where wit fails steps in to our defense, And fills up all the mighty void of sense. If once right reason drives that cloud away, Truth breaks upon us with resistless day Trust not yourself, but your defects to know, Make use of every friend—and every foe.

A little learning is a dangerous thing Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring [ 216 ] There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. Fired at first sight with what the muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts While from the bounded level of our mind Short views we take nor see the lengths behind But more advanced behold with strange surprise, New distant scenes of endless science rise! So pleased at first the towering Alps we try, Mount o'er the vales and seem to tread the sky, The eternal snows appear already passed And the first clouds and mountains seem the last. But those attained we tremble to survey The growing labors of the lengthened way The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes, Hills peep o'er hills and Alps on Alps arise!

A perfect judge will read each work of wit With the same spirit that its author writ Survey the whole nor seek slight faults to find Where nature moves and rapture warms the mind, Nor lose for that malignant dull delight The generous pleasure to be charmed with wit But in such lays as neither ebb nor flow, Correctly cold and regularly low That, shunning faults, one quiet tenor keep; We cannot blame indeed—but we may sleep. In wit, as nature, what affects our hearts Is not the exactness of peculiar parts, 'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call, But the joint force and full result of all. Thus, when we view some well proportioned dome (The worlds just wonder, and even thine, O Rome!), [ 248 ] No single parts unequally surprise, All comes united to the admiring eyes; No monstrous height or breadth, or length, appear; The whole at once is bold, and regular.

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see. Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be. In every work regard the writer's end, Since none can compass more than they intend; And if the means be just, the conduct true, Applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due. As men of breeding, sometimes men of wit, To avoid great errors, must the less commit: Neglect the rules each verbal critic lays, For not to know some trifles is a praise. Most critics, fond of some subservient art, Still make the whole depend upon a part: They talk of principles, but notions prize, And all to one loved folly sacrifice.

Once on a time La Mancha's knight, they say, [ 267 ] A certain bard encountering on the way, Discoursed in terms as just, with looks as sage, As e'er could Dennis, of the Grecian stage; [ 270 ] Concluding all were desperate sots and fools, Who durst depart from Aristotle's rules Our author, happy in a judge so nice, Produced his play, and begged the knight's advice; Made him observe the subject, and the plot, The manners, passions, unities, what not? All which, exact to rule, were brought about, Were but a combat in the lists left out "What! leave the combat out?" exclaims the knight. "Yes, or we must renounce the Stagirite." "Not so, by heaven!" (he answers in a rage) "Knights, squires, and steeds must enter on the stage." "So vast a throng the stage can ne'er contain." "Then build a new, or act it in a plain."

Thus critics of less judgment than caprice, Curious, not knowing, not exact, but nice, Form short ideas, and offend in arts (As most in manners) by a love to parts.

Some to conceit alone their taste confine, And glittering thoughts struck out at every line; Pleased with a work where nothing's just or fit; One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit. Poets, like painters, thus, unskilled to trace The naked nature and the living grace, With gold and jewels cover every part, And hide with ornaments their want of art. True wit is nature to advantage dressed; What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed; Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find That gives us back the image of our mind. As shades more sweetly recommend the light, So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit For works may have more wit than does them good, As bodies perish through excess of blood.

Others for language all their care express, And value books, as women men, for dress. Their praise is still—"the style is excellent," The sense they humbly take upon content [ 308 ] Words are like leaves, and where they most abound Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. False eloquence, like the prismatic glass. [ 311 ] Its gaudy colors spreads on every place, The face of nature we no more survey. All glares alike without distinction gay: But true expression, like the unchanging sun, Clears and improves whate'er it shines upon; It gilds all objects, but it alters none. Expression is the dress of thought, and still Appears more decent, as more suitable, A vile conceit in pompous words expressed, Is like a clown in regal purple dressed For different styles with different subjects sort, As several garbs with country town and court Some by old words to fame have made pretense, Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense; Such labored nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze the unlearned, and make the learned smile. Unlucky, as Fungoso in the play, [ 328 ] These sparks with awkward vanity display What the fine gentleman wore yesterday; And but so mimic ancient wits at best, As apes our grandsires in their doublets dressed. In words as fashions the same rule will hold, Alike fantastic if too new or old. Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside

But most by numbers judge a poet's song And smooth or rough, with them is right or wrong. In the bright muse though thousand charms conspire, Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire, Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear, Not mend their minds, 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, While they ring round the same unvaried chimes, With sure returns of still expected rhymes, Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze," In the next line it "whispers through the trees" If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep" The reader's threatened (not in vain) with "sleep" Then, at the last and only couplet fraught With some unmeaning thing they call a thought, A needless Alexandrine ends the song [ 356 ] That, like a wounded snake drags its slow length along.

Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know What's roundly smooth or languishingly slow; And praise the easy vigor of a line, Where Denham's strength, and Waller's sweetness join. [ 361 ] True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense, The sound must seem an echo to the sense. Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows, [ 366 ] 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 labors, and the words move slow; Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main. [ 373 ] Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise, [ 374 ] And bid alternate passions fall and rise! While, at each change, the son of Libyan Jove [ 376 ] Now burns with glory, and then melts with love; Now his fierce eyes with sparkling fury glow, Now sighs steal out, and tears begin to flow: Persians and Greeks like turns of nature found, And the world's victor stood subdued by sound? [ 381 ] The power of music all our hearts allow, And what Timotheus was, is Dryden now.

Avoid extremes, and shun the fault of such, Who still are pleased too little or too much. At every trifle scorn to take offense, That always shows great pride, or little sense: Those heads, as stomachs, are not sure the best, Which nauseate all, and nothing can digest. Yet let not each gay turn thy rapture move; For fools admire, but men of sense approve: As things seem large which we through mist descry, Dullness is ever apt to magnify. [ 393 ]

Some foreign writers, some our own despise, The ancients only, or the moderns prize. Thus wit, like faith, by each man is applied To one small sect, and all are damned beside. Meanly they seek the blessing to confine, And force that sun but on a part to shine, Which not alone the southern wit sublimes, But ripens spirits in cold northern climes. Which from the first has shone on ages past, Enlights the present, and shall warm the last, Though each may feel increases and decays, And see now clearer and now darker days. Regard not then if wit be old or new, But blame the false, and value still the true.

Some ne'er advance a judgment of their own, But catch the spreading notion of the town, They reason and conclude by precedent, And own stale nonsense which they ne'er invent. Some judge of authors names not works, and then Nor praise nor blame the writing, but the men. Of all this servile herd the worst is he That in proud dullness joins with quality A constant critic at the great man's board, To fetch and carry nonsense for my lord What woful stuff this madrigal would be, In some starved hackney sonnetteer, or me! But let a lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens! how the style refines! Before his sacred name flies every fault, And each exalted stanza teems with thought!

The vulgar thus through imitation err; As oft the learned by being singular. So much they scorn the crowd that if the throng By chance go right they purposely go wrong: So schismatics the plain believers quit, And are but damned for having too much wit. Some praise at morning what they blame at night, But always think the last opinion right. A muse by these is like a mistress used, This hour she's idolized, the next abused; While their weak heads, like towns unfortified, 'Twixt sense and nonsense daily change their side. Ask them the cause, they're wiser still they say; And still to-morrow's wiser than to-day. We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow; Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so. Once school-divines this zealous isle o'erspread. Who knew most sentences was deepest read, [ 441 ] Faith, Gospel, all, seemed made to be disputed, And none had sense enough to be confuted: Scotists and Thomists now in peace remain, [ 444 ] Amidst their kindred cobwebs in Duck Lane. [ 445 ] If faith itself has different dresses worn, What wonder modes in wit should take their turn? Oft, leaving what is natural and fit, The current folly proves the ready wit; And authors think their reputation safe, Which lives as long as fools are pleased to laugh.

Some valuing those of their own side or mind, Still make themselves the measure of mankind: Fondly we think we honor merit then, When we but praise ourselves in other men. Parties in wit attend on those of state, And public faction doubles private hate. Pride, malice, folly against Dryden rose, In various shapes of parsons, critics, beaux; [ 459 ] But sense survived, when merry jests were past; For rising merit will buoy up at last. Might he return, and bless once more our eyes, New Blackmores and new Millbourns must arise: [ 463 ] Nay, should great Homer lift his awful head, Zoilus again would start up from the dead [ 465 ] Envy will merit, as its shade, pursue, But like a shadow, proves the substance true: For envied wit, like Sol eclipsed, makes known The opposing body's grossness, not its own. When first that sun too powerful beams displays, It draws up vapors which obscure its rays, But even those clouds at last adorn its way Reflect new glories and augment the day

Be thou the first true merit to befriend His praise is lost who stays till all commend Short is the date alas! of modern rhymes And 'tis but just to let them live betimes No longer now that golden age appears When patriarch wits survived a thousand years [ 479 ] Now length of fame (our second life) is lost And bare threescore is all even that can boast, Our sons their fathers failing language see And such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be So when the faithful pencil has designed Some bright idea of the master's mind Where a new world leaps out at his command And ready nature waits upon his hand When the ripe colors soften and unite And sweetly melt into just shade and light When mellowing years their full perfection give And each bold figure just begins to live The treacherous colors the fair art betray And all the bright creation fades away!

Unhappy wit, like most mistaken things Atones not for that envy which it brings In youth alone its empty praise we boast But soon the short lived vanity is lost. Like some fair flower the early spring supplies That gayly blooms but even in blooming dies What is this wit, which must our cares employ? The owner's wife that other men enjoy Then most our trouble still when most admired And still the more we give the more required Whose fame with pains we guard, but lose with ease, Sure some to vex, but never all to please, 'Tis what the vicious fear, the virtuous shun, By fools 'tis hated, and by knaves undone!

If wit so much from ignorance undergo, Ah! let not learning too commence its foe! Of old, those met rewards who could excel, And such were praised who but endeavored well: Though triumphs were to generals only due, Crowns were reserved to grace the soldiers too. Now they who reach Parnassus' lofty crown, Employ their pains to spurn some others down; And, while self-love each jealous writer rules, Contending wits become the sport of fools: But still the worst with most regret commend, For each ill author is as bad a friend To what base ends, and by what abject ways, Are mortals urged, through sacred lust of praise! Ah, ne'er so dire a thirst of glory boast, Nor in the critic let the man be lost Good-nature and good sense must ever join; To err is human, to forgive, divine.

But if in noble minds some dregs remain, Not yet purged off, of spleen and sour disdain; Discharge that rage on more provoking crimes, Nor fear a dearth in these flagitious times. No pardon vile obscenity should find, Though wit and art conspire to move your mind; But dullness with obscenity must prove As shameful sure as impotence in love. In the fat age of pleasure, wealth, and ease, Sprung the rank weed, and thrived with large increase: When love was all an easy monarch's care, [ 536 ] Seldom at council, never in a war Jilts ruled the state, and statesmen farces writ; Nay, wits had pensions, and young lords had wit: The fair sat panting at a courtier's play, And not a mask went unimproved away: [ 541 ] The modest fan was lifted up no more, And virgins smiled at what they blushed before. The following license of a foreign reign, [ 544 ] Did all the dregs of bold Socinus drain, [ 545 ] Then unbelieving priests reformed the nation. And taught more pleasant methods of salvation; Where Heaven's free subjects might their rights dispute, Lest God himself should seem too absolute: Pulpits their sacred satire learned to spare, And vice admired to find a flatterer there! Encouraged thus, wit's Titans braved the skies, [ 552 ] And the press groaned with licensed blasphemies. These monsters, critics! with your darts engage, Here point your thunder, and exhaust your rage! Yet shun their fault, who, scandalously nice, Will needs mistake an author into vice; All seems infected that the infected spy, As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.

Learn, then, what morals critics ought to show, For 'tis but half a judge's task to know. 'Tis not enough, taste, judgment, learning, join; In all you speak, let truth and candor shine: That not alone what to your sense is due All may allow, but seek your friendship too.

Be silent always, when you doubt your sense; And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence: Some positive persisting fops we know, Who, if once wrong will needs be always so; But you, with pleasure, own your errors past, And make each day a critique on the last.

'Tis not enough your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do; Men must be taught as if you taught them not, And things unknown proposed as things forgot. Without good breeding truth is disapproved; That only makes superior sense beloved.

Be niggards of advice on no pretense; For the worst avarice is that of sense With mean complacence, ne'er betray your trust, Nor be so civil as to prove unjust Fear not the anger of the wise to raise, Those best can bear reproof who merit praise.

'Twere well might critics still this freedom take, But Appius reddens at each word you speak, [ 585 ] And stares, tremendous with a threatening eye, Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry Fear most to tax an honorable fool Whose right it is uncensured to be dull Such, without wit are poets when they please, As without learning they can take degrees Leave dangerous truths to unsuccessful satires, And flattery to fulsome dedicators Whom, when they praise, the world believes no more, Than when they promise to give scribbling o'er.

'Tis best sometimes your censure to restrain, And charitably let the dull be vain Your silence there is better than your spite, For who can rail so long as they can write? Still humming on, their drowsy course they keep, And lashed so long like tops are lashed asleep. False steps but help them to renew the race, As after stumbling, jades will mend their pace. What crowds of these, impenitently bold, In sounds and jingling syllables grown old, Still run on poets in a raging vein, Even to the dregs and squeezing of the brain; Strain out the last dull droppings of their sense, And rhyme with all the rage of impotence!

Such shameless bards we have, and yet, 'tis true, There are as mad abandoned critics, too The bookful blockhead ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head, With his own tongue still edifies his ears, And always listening to himself appears All books he reads and all he reads assails From Dryden's Fables down to Durfey's Tales [ 617 ] With him most authors steal their works or buy; Garth did not write his own Dispensary [ 619 ] Name a new play, and he's the poets friend Nay, showed his faults—but when would poets mend? No place so sacred from such fops is barred, Nor is Paul's Church more safe than Paul's Churchyard: [ 623 ] Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead, For fools rush in where angels fear to tread Distrustful sense with modest caution speaks, It still looks home, and short excursions makes; But rattling nonsense in full volleys breaks, And, never shocked, and never turned aside. Bursts out, resistless, with a thundering tide,

But where's the man who counsel can bestow, Still pleased to teach, and yet not proud to know? Unbiased, or by favor, or in spite, Not dully prepossessed, nor blindly right; Though learned, well-bred, and though well bred, sincere, Modestly bold, and humanly severe, Who to a friend his faults can freely show, And gladly praise the merit of a foe? Blessed with a taste exact, yet unconfined; A knowledge both of books and human kind; Generous converse, a soul exempt from pride; And love to praise, with reason on his side?

Such once were critics such the happy few, Athens and Rome in better ages knew. The mighty Stagirite first left the shore, [ 645 ] Spread all his sails, and durst the deeps explore; He steered securely, and discovered far, Led by the light of the Maeonian star. [ 648 ] Poets, a race long unconfined and free, Still fond and proud of savage liberty, Received his laws, and stood convinced 'twas fit, Who conquered nature, should preside o'er wit. [ 652 ]

Horace still charms with graceful negligence, And without method talks us into sense; Will like a friend familiarly convey The truest notions in the easiest way. He who supreme in judgment as in wit, Might boldly censure, as he boldly writ, Yet judged with coolness though he sung with fire; His precepts teach but what his works inspire Our critics take a contrary extreme They judge with fury, but they write with phlegm: Nor suffers Horace more in wrong translations By wits than critics in as wrong quotations.

See Dionysius Homer's thoughts refine, [ 665 ] And call new beauties forth from every line!

Fancy and art in gay Petronius please, [ 667 ] The scholar's learning with the courtier's ease.

In grave Quintilian's copious work we find [ 669 ] The justest rules and clearest method joined: Thus useful arms in magazines we place, All ranged in order, and disposed with grace, But less to please the eye, than arm the hand, Still fit for use, and ready at command.

Thee bold Longinus! all the Nine inspire, [ 675 ] And bless their critic with a poet's fire. An ardent judge, who, zealous in his trust, With warmth gives sentence, yet is always just: Whose own example strengthens all his laws; And is himself that great sublime he draws.

Thus long succeeding critics justly reigned, License repressed, and useful laws ordained. Learning and Rome alike in empire grew; And arts still followed where her eagles flew, From the same foes at last, both felt their doom, And the same age saw learning fall, and Rome. [ 686 ] With tyranny then superstition joined As that the body, this enslaved the mind; Much was believed but little understood, And to be dull was construed to be good; A second deluge learning thus o'errun, And the monks finished what the Goths begun. [ 692 ]

At length Erasmus, that great injured name [ 693 ] (The glory of the priesthood and the shame!) Stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age, And drove those holy Vandals off the stage. [ 696 ]

But see! each muse, in Leo's golden days, [ 697 ] Starts from her trance and trims her withered bays, Rome's ancient genius o'er its ruins spread Shakes off the dust, and rears his reverent head Then sculpture and her sister arts revive, Stones leaped to form, and rocks began to live; With sweeter notes each rising temple rung, A Raphael painted, and a Vida sung [ 704 ] Immortal Vida! on whose honored brow The poets bays and critic's ivy grow Cremona now shall ever boast thy name As next in place to Mantua, next in fame!

But soon by impious arms from Latium chased, Their ancient bounds the banished muses passed. Thence arts o'er all the northern world advance, But critic-learning flourished most in France, The rules a nation born to serve, obeys; And Boileau still in right of Horace sways [ 714 ] But we, brave Britons, foreign laws despised, And kept unconquered and uncivilized, Fierce for the liberties of wit and bold, We still defied the Romans as of old. Yet some there were, among the sounder few Of those who less presumed and better knew, Who durst assert the juster ancient cause, And here restored wit's fundamental laws. Such was the muse, whose rule and practice tell "Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well." Such was Roscommon, not more learned than good, With manners generous as his noble blood, To him the wit of Greece and Rome was known, And every author's merit, but his own Such late was Walsh—the muse's judge and friend, Who justly knew to blame or to commend, To failings mild, but zealous for desert, The clearest head, and the sincerest heart, This humble praise, lamented shade! receive, This praise at least a grateful muse may give. The muse whose early voice you taught to sing Prescribed her heights and pruned her tender wing, (Her guide now lost) no more attempts to rise, But in low numbers short excursions tries, Content if hence the unlearned their wants may view, The learned reflect on what before they knew Careless of censure, nor too fond of fame, Still pleased to praise, yet not afraid to blame, Averse alike to flatter, or offend, Not free from faults, nor yet too vain to mend.

[Line 17: Wit is used in the poem in a great variety of meanings (1) Here it seems to mean genius or fancy , (2) in line 36 a man of fancy , (3) in line 53 the understanding or powers of the mind , (4) in line 81 it means judgment .]

[Line 26: Schools —Different systems of doctrine or philosophy as taught by particular teachers.]

[Line 34: Maevius —An insignificant poet of the Augustan age, ridiculed by Virgil in his third Eclogue and by Horace in his tenth Epode.]

[Lines 80, 81: There is here a slight inaccuracy or inconsistency, since "wit" has a different meaning in the two lines: in 80, it means fancy, in 81, judgment .]

[Line 86: The winged courser .—Pegasus, a winged horse which sprang from the blood of Medusa when Perseus cut off her head. As soon as born he left the earth and flew up to heaven, or, according to Ovid, took up his abode on Mount Helicon, and was always associated with the Muses.]

[Line 94: Parnassus .—A mountain of Phocis, which received its name from Parnassus, the son of Neptune, and was sacred to the Muses, Apollo and Bacchus.]

[Line 97: Equal steps .—Steps equal to the undertaking.]

[Line 129: The Mantuan Muse —Virgil called Maro in the next line (his full name being, Virgilius Publius Maro) born near Mantua, 70 B.C.]

[Lines 130-136: It is said that Virgil first intended to write a poem on the Alban and Roman affairs which he found beyond his powers, and then he imitated Homer:

   Cum canerem reges et proelia Cynthius aurem    Vellit— Virg. Ecl. VI ]

[Line 138: The Stagirite —Aristotle, born at the Greek town of Stageira on the Strymonic Gulf (Gulf of Contessa, in Turkey) 384 B.C., whose treatises on Rhetoric and the Art of Poetry were the earliest development of a Philosophy of Criticism and still continue to be studied.

The poet contradicts himself with regard to the principle he is here laying down in lines 271-272 where he laughs at Dennis for

   Concluding all were desperate sots and fools    Who durst depart from Aristotle's rules.]

[Line 180: Homer nods — Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus , 'even the good Homer nods'—Horace, Epistola ad Pisones , 359.]

[Lines 183, 184: Secure from flames .—The poet probably alludes to such fires as those in which the Alexandrine and Palatine Libraries were destroyed. From envy's fiercer rage .—Probably he alludes to the writings of such men as Maevius (see note to line 34) and Zoilus, a sophist and grammarian of Amphipolis, who distinguished himself by his criticism on Isocrates, Plato, and Homer, receiving the nickname of Homeromastic (chastiser of Homer). Destructive war —Probably an allusion to the irruption of the barbarians into the south of Europe. And all-involving age ; that is, time. This is usually explained as an allusion to 'the long reign of ignorance and superstition in the cloisters,' but it is surely far-fetched, and more than the language will bear.]

[Lines 193, 194:

   'Round the whole world this dreaded name shall sound,     And reach to worlds that must not yet be found,"—COWLEY.]

[Line 216: The Pierian spring —A fountain in Pieria, a district round Mount Olympus and the native country of the Muses.]

[Line 248: And even thine, O Rome. —The dome of St Peter's Church, designed by Michael Angelo.]

[Line 267: La Mancha's Knight .—Don Quixote, a fictitious Spanish knight, the hero of a book written (1605) by Cervantes, a Spanish writer.]

[Line 270: Dennis, the son of a saddler in London, born 1657, was a mediocre writer, and rather better critic of the time, with whom Pope came a good deal into collision. Addison's tragedy of Cato , for which Pope had written a prologue, had been attacked by Dennis. Pope, to defend Addison, wrote an imaginary report, pretending to be written by a notorious quack mad-doctor of the day, entitled The Narrative of Dr. Robert Norris on the Frenz of F. D. Dennis replied to it by his Character of Mr. Pope . Ultimately Pope gave him a place in his Dunciad , and wrote a prologue for his benefit.]

[Line 308: On content .—On trust, a common use of the word in Pope's time.]

[Lines 311, 312: Prismatic glass .—A glass prism by which light is refracted, and the component rays, which are of different colors being refracted at different angles show what is called a spectrum or series of colored bars, in the order violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.]

[Line 328: Fungoso —One of the characters in Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humor who assumed the dress and tried to pass himself off for another.]

[Line 356: Alexandrine —A line of twelve syllables, so called from a French poem on the Life of Alexander the Great, written in that meter. The poet gives a remarkable example in the next line.]

[Line 361: Sir John Denham, a poet of the time of Charles I. (1615-1668). His verse is characterized by considerable smoothness and ingenuity of rhythm, with here and there a passage of some force—Edmund Waller (1606-1687) is celebrated as one of the refiners of English poetry. His rank among English poets, however, is very subordinate.]

[Line 366: Zephyr .—Zephyrus, the west wind personified by the poets and made the most mild and gentle of the sylvan deities.]

[Lines 366-373: In this passage the poet obviously intended to make "the sound seem an echo to the sense". The success of the attempt has not been very complete except in the second two lines, expressing the dash and roar of the waves, and in the last two, expressing the skimming, continuous motion of Camilla. What he refers to is the onomatopoeia of Homer and Virgil in the passages alluded to. Ajax , the son of Telamon, was, next to Achilles, the bravest of all the Greeks in the Trojan war. When the Greeks were challenged by Hector he was chosen their champion and it was in their encounter that he seized a huge stone and hurled it at Hector.

Thus rendered by Pope himself:

   "Then Ajax seized the fragment of a rock    Applied each nerve, and swinging round on high,    With force tempestuous let the ruin fly    The huge stone thundering through his buckler broke."

Camilla , queen of the Volsci, was brought up in the woods, and, according to Virgil, was swifter than the winds. She led an army to assist Turnus against Aeneas.

   "Dura pan, cursuque pedum praevertere ventos.     Illa vel intactae segetis per summa volaret     Gramina nec teneras cursu laesisset aristas;     Vel mare per medium fluctu suspensa tumenti,     Ferret iter, celeres nec tingeret aequore plantas."                                             Aen . vii 807-811.

Thus rendered by Dryden.

   "Outstripped the winds in speed upon the plain,    Flew o'er the fields, nor hurt the bearded grain;    She swept the seas, and as she skimmed along,    Her flying feet unbathed on billows hung"]

[Lines 374-381: This passage refers to Dryden's ode, Alexander's Feast , or The Power of Music . Timotheus, mentioned in it, was a musician of Boeotia, a favorite of Alexander's, not the great musician Timotheus, who died before Alexander was born, unless, indeed, Dryden have confused the two.]

[Line 376: The son of Libyan Jove .—A title arrogated to himself by Alexander.]

[Line 393: Dullness here 'seems to be incorrectly used. Ignorance is apt to magnify, but dullness reposes in stolid indifference.']

[Line 441: Sentences —Passages from the Fathers of the Church who were regarded as decisive authorities on all disputed points of doctrine.]

[Line 444: Scotists —The disciples of Duns Scotus, one of the most famous and influential of the scholastics of the fourteenth century, who was opposed to Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), another famous scholastic, regarding the doctrines of grace and the freedom of the will, but especially the immaculate conception of the Virgin. The followers of the latter were called Thomists, between whom and the Scotists bitter controversies were carried on.]

[Line 445: Duck Lane .—A place near Smithfield where old books were sold. The cobwebs were kindred to the works of these controversialists, because their arguments were intricate and obscure. Scotus is said to have demolished two hundred objections to the doctrine of the immaculate conception, and established it by a cloud of proofs.]

[Line 459: Parsons .—This is an allusion to Jeremy Collier, the author of A Short View etc, of the English Stage . Critics, beaux .—This to the Duke of Buckingham, the author of The Rehearsal .]

[Line 463: Blackmore , Sir Richard (1652-1729), one of the court physicians and the writer of a great deal of worthless poetry. He attacked the dramatists of the time generally and Dryden individually, and is the Quack Maurus of Dryden's prologue to The Secular Masque . Millbourn , Rev. Luke, who criticised Dryden; which criticism, although sneered at by Pope, is allowed to have been judicious and decisive.]

[Line 465: Zoilus . See note on line 183.]

[Line 479: Patriarch wits —Perhaps an allusion to the great age to which the antediluvian patriarchs of the Bible lived.]

[Line 536: An easy monarch .—Charles II.]

[Line 541: At that time ladies went to the theater in masks.]

[Line 544: A foreign reign .—The reign of the foreigner, William III.]

[Line 545: Socinus .—The reaction from the fanaticism of the Puritans, who held extreme notions of free grace and satisfaction, by resolving all Christianity into morality, led the way to the introduction of Socinianism, the most prominent feature of which is the denial of the existence of the Trinity.]

[Line 552: Wit's Titans .—The Titans, in Greek mythology, were the children of Uranus (heaven) and Gaea (earth), and of gigantic size. They engaged in a conflict with Zeus, the king of heaven, which lasted ten years. They were completely defeated, and hurled down into a dungeon below Tartarus. Very often they are confounded with the Giants, as has apparently been done here by Pope. These were a later progeny of the same parents, and in revenge for what had been done to the Titans, conspired to dethrone Zeus. In order to scale heaven, they piled Mount Ossa upon Pelion, and would have succeeded in their attempt if Zeus had not called in the assistance of his son Hercules.]

[Line 585: Appius .—He refers to Dennis (see note to verse 270) who had published a tragedy called Appius and Virginia . He retaliated for these remarks by coarse personalities upon Pope, in his criticism of this poem.]

[Line 617: Durfey's Tales .—Thomas D'Urfey, the author (in the reign of Charles II.) of a sequel in five acts of The Rehearsal , a series of sonnets entitled Pills to Purge Melancholy , the Tales here alluded to, etc. He was a very inferior poet, although Addison pleaded for him.]

[Line 619: Garth, Dr. , afterwards Sir Samuel (born 1660) an eminent physician and a poet of considerable reputation He is best known as the author of The Dispensary , a poetical satire on the apothecaries and physicians who opposed the project of giving medicine gratuitously to the sick poor. The poet alludes to a slander current at the time with regard to the authorship of the poem.]

[Line 623: St Paul's Churchyard , before the fire of London, was the headquarters of the booksellers.]

[Lines 645, 646: See note on line 138.]

[Line 648: The Maeonian star .—Homer, supposed by some to have been born in Maeonia, a part of Lydia in Asia Minor, and whose poems were the chief subject of Aristotle's criticism.]

[Line 652: Who conquered nature —He wrote, besides his other works, treatises on Astronomy, Mechanics, Physics, and Natural History.]

[Line 665: Dionysius , born at Halicarnassus about 50 B.C., was a learned critic, historian, and rhetorician at Rome in the Augustan age.]

[Line 667: Petronius .—A Roman voluptuary at the court of Nero whose ambition was to shine as a court exquisite. He is generally supposed to be the author of certain fragments of a comic romance called Petronii Arbitri Satyricon .]

[Line 669: Quintilian , born in Spain 40 A.D. was a celebrated teacher of rhetoric and oratory at Rome. His greatwork is De Institutione Oratorica , a complete system of rhetoric, which is here referred to.]

[Line 675: Longinus , a Platonic philosopher and famous rhetorician, born either in Syria or at Athens about 213 A.D., was probably the best critic of antiquity. From his immense knowledge, he was called "a living library" and "walking museum," hence the poet speaks of him as inspired by all the Nine —Muses that is. These were Clio, the muse of History, Euterpe, of Music, Thaleia, of Pastoral and Comic Poetry and Festivals, Melpomene, of Tragedy, Terpsichore, of Dancing, Erato, of Lyric and Amorous Poetry, Polyhymnia, of Rhetoric and Singing, Urania, of Astronomy, Calliope, of Eloquence and Heroic Poetry.]

[Line 686: Rome .—For this pronunciation (to rhyme with doom ) he has Shakespeare's example as precedent.]

[Line 692: Goths .—A powerful nation of the Germanic race, which, originally from the Baltic, first settled near the Black Sea, and then overran and took an important part in the subversion of the Roman empire. They were distinguished as Ostro Goths (Eastern Goths) on the shores of the Black Sea, the Visi Goths (Western Goths) on the Danube, and the Moeso Goths, in Moesia ]

[Line 693: Erasmus .—A Dutchman (1467-1536), and at one time a Roman Catholic priest, who acted as tutor to Alexander Stuart, a natural son of James IV. of Scotland as professor of Greek for a short time at Oxford, and was the most learned man of his time. His best known work is his Colloquia , which contains satirical onslaughts on monks, cloister life, festivals, pilgrimages etc.]

[Line 696: Vandals .—A race of European barbarians, who first appear historically about the second century, south of the Baltic. They overran in succession Gaul, Spain, and Italy. In 455 they took and plundered Rome, and the way they mutilated and destroyed the works of art has become a proverb, hence the monks are compared to them in their ignorance of art and science.]

[Line 697: Leo .—Leo X., or the Great (1513-1521), was a scholar himself, and gave much encouragement to learning and art.]

[Line 704: Raphael (1483-1520), an Italian, is almost universally regarded as the greatest of painters. He received much encouragement from Leo. Vida —A poet patronised by Leo. He was the son of poor parents at Cremona (see line 707), which therefore the poet says, would be next in fame to Mantua, the birthplace of Virgil as it was next to it in place.

   "Mantua vae miserae nimium vicina Cremona."—Virg.]

[Line 714: Boileau .—An illustrious French poet (1636-1711), who wrote a poem on the Art of Poetry, which is copiously imitated by Pope in this poem.]

[Lines 723, 724: Refers to the Duke of Buckingham's Essay on Poetry which had been eulogized also by Dryden and Dr. Garth.]

[Line 725: Roscommon , the Earl of, a poet, who has the honor to be the first critic who praised Milton's Paradise Lost , died 1684.]

[Line 729: Walsh .—An indifferent writer, to whom Pope owed a good deal, died 1710.]

A Little Learning

By Alexander Pope

‘A Little Learning’ by Alexander Pope reflects on the dangers of superficial knowledge, urging deep understanding for true enlightenment.

Alexander Pope

Nationality: English

Notable works include  ' Ode on Solitude ’ and  ' On a Certain Lady at Court .'

Key Poem Information

Unlock more with Poetry +

Central Message: Pursue deep understanding for enlightenment

Themes: Celebration , Disappointment , Dreams , Journey , New Life , Recovery

Speaker: Unknown

Emotions Evoked: Confidence , Fear , Relief , Resilience

Poetic Form: Couplets

Time Period: 18th Century

Pope's cautionary tale warns against arrogance in learning, advocating for thorough comprehension and humility.

Poem Analyzed by Hilary Benard

M.A. in Comparative Literature & Critical Theories and B.A. Honors in Comparative History

‘A Little Learning’ by Alexander Pope cautions against the dangers of superficial knowledge. Through vivid imagery and metaphor , Pope portrays the perils of having only a shallow understanding of a subject . He compares incomplete knowledge to intoxication, warning that it can cloud judgment and lead to arrogance. Pope emphasizes the necessity of delving deeply into learning or abstaining altogether, using the metaphor of drinking from the Pierian spring. He also highlights the transformative nature of learning, depicting the journey as one marked by continual discovery and expanding horizons. Overall, the poem serves as a reminder to approach knowledge with humility and a willingness to pursue deep understanding.

Before reading ' A Little Learning ' by Alexander Pope, it's helpful to:

• Understand the context of the Enlightenment period (17th-18th period movement), during which reason and knowledge were highly valued.
• Keep in mind Pope's satirical style and his tendency to convey moral messages through wit and irony .
• Consider the metaphorical significance of the Pierian spring and the imagery of climbing mountains, as they represent the journey of learning.
• Reflect on the dangers of intellectual arrogance and the importance of humility in the pursuit of knowledge.

Log in or join Poetry + to access Poem Printable PDFs.

Explore A Little Learning

• 2 Structure and Form
• 4  Literary Devices
• 5 Detailed Analysis

‘A Little Learning ‘ discusses the dangers of superficial knowledge and the importance of deep understanding. The speaker warns that possessing only a small amount of knowledge can be harmful, likening it to a “dangerous thing.” He advises that one should either fully immerse oneself in learning or refrain from it altogether, using the metaphor of drinking from the Pierian spring, a symbol of knowledge and inspiration from Greek mythology .

The poem describes how superficial understanding can be misleading, leading to arrogance and overconfidence. It compares the initial excitement and confidence of youthful learners to climb the heights of knowledge with the sobering realization that true understanding requires extensive effort and exploration. The speaker suggests that in youth, people are often eager to explore the arts and sciences but may only have a limited perspective , failing to see the depth and complexity of the subjects they are studying.

As one progresses in learning, the poem suggests, they become increasingly aware of the vastness of knowledge and the challenges that lie ahead. The metaphorical journey up the towering Alps represents the initial enthusiasm for learning, but as one climbs higher, they realize the immense effort required to reach the summit. The “growing labours of the lengthened way” symbolize the ever-expanding scope of knowledge, with “Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise” indicating the seemingly endless layers of understanding yet to be attained.

Overall, the poem emphasizes the importance of humility, caution, and perseverance in the pursuit of knowledge. It warns against the dangers of intellectual arrogance and encourages individuals to approach learning with a sense of humility and a willingness to delve deeply into subjects rather than settling for superficial understanding.

The Poem Analysis Take

Expert Insights by Hilary Benard

I can praise ‘ A Little Learning ’ for its cautionary message and eloquent execution. However, I feel that Pope's admonition against superficial knowledge is overly pessimistic. I want to argue that a modest amount of learning can inspire curiosity and serve as a stepping stone to deeper understanding. I am sure this perspective may challenge the conventional wisdom of the poem and I therefore invite readers to reconsider the value of incremental knowledge acquisition.

Structure and Form

The structure and form of ‘A Little Learning ‘ play a significant role in conveying the poem’s message effectively. Here’s a breakdown of its structure and form:

The poem consists of a single stanza , which is relatively long, containing eighteen lines . This single stanza allows for a continuous flow of thought, with each line building upon the previous one.

The poem is composed entirely of couplets , meaning each line is paired with another line that rhymes with it. This consistent use of couplets creates a sense of rhythm and unity throughout the poem. The use of couplets also contributes to the clarity of expression and reinforces the ideas presented in each pair of lines.

The rhyme scheme of the poem is AABBCCDDEEFFCCFFEE . This structured rhyme scheme contributes to the poem’s musicality and reinforces its formal quality. The repetition of rhyme patterns, particularly the frequent use of end rhymes , helps to maintain the poem’s coherence and aids in memorability.

While ‘A Little Learning ‘ doesn’t strictly adhere to a specific meter , it exhibits a rhythmic quality characteristic of Pope’s writing. The poem flows smoothly, with a balanced cadence created by the use of iambs and the consistent rhyme scheme. This rhythmic flow contributes to the poem’s readability and helps to engage the reader.

Pope employs enjambment , the continuation of a sentence or phrase beyond the end of a line, and caesura , a pause within a line, to control the pacing and emphasis within the poem. This technique allows for a natural progression of thought while also providing moments of pause for reflection.

The length of the stanza, coupled with the symmetry of the rhyme scheme, contributes to the overall balance and structure of the poem. Despite its relatively long length, the poem feels cohesive and well-organized due to its carefully crafted form.

In summary, the structure and form of “A Little Learning” serve to enhance the poem’s thematic content by providing a rhythmic and cohesive framework for conveying its message about the dangers of superficial knowledge and the importance of humility in learning.

In ‘A Little Learning ,’ Alexander Pope addresses several themes.

One prominent theme in the poem is the danger of possessing only a small amount of knowledge . Pope warns that “A little learning is a dangerous thing” (line 1), suggesting that having limited understanding can lead to arrogance and misguided confidence. This theme is further emphasized as Pope describes how “shallow draughts intoxicate the brain” (line 3), indicating that incomplete knowledge can cloud one’s judgment and lead to erroneous conclusions. The metaphor of intoxication suggests that superficial understanding can be misleading and ultimately harmful.

Another theme that Pope explores is the importance of humility in the pursuit of knowledge . He advises readers to “Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring” (line 2), implying that one should either fully immerse oneself in learning or refrain from it altogether. This admonition underscores the need for humility and a recognition of the vastness of knowledge. Additionally, Pope cautions against the folly of intellectual arrogance, suggesting that those who possess only a shallow understanding may be “fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts” (line 5), but ultimately lack the depth of insight necessary for true wisdom.

Furthermore, Pope reflects on the evolving nature of understanding as one progresses in learning . He describes how in youth, individuals are often “fired at first sight” (line 5) with enthusiasm and confidence, eager to explore the heights of knowledge. However, as they advance, they become aware of the vastness of the journey ahead, with “new distant scenes of endless science rise” (line 7). This theme highlights the idea that knowledge is not static but continuously expanding, requiring lifelong curiosity and exploration.

Pope offers a cautionary reflection on the dangers of superficial knowledge , the importance of humility in learning , and the evolving nature of understanding . The poem serves as a reminder to approach knowledge with humility, recognizing both its vastness and complexity.

 Literary Devices

Alexander Pope employs several literary devices in this poem to effectively convey his message about the dangers of superficial knowledge and the importance of humility in learning. Key among these devices are:

• Metaphor : One prominent literary device used by Pope is metaphor. Throughout the poem, Pope utilizes metaphor to illustrate the consequences of possessing only a small amount of knowledge. For instance, he compares shallow understanding to a “dangerous thing” (line 1), likening it to a hazardous substance that can lead to negative outcomes. Furthermore, Pope employs the metaphor of drinking from the Pierian spring, a symbol of knowledge and inspiration, to emphasize the importance of delving deeply into learning. He warns that “There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain” (line 3), suggesting that incomplete knowledge can cloud one’s judgment in the same way that alcohol intoxicates the mind.
• Imagery : Pope makes use of this device to vividly depict the journey of learning and the challenges that come with it. He describes the initial enthusiasm of youth as being “fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts” (line 5), evoking imagery of passion and inspiration. Furthermore, Pope employs visual imagery to portray the daunting nature of the intellectual journey, describing how “Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise” (line 17), creating a vivid image of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that lie ahead.
• Parallelism : Pope also utilizes parallelism to reinforce his message and create a sense of balance within the poem. He repeats the phrase “Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring” (line 2) twice within the poem, employing parallel structure to emphasize the importance of fully engaging with learning. This repetition serves to underscore the central message of the poem while also enhancing its rhythm and coherence.
• Alliteration : Pope further employs alliteration, assonance , and consonance to create musicality and enhance the poem’s aesthetic appeal. For example, in the line “Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts” (line 5), the repetition of the “f” sound in “fired” and “first,” as well as the “s” sound in “sight” and “Muse,” creates a melodic quality that draws attention to the speaker’s enthusiasm for learning.

Through these devices, the poet effectively conveys his message. These literary devices not only enhance the poem’s aesthetic appeal but also contribute to its thematic depth and resonance.

Detailed Analysis

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts,

In the opening lines of the poem, the poet conveys a profound message about the perils of superficial knowledge and the importance of thorough understanding. Through the metaphor of “A little learning” being “a dangerous thing” (lines 1-2), Pope warns against the pitfalls of having only a shallow understanding of a subject. He suggests that such limited knowledge can lead to misguided confidence and potentially harmful outcomes. By juxtaposing this cautionary statement with the imperative “Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring” (line 2), Pope emphasizes the necessity of delving deeply into learning or abstaining from it altogether.

The Pierian spring symbolizes the source of knowledge and inspiration, and Pope advises against merely sampling its waters, as “shallow draughts intoxicate the brain” (line 3). Here, he vividly illustrates how incomplete understanding can cloud one’s judgment, likening it to intoxication. However, Pope offers a solution, suggesting that immersing oneself fully in learning (“drinking largely”) can “sober us again” (line 4), implying that deep knowledge brings clarity and understanding.

Furthermore, Pope describes how in youth, individuals are often “Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts” (line 5), indicating an initial enthusiasm for learning. This line suggests that young people are often inspired by the insights of the Muse, eager to explore the heights of knowledge.

While from the bounded level of our mind, Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind, But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise New, distant scenes of endless science rise! So pleased at first, the towering Alps we try, Mount o’er the vales, and seem to tread the sky;

In these lines, Alexander Pope continues to explore the theme of knowledge and understanding, focusing on the progression of learning and the expanding vistas of knowledge that become apparent with advancement. He depicts the limitations of initial understanding, characterized by “Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind” (lines 8-9), suggesting that in the early stages of learning, individuals have a narrow perspective and fail to comprehend the depth and complexity of the subject. However, Pope suggests that as one progresses, they are met with “strange surprise” (line 10) as new, previously unseen aspects of knowledge unfold before them. This imagery of “New distant scenes of endless science” (line 11) evokes a sense of wonder and awe at the vastness of the intellectual landscape.

Pope employs the metaphor of climbing towering Alps to illustrate the journey of learning, describing how one initially feels “pleased” (line 11) to attempt the ascent, metaphorically representing the enthusiasm and determination to explore new heights of understanding. The imagery of “Mount o’er the vales, and seem to tread the sky” (line 12) conveys the sense of triumph and exhilaration that comes with initial progress. Through these lines, Pope underscores the idea that learning is a journey marked by continual discovery and expanding horizons, highlighting the transformative nature of deepening understanding.

Lines 13-18

The eternal snows appear already past, And the first clouds and mountains seem the last; But those attained, we tremble to survey The growing labours of the lengthened way, The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes, Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

In these concluding lines of ‘A Little Learning ,’ the speaker reflects on the daunting reality of the intellectual journey, using vivid imagery to convey the challenges of advancing in knowledge. The metaphor of “the eternal snows” appearing “already past” (line 13) and the “first clouds and mountains” seeming “the last” (line 14) captures the illusion of progress, where initial accomplishments make future obstacles appear surmountable. However, Pope quickly dispels this illusion, revealing that upon reaching these milestones, individuals “tremble to survey” (line 15) the vastness of what lies ahead.

The imagery of “the growing labours of the lengthened way” (line 16) emphasizes the arduous nature of the journey and the increasing difficulty of the challenges faced. Moreover, Pope illustrates how the expanding horizon of knowledge can be overwhelming, as “the increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes” (line 17). The repetition of the phrase “Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise” (line 18) emphasizes the endlessness of the intellectual landscape, where each achievement reveals new heights yet to be conquered. Through these lines, Pope emphasizes the humbling reality of the pursuit of knowledge, portraying it as a continuous and sometimes daunting journey characterized by both exhilaration and exhaustion.

Poetry + Review Corner

18th century, celebration, disappointment, exploration.

Get PDFs for this Poem

Log in or join Poetry + to access all PDFs for this poem.

Home » Alexander Pope » A Little Learning

About Hilary Benard

Join the poetry chatter and comment.

Exclusive to Poetry + Members

Join Conversations

Share your thoughts and be part of engaging discussions.

Expert Replies

Get personalized insights from our Qualified Poetry Experts.

Connect with Poetry Lovers

Build connections with like-minded individuals.

Access the Complete PDF Guide of this Poem

Poetry+ PDF Guides are designed to be the ultimate PDF Guides for poetry. The PDF Guide consists of a front cover, table of contents, with the full analysis, including the Poetry+ Review Corner and numerically referenced literary terms, plus much more.

Get the PDF Guide

Experts in Poetry

Our work is created by a team of talented poetry experts, to provide an in-depth look into poetry, like no other.

Cite This Page

Benard, Hilary. "A Little Learning by Alexander Pope". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/alexander-pope/a-little-learning/ . Accessed 25 August 2024.

Help Center

Request an Analysis

(not a member? Join now)

Poem PDF Guides

PDF Learning Library

Beyond the Verse Podcast

Poetry Archives

Poetry Explained

Poet Biographies

Useful Links

Poem Explorer

Poem Generator

[email protected]

Poem Solutions Limited, International House, 36-38 Cornhill, London, EC3V 3NG, United Kingdom

(and discover the hidden secrets to understanding poetry)

Get PDFs to Help You Learn Poetry

Download Poetry PDF Guides

Complete Poetry PDF Guide

Perfect Offline Resource

Covers Everything Need to Know

One-pager 'snapshot' PDF

Offline Resource

Gateway to deeper understanding

Get this Poem Analysis as an Offline Resource

Poetry+ PDF Guides are designed to be the ultimate PDF Guides for poetry. The PDF Guide contains everything to understand poetry.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

What's the meaning of the phrase 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing'.

The proverb ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ expresses the idea that a small amount of knowledge can mislead people into thinking that they are more expert than they really are, which can lead to mistakes being made.

What's the origin of the phrase 'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing'?

‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ and ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’ have been used synonymously since the 18th century.

A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.

The similarity of the two phrases is demonstrated by what appears to be an impromptu coining of ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ in a piece in The monthly miscellany; or Gentleman and Lady’s Complete Magazine, Vol II , 1774, in which the writer misquoted Pope:

Mr. Pope says, very truly, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

Both Pope’s original verse and the misquotation of it were pre-dated by a similar notion expressed by an anonymous author, signing himself ‘A B’, in the collection of letters published in 1698 as The Mystery of Phanaticism :

“Twas well observed by my Lord Bacon, That a little knowledge is apt to puff up, and make men giddy, but a greater share of it will set them right, and bring them to low and humble thoughts of themselves.

Again, there is a degree of misquotation here. ‘My Lord Bacon’ was the English politician and philosopher Francis Bacon, Viscount St Alban, and what he actually said, in his The Essays: Of Atheism , 1601, was:

“A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”

The number of writers who were stating variants of ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’ in early 18th England is probably a consequence of spread in the availability of scholarly works in English. The Age of the Enlightenment, as the period was known, saw a growth in the interest of cultural and philosophical concerns amongst the middle classes. Discussion of such topics had previously been conducted mainly in Latin and been the preserve of the elite. The sight of the hoi-polloi having views on higher matters wasn’t welcomed by those who had been classically schooled – hence ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’.

Related phrases and meanings

Browse more phrases, about the author, gary martin.

Phrases & Meanings

How did we do.

Poetry Prof

Read, Teach, Study Poetry

from An Essay on Criticism

Join Alexander Pope on a metaphysical journey of discovery… that will last a lifetime.

“[It is] difficult to know which part to prefer, when all is equally beautiful and noble.” Weekly Miscellany comments on the poetry of Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope spent his childhood in Windsor forest and, from an early age, gained a keen appreciation for nature. Later in his life he lived in a property by the River Thames in London where he cultivated his own garden that he opened for visitors. In today’s poem, written in 1709, we can see this love of the natural world through his shaping of elements of the landscape into an extended metaphor for knowledge. This landscape is vast and mountainous: the Alps , Europe’s largest mountain range are a prominent feature, as are hills, vales , an endless sky and eternal snows . Compared to this vast landscape, people are almost insignificant. Their role in the poem is to act as explorers who set off on a journey of discovery, trying to conquer the highest mountains by ascending to the summit; we tempt the heights of Arts… the towering Alps we try… Finally, despite being almost exhausted by his efforts, the explorer realises that his journey has barely begun; the mountain vista stretches ahead, unbroken, into the distance:

A poem’s central idea, often developed into an extended metaphor, is known as a conceit . Unlocking the first couplet should provide you the key to Pope’s conceit in An Essay on Criticism . Pope begins with a warning that:

The Pierian Spring is an important place in Greek Mythology , the source of a river of knowledge that was associated with the nine ancient Muses, themselves a metaphor for artistic inspiration. In this poem, it’s part of the landscape that functions as an extended metaphor for learning. It might seem strange that Pope begins by giving his readers a warning to taste not the waters of this river. However, it’s important to realise that Pope isn’t saying not to drink from the well of knowledge at all. He tells us to drink deep , emphasising his instruction with both alliterative D and using the imperative tense (where the verb is placed at the beginning of the line or phrase). To Pope’s mind, learning is seductive and intoxicating . Once you set out on the journey of learning, or take even a tiny sip from the wellspring of knowledge, you won’t be able to resist the temptation to learn more. Therefore, he suggests that you either prepare to immerse yourself completely in the Pierian Spring , or don’t drink at all.

Once you’ve discovered the connotations of Pierian Spring , the rest of the poem can be read as a warning (or criticism ) of anyone who is rash enough not to follow Pope’s instruction. Should you venture unprepared into the unknown, you must be clear about your limitations. As a spring is the starting point of a river, so too is it the starting point of Pope’s extended metaphor . From here, the reader sets out on a journey into an imposing mountainous landscape that, while initially appearing it can be ‘climbed’ or conquered, actually keeps expanding into an endless vista. No matter how far the explorer climbs, the top of the mountain never gets any nearer. Heights, lengthening way, increasing prospect and, most telling of all, eternal snows conjure the visual image of the landscape metaphysically stretching out in front of our weary eyes. Individual people are tiny and easily lost in this ever-shifting world. Pope creates a contrast between the boundless landscape and the bounded limits of human perception. At the last, the human explorer is tired by his efforts to conquer these mountains of knowledge – but the poem ends by revealing that he’d barely even gotten started on his journey: Hills peep o’er hills; Alps upon Alps arise .

Before we get too much further into the discussion of Pope’s ‘essay’, it might be helpful to place these lines in context. Despite the way they seem to be a complete poem in themselves, they are actually part of a much longer poem which stretches to three parts and a total of 744 lines! The eighteen-line extract you’ve read constitutes the second verse of Part 2 and it may help you to know that, in the first verse, Pope singled out pride as the characteristic that would eventually lead to the downfall of his explorer. Here are four lines from earlier in the Essay:

In this short sample, you can see the names Pope calls people who rush off on foolhardy adventures without taking the time to properly prepare: blind man , weak head and fools ! Younger readers might not enjoy this interpretation, but Pope finds the overconfidence of young people most problematic, associating youth with a kind of recklessness that, in hindsight, is misplaced.

You may argue that qualities such as fearless and passionate (fired) seem like compliments; but I detect a note of criticism in Pope’s words; he suggests that young people confuse emotion with clear thinking and they are too eager to plunge into the unknown. There’s an emphasis on speed and rashness ( pleased at first; at first sight ) that cannot last, like a novice marathon runner who goes sprinting out of the blocks while older, more wily competitors know to save themselves for the challenges ahead. While the young explorer does encounter some early success (implied by words like mount , more advanced , attained and, more significantly by an image : tread the sky ), the race is longer than the runner thought and inevitably the pace must sag. Later in the poem, positive diction disappears and words like trembling , growing labours , and tired take over as the true scale of the challenge becomes apparent. Sharp-eyed readers will already have noticed that the image of ‘treading the sky’ was in fact a simile : seem to tread the sky. Subtly, Pope’s use of a simile implies that any success the explorer thought he’d achieved wasn’t actually real.

The implication that over-enthusiasm can cloud good judgment can be traced through diction to do with looking and seeing: a t first sight, short views, see, behold, appear, survey, eyes and peep pepper the poem and convey the poet’s belief that, to our detriment, we can be short-sighted and tunnel-visioned. The eighth line of the poem is entirely concerned with this idea: short views we take, nor see the lengths behind paints a picture of a young explorer who only looks in one direction – eyes fixed straight ahead – and so misses the bigger picture.

While the poem is certainly didactic (it’s trying to impart a lesson), Pope’s tone of voice is not too condescending or stand-offish because he includes himself in his criticism as well. Throughout the poem the words us, we and our soften his accusations so there’s never a ‘them-and-us’ divide between young and old. In fact, Pope was only 21 years old when he finished his Essay on Criticism , so use your mind’s ear to imagine him speaking ruefully from experience, rather than as a nagging or pestering adult complaining about ‘young people today.’ The line Fired at first sight by what the Muse imparts is revealing in this regard. Alluding to the nine Muses of Greek mythology , this line personifies poetic inspiration, so in one sense the extended metaphor of trying to conquer an unknowable landscape represents his own experiences of writing poetry. ‘Meta-poems’ (poems about the writing of poems) actually have a name: ars poetica . Pope implies that rushing off on a path of artistic endeavour without realising the true extent of the commitment that entails is a mistake that he himself has made in his own attempts at writing.

If you’re a student reading this who thinks you might be able to use Pope’s poem as an excuse not to do your homework or give up on your own writing: you shouldn’t be too rash. Pope’s not suggesting we should quit. Instead, he’s warning us that what might seem like a shallow pool is in fact a deep river of knowledge. Once you jump in, the current will sweep you away and there’s no going back. The poem is a criticism of unpreparedness and arrogance rather than an acknowledgement of futility. In fact, an element of form suggests that, for all the faults Pope has pointed out in young people who are too confident in their limited abilities, it is much more praiseworthy to try and fail to conquer the heights than never to try at all. The poem is written in iambic pentameter that is constant and regular as if, no matter how tough the going gets, the young explorer doesn’t give up. Compare these two lines, with iambic accents marked, from the beginning and end of the poem to see how the rhythm is unfailing:

More, the poem is arranged in rhyming couplets (the rhyme scheme is AA, BB, CC and so on). Rhyming couplets written in iambic pentameter are traditionally known by a more dramatic name: heroic couplets . Pope was widely considered to be the master of writing poetry in heroic couplets ; using them here implies that Pope ultimately believes any young person who’s brave – or foolhardy – enough to embark upon the lifelong journey of learning is worthy of praise.

The structure of Pope’s poetical essay matches the message he’s trying to convey – that, once you start learning, you won’t be able to stop. Look carefully at the punctuation marks, in particular his use of full stops . You’ll find the first one at the end of the fourth line, the second after the tenth and the third at the end of the poem (after eighteen lines). In other words, if the poem was arranged in verses, the first verse would be nice and short at only four lines, the second would stretch to six, but the final verse would have doubled in length to eight lines. Expanding sentences represent the conceit – a little learning is a dangerous thing – and match the images of the landscape expanding ( eternal snows , increasing prospect, lengthening way ) as you read further down the poem.

The end of the poem brings Pope’s criticism to its conclusion. We see the young explorer break through the eternal snows , climb above the clouds, and stand triumphantly on the mountain top, proudly surveying his achievements. Only now does he take a moment to look more deliberately at the mountains he’s trying to conquer:

Be alert to two words that might seem insignificant: appear and seem , words that signal the mistake the explorer made; he thought that he had already past the bulk of his journey. Read carefully to punctuation as well, and you’ll see the colon – a longer pause, which creates a caseura – representing the traveler pausing at the moment of his triumph… and it’s here that realisation finally dawns. Despite the difficulty of his climb thus far, the landscape ( increasing prospect ) stretches out endlessly in front of him: Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise . Here, repetition mixes with all that increasing and lengthening diction to create a surreal image of an ever-expanding landscape stretching out ahead. You might also notice P sounds peppering the last two lines of the poem in the words p ee p , Al p s, Al p s, and p ros p ect . Coming from a category of alliteration called plosive , this sound is excellent at conveying a release of negative emotion, as it is formed by pushing air through closed lips. The sound helps us perceive the taste of victory turning to defeat as the weary traveler’s shoulders slump at the prospect of the endless climb still to come.

What does Pope offer as a solution? He already warned us at the start of the poem: drinking largely sobers us again . Suddenly, the importance of the word sober becomes clear. While the idea of heading off on this journey of discovery was intoxicating , firing up those with passion to learn, discover and explore – the reality is very different. That young, over-confident learner/explorer is gone, replaced by a wiser, but more world-weary traveler who can finally see the true scale of the task ahead. By now it’s too late, he’s stuck on the mountain top and there’s only one thing he can do – go onwards!

So drink deep and be prepared to encounter much more than you expected when you set out on your journey.

Suggested poems for comparison:

• from Essay on Man by Alexander Pope

An Essay on Criticism was not the only poetical essay written by Pope. French writer Voltaire so admired Pope’s Essay on Man that he arranged for its translation into French and from there it spread around Europe.

• Marrysong by Dennis Scott

As in Pope’s poem, Scott creates a metaphor of the landscape to represent his marriage. He is an explorer in a strange land – each time the explorer glances up from his map, the landscape has changed and he’s lost again.

• Through the Dark Sod – As Education by Emily Dickinson

Victorians brought many different associations to all kinds of plants and flowers. In this Emily Dickinson poem, the lily represents beauty, purity and rebirth. This link will also take you to a fantastic blog which aims to read and provide comment on all of Emily Dickinson’s poems. So that’s 1 down, and nearly 2000 more to go…

• In the Mountains by Wang Wei

Often spoken of with the same reverence as Li Bai and Du Fu, Wang Wei is a famous imagist poet in China. In these exquisite portrait poems, Wang Wei paints pictures of the impressive landscapes of his mountain home.

Additional Resources

If you are teaching or studying  An Essay on Criticism  at school or college, or if you simply enjoyed this analysis of the poem and would like to discover more, you might like to purchase our bespoke study bundle for this poem. It costs only £2 and includes: 

• Study Questions with guidance on how to answer in full paragraphs;
• A sample analytical paragraph for essay writing; 
• An interactive and editable powerpoint, giving line-by-line analysis of all the poetic and technical features of the poem; 
• An in-depth worksheet with a focus on analysing diction and explaining lexical fields ;
• A fun crossword quiz, perfect for a starter activity, revision or a recap;
• A four-page activity booklet that can be printed and folded into a handout – ideal for self study or revision;
• 4 practice Essay Questions – and one complete model Essay Plan.

And… discuss! 

Did you enjoy this analysis of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism ? Do you agree that the poem somewhat singles out young people? Can you relate to Pope’s messages about the temptations of learning? Why not share your ideas, ask a question, or leave a comment for others to read below. For nuggets of analysis and all-new illustrations, find and follow Poetry Prof on Instagram.

One comment

I would like to have an explanation of the frontispiece appended to the 1711 edition of An Essay on Criticism. Is it related to Pierrian Spring and the Muse of Poetry referred to in the poem. I would like to know more on it.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction

Early works

• Homer and The Dunciad
• Life at Twickenham

• Was Homer a real person?
• Did Homer write the Odyssey ?
• How did Shakespeare die?
• Why is Shakespeare still important today?

Alexander Pope

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Poetry Foundation - Biography of Alexander Pope
• McClintock and Strong Biblical Cyclopedia - Biography of Alexander Pope
• Online Library of Liberty - Alexander Pope: A Biographical Sketch
• All Poetry - Biography of Alexander Pope
• Academy of American Poets - Biography of Alexander Pope
• The Victorian Web - Alexander Pope
• The Twickenham Museum - Alexander Pope
• Catholic Online - Biography of Alexander Pope
• Alexander Pope - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

Alexander Pope (born May 21, 1688, London , England—died May 30, 1744, Twickenham, near London) was a poet and satirist of the English Augustan period, best known for his poems An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), The Dunciad (1728), and An Essay on Man (1733–34). He is one of the most epigrammatic of all English authors.

Pope’s father, a wholesale linen merchant, retired from business in the year of his son’s birth and in 1700 went to live at Binfield in Windsor Forest. The Popes were Roman Catholics, and at Binfield they came to know several neighbouring Catholic families who were to play an important part in the poet’s life. Pope’s religion procured him some lifelong friends, notably the wealthy squire John Caryll (who persuaded him to write The Rape of the Lock , on an incident involving Caryll’s relatives) and Martha Blount, to whom Pope addressed some of the most memorable of his poems and to whom he bequeathed most of his property. But his religion also precluded him from a formal course of education, since Catholics were not admitted to the universities. He was trained at home by Catholic priests for a short time and attended Catholic schools at Twyford, near Winchester, and at Hyde Park Corner, London, but he was mainly self-educated. He was a precocious boy, eagerly reading Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, which he managed to teach himself, and an incessant scribbler, turning out verse upon verse in imitation of the poets he read. The best of these early writings are the “Ode on Solitude” and a paraphrase of St. Thomas à Kempis , both of which he claimed to have written at age 12.

Windsor Forest was near enough to London to permit Pope’s frequent visits there. He early grew acquainted with former members of John Dryden’s circle, notably William Wycherley , William Walsh, and Henry Cromwell . By 1705 his “ Pastorals” were in draft and were circulating among the best literary judges of the day. In 1706 Jacob Tonson , the leading publisher of poetry , had solicited their publication, and they took the place of honour in his Poetical Miscellanies in 1709.

This early emergence of a man of letters may have been assisted by Pope’s poor physique. As a result of too much study, so he thought, he acquired a curvature of the spine and some tubercular infection, probably Pott’s disease , that limited his growth and seriously impaired his health. His full-grown height was 4 feet 6 inches (1.4 metres), but the grace of his profile and fullness of his eye gave him an attractive appearance. He was a lifelong sufferer from headaches, and his deformity made him abnormally sensitive to physical and mental pain. Though he was able to ride a horse and delighted in travel, he was inevitably precluded from much normal physical activity , and his energetic, fastidious mind was largely directed to reading and writing .

When the “Pastorals” were published, Pope was already at work on a poem on the art of writing. This was An Essay on Criticism , published in 1711. Its brilliantly polished epigrams (e.g., “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” “To err is human, to forgive, divine,” and “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread”), which have become part of the proverbial heritage of the language , are readily traced to their sources in Horace , Quintilian, Boileau, and other critics, ancient and modern, in verse and prose; but the charge that the poem is derivative, so often made in the past, takes insufficient account of Pope’s success in harmonizing a century of conflict in critical thinking and in showing how nature may best be mirrored in art.

The well-deserved success of An Essay on Criticism brought Pope a wider circle of friends, notably Richard Steele and Joseph Addison , who were then collaborating on The Spectator . To this journal Pope contributed the most original of his pastorals, “The Messiah” (1712), and perhaps other papers in prose. He was clearly influenced by The Spectator ’s policy of correcting public morals by witty admonishment, and in this vein he wrote the first version of his mock epic , The Rape of the Lock (two cantos, 1712; five cantos, 1714), to reconcile two Catholic families. A young man in one family had stolen a lock of hair from a young lady in the other. Pope treated the dispute that followed as though it were comparable to the mighty quarrel between Greeks and Trojans, which had been Homer’s theme. Telling the story with all the pomp and circumstance of epic made not only the participants in the quarrel but also the society in which they lived seem ridiculous. Though it was a society where

…Britain’s statesmen oft the fall foredoom Of foreign tyrants, and of nymphs at home;

as if one occupation concerned them as much as the other, and though in such a society a young lady might do equally ill to

…Stain her honour, or her new brocade; Forget her pray’rs, or miss a masquerade;

Pope managed also to suggest what genuine attractions existed amid the foppery. It is a glittering poem about a glittering world. He acknowledged how false the sense of values was that paid so much attention to external appearance, but ridicule and rebuke slide imperceptibly into admiration and tender affection as the heroine, Belinda, is conveyed along the Thames to Hampton Court , the scene of the “rape”:

But now secure the painted vessel glides, The sunbeams trembling on the floating tides: While melting music steals upon the sky, And soften’d sounds along the waters die; Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play, Belinda smil’d, and all the world was gay.

A comparable blend of seemingly incompatible responses—love and hate, bawdiness and decorum , admiration and ridicule—is to be found in all Pope’s later satires. The poem is thick with witty allusions to classical verse and, notably, to Milton’s Paradise Lost . The art of allusion is an element of much of Pope’s poetry.

Pope had also been at work for several years on “ Windsor-Forest .” In this poem, completed and published in 1713, he proceeded, as Virgil had done, from the pastoral vein to the georgic and celebrated the rule of Queen Anne as the Latin poet had celebrated the rule of Augustus. In another early poem,“ Eloisa to Abelard ,” Pope borrowed the form of Ovid’s “heroic epistle” (in which an abandoned lady addresses her lover) and showed imaginative skill in conveying the struggle between sexual passion and dedication to a life of celibacy.

• Free writing courses
• Famous poetry classics
• Forums: Poet's • Suggestions
• My active groups   see all
• Trade comments
• Print publishing
• Rate comments
• Recent views
• Membership plan
• Contact us + HELP

An Essay on Criticism

Comments from the archive

Alexander Pope   Follow

Make comments, explore modern poetry. Join today for free!

Top poems List all »

Have you read these poets? List all »

More by alexander pope list all ».

• Send Message
• Open Profile in New Window

Poems & Poets

An Essay on Criticism: Part 2

Of all the causes which conspire to blind Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind, What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools. Whatever Nature has in worth denied, She gives in large recruits of needful pride; For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find What wants in blood and spirits, swell'd with wind; Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence, And fills up all the mighty void of sense! If once right reason drives that cloud away, Truth breaks upon us with resistless day; Trust not yourself; but your defects to know, Make use of ev'ry friend—and ev'ry foe.        A little learning is a dang'rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. Fir'd at first sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts, While from the bounded level of our mind, Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind, But more advanc'd, behold with strange surprise New, distant scenes of endless science rise! So pleas'd at first, the tow'ring Alps we try, Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky; Th' eternal snows appear already past, And the first clouds and mountains seem the last; But those attain'd, we tremble to survey The growing labours of the lengthen'd way, Th' increasing prospect tires our wand'ring eyes, Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!        A perfect judge will read each work of wit With the same spirit that its author writ, Survey the whole, nor seek slight faults to find, Where nature moves, and rapture warms the mind; Nor lose, for that malignant dull delight, The gen'rous pleasure to be charm'd with wit. But in such lays as neither ebb, nor flow, Correctly cold, and regularly low, That shunning faults, one quiet tenour keep; We cannot blame indeed—but we may sleep. In wit, as nature, what affects our hearts Is not th' exactness of peculiar parts; 'Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call, But the joint force and full result of all. Thus when we view some well-proportion'd dome, (The world's just wonder, and ev'n thine, O Rome!' No single parts unequally surprise; All comes united to th' admiring eyes; No monstrous height, or breadth, or length appear; The whole at once is bold, and regular.        Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be. In ev'ry work regard the writer's end, Since none can compass more than they intend; And if the means be just, the conduct true, Applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due. As men of breeding, sometimes men of wit, T' avoid great errors, must the less commit: Neglect the rules each verbal critic lays, For not to know such trifles, is a praise. Most critics, fond of some subservient art, Still make the whole depend upon a part: They talk of principles, but notions prize, And all to one lov'd folly sacrifice.        Once on a time, La Mancha's knight, they say, A certain bard encount'ring on the way, Discours'd in terms as just, with looks as sage, As e'er could Dennis of the Grecian stage; Concluding all were desp'rate sots and fools, Who durst depart from Aristotle's rules. Our author, happy in a judge so nice, Produc'd his play, and begg'd the knight's advice, Made him observe the subject and the plot, The manners, passions, unities, what not? All which, exact to rule, were brought about, Were but a combat in the lists left out. "What! leave the combat out?" exclaims the knight; "Yes, or we must renounce the Stagirite." "Not so by Heav'n" (he answers in a rage) "Knights, squires, and steeds, must enter on the stage." So vast a throng the stage can ne'er contain. "Then build a new, or act it in a plain."        Thus critics, of less judgment than caprice, Curious not knowing, not exact but nice, Form short ideas; and offend in arts (As most in manners) by a love to parts.        Some to conceit alone their taste confine, And glitt'ring thoughts struck out at ev'ry line; Pleas'd with a work where nothing's just or fit; One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit. Poets, like painters, thus, unskill'd to trace The naked nature and the living grace, With gold and jewels cover ev'ry part, And hide with ornaments their want of art. True wit is nature to advantage dress'd, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd, Something, whose truth convinc'd at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind. As shades more sweetly recommend the light, So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit. For works may have more wit than does 'em good, As bodies perish through excess of blood.        Others for language all their care express, And value books, as women men, for dress: Their praise is still—"the style is excellent": The sense, they humbly take upon content. Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found. False eloquence, like the prismatic glass, Its gaudy colours spreads on ev'ry place; The face of Nature we no more survey, All glares alike, without distinction gay: But true expression, like th' unchanging sun, Clears, and improves whate'er it shines upon, It gilds all objects, but it alters none. 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: For diff'rent styles with diff'rent subjects sort, As several garbs with country, town, and court. Some by old words to fame have made pretence, Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense; Such labour'd nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze th' unlearn'd, and make the learned smile. Unlucky, as Fungoso in the play, These sparks with awkward vanity display What the fine gentleman wore yesterday! And but so mimic ancient wits at best, As apes our grandsires, in their doublets dress'd. In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold; Alike fantastic, if too new, or old; Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Not yet the last to lay the old aside.        But most by numbers judge a poet's song; And smooth or rough, with them is right or wrong: In the bright Muse though thousand charms conspire, Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire, Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear, Not mend their minds; as some to church repair, Not for the doctrine, but the music there. These equal syllables alone require, Tho' oft the ear the open vowels tire, While expletives their feeble aid do join, And ten low words oft creep in one dull line, While they ring round the same unvaried chimes, With sure returns of still expected rhymes. Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze", In the next line, it "whispers through the trees": If "crystal streams with pleasing murmurs creep", The reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with "sleep". 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. Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know What's roundly smooth, or languishingly slow; And praise the easy vigour of a line, Where Denham's strength, and Waller's sweetness join. True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. 'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, The sound must seem an echo to the sense. 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. Hear how Timotheus' varied lays surprise, And bid alternate passions fall and rise! While, at each change, the son of Libyan Jove Now burns with glory, and then melts with love; Now his fierce eyes with sparkling fury glow, Now sighs steal out, and tears begin to flow: Persians and Greeks like turns of nature found, And the world's victor stood subdu'd by sound! The pow'r of music all our hearts allow, And what Timotheus was, is Dryden now.        Avoid extremes; and shun the fault of such, Who still are pleas'd too little or too much. At ev'ry trifle scorn to take offence, That always shows great pride, or little sense; Those heads, as stomachs, are not sure the best, Which nauseate all, and nothing can digest. Yet let not each gay turn thy rapture move, For fools admire, but men of sense approve; As things seem large which we through mists descry, Dulness is ever apt to magnify.        Some foreign writers, some our own despise; The ancients only, or the moderns prize. Thus wit, like faith, by each man is applied To one small sect, and all are damn'd beside. Meanly they seek the blessing to confine, And force that sun but on a part to shine; Which not alone the southern wit sublimes, But ripens spirits in cold northern climes; Which from the first has shone on ages past, Enlights the present, and shall warm the last; (Though each may feel increases and decays, And see now clearer and now darker days.) Regard not then if wit be old or new, But blame the false, and value still the true. Some ne'er advance a judgment of their own, But catch the spreading notion of the town; They reason and conclude by precedent, And own stale nonsense which they ne'er invent. Some judge of authors' names, not works, and then Nor praise nor blame the writings, but the men. Of all this servile herd, the worst is he That in proud dulness joins with quality, A constant critic at the great man's board, To fetch and carry nonsense for my Lord. 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! Before his sacred name flies every fault, And each exalted stanza teems with thought!        The vulgar thus through imitation err; As oft the learn'd by being singular; So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng By chance go right, they purposely go wrong: So Schismatics the plain believers quit, And are but damn'd for having too much wit.        Some praise at morning what they blame at night; But always think the last opinion right. A Muse by these is like a mistress us'd, This hour she's idoliz'd, the next abus'd; While their weak heads, like towns unfortified, Twixt sense and nonsense daily change their side. Ask them the cause; they're wiser still, they say; And still tomorrow's wiser than today. We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow; Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so. Once school divines this zealous isle o'erspread; Who knew most Sentences, was deepest read; Faith, Gospel, all, seem'd made to be disputed, And none had sense enough to be confuted: Scotists and Thomists, now, in peace remain, Amidst their kindred cobwebs in Duck Lane. If Faith itself has different dresses worn, What wonder modes in wit should take their turn? Oft, leaving what is natural and fit, The current folly proves the ready wit; And authors think their reputation safe Which lives as long as fools are pleased to laugh.        Some valuing those of their own side or mind, Still make themselves the measure of mankind; Fondly we think we honour merit then, When we but praise ourselves in other men. Parties in wit attend on those of state, And public faction doubles private hate. Pride, Malice, Folly, against Dryden rose, In various shapes of Parsons, Critics, Beaus; But sense surviv'd, when merry jests were past; For rising merit will buoy up at last. Might he return, and bless once more our eyes, New Blackmores and new Milbourns must arise; Nay should great Homer lift his awful head, Zoilus again would start up from the dead. Envy will merit, as its shade, pursue, But like a shadow, proves the substance true; For envied wit, like Sol eclips'd, makes known Th' opposing body's grossness, not its own. When first that sun too powerful beams displays, It draws up vapours which obscure its rays; But ev'n those clouds at last adorn its way, Reflect new glories, and augment the day.        Be thou the first true merit to befriend; His praise is lost, who stays till all commend. Short is the date, alas, of modern rhymes, And 'tis but just to let 'em live betimes. No longer now that golden age appears, When patriarch wits surviv'd a thousand years: Now length of Fame (our second life) is lost, And bare threescore is all ev'n that can boast; Our sons their fathers' failing language see, And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be. So when the faithful pencil has design'd Some bright idea of the master's mind, Where a new world leaps out at his command, And ready Nature waits upon his hand; When the ripe colours soften and unite, And sweetly melt into just shade and light; When mellowing years their full perfection give, And each bold figure just begins to live, The treacherous colours the fair art betray, And all the bright creation fades away!        Unhappy wit, like most mistaken things, Atones not for that envy which it brings. In youth alone its empty praise we boast, But soon the short-liv'd vanity is lost: Like some fair flow'r the early spring supplies, That gaily blooms, but ev'n in blooming dies. What is this wit, which must our cares employ? The owner's wife, that other men enjoy; Then most our trouble still when most admir'd, And still the more we give, the more requir'd; Whose fame with pains we guard, but lose with ease, Sure some to vex, but never all to please; 'Tis what the vicious fear, the virtuous shun; By fools 'tis hated, and by knaves undone!        If wit so much from ign'rance undergo, Ah let not learning too commence its foe! Of old, those met rewards who could excel, And such were prais'd who but endeavour'd well: Though triumphs were to gen'rals only due, Crowns were reserv'd to grace the soldiers too. Now, they who reach Parnassus' lofty crown, Employ their pains to spurn some others down;        And while self-love each jealous writer rules, Contending wits become the sport of fools: But still the worst with most regret commend, For each ill author is as bad a friend. To what base ends, and by what abject ways, Are mortals urg'd through sacred lust of praise! Ah ne'er so dire a thirst of glory boast, Nor in the critic let the man be lost! Good nature and good sense must ever join; To err is human; to forgive, divine.        But if in noble minds some dregs remain, Not yet purg'd off, of spleen and sour disdain, Discharge that rage on more provoking crimes, Nor fear a dearth in these flagitious times. No pardon vile obscenity should find, Though wit and art conspire to move your mind; But dulness with obscenity must prove As shameful sure as impotence in love. In the fat age of pleasure, wealth, and ease, Sprung the rank weed, and thriv'd with large increase: When love was all an easy monarch's care; Seldom at council, never in a war: Jilts ruled the state, and statesmen farces writ; Nay wits had pensions, and young Lords had wit: The fair sat panting at a courtier's play, And not a mask went unimprov'd away: The modest fan was lifted up no more, And virgins smil'd at what they blush'd before. The following licence of a foreign reign Did all the dregs of bold Socinus drain; Then unbelieving priests reform'd the nation, And taught more pleasant methods of salvation; Where Heav'n's free subjects might their rights dispute, Lest God himself should seem too absolute: Pulpits their sacred satire learned to spare, And Vice admired to find a flatt'rer there! Encourag'd thus, wit's Titans brav'd the skies, And the press groan'd with licenc'd blasphemies. These monsters, critics! with your darts engage, Here point your thunder, and exhaust your rage! Yet shun their fault, who, scandalously nice, Will needs mistake an author into vice; All seems infected that th' infected spy, As all looks yellow to the jaundic'd eye.

Essay on A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing

Students are often asked to write an essay on A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing

Introduction.

“A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing” is a famous quote by Alexander Pope. It warns about the hazards of superficial knowledge.

Understanding the Quote

The quote means that a small amount of knowledge can mislead people into thinking they are more expert than they actually are.

Real Life Examples

For instance, a person knowing only a bit about medicine may misuse drugs, causing harm. Similarly, partial knowledge about technology can lead to misuse or accidents.

Thus, it’s crucial to have thorough understanding before applying knowledge, to avoid harmful consequences.

250 Words Essay on A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing

Understanding the phrase.

The danger in a little learning lies in its potential to breed overconfidence. Individuals who possess a limited understanding of a subject often fail to recognize the depth and complexity inherent in it. This ignorance, coupled with a false sense of expertise, can lead to misguided actions and decisions.

The Paradox of Knowledge

The paradox of knowledge is that the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know. In contrast, with limited knowledge, one might fail to appreciate the vastness of the unknown, leading to an inflated sense of comprehension. This phenomenon, known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, illustrates the hazardous nature of superficial learning.

In conclusion, while learning is fundamentally beneficial, it becomes dangerous when it is limited and not pursued further. It is crucial to foster a culture of continuous learning and intellectual humility, recognizing that our understanding of the world is always evolving and incomplete. As Pope’s subsequent line suggests, “Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring,” implying that if we choose to learn, we must strive to learn deeply and thoroughly.

500 Words Essay on A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing

The adage, “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” is a profound statement that underscores the perils of incomplete knowledge. The phrase, attributed to Alexander Pope in his poem “An Essay on Criticism,” warns us that shallow understanding can lead to misconceptions, which can have harmful consequences.

Knowledge is power, but only when it is comprehensive and well-founded. A superficial understanding of a subject can create a false sense of expertise, leading to overconfidence and erroneous decisions. For instance, an individual with a basic understanding of medicine might misdiagnose an illness, leading to improper treatment and potential harm.

The Dangers of Misinformation

Implications in decision making.

In the realm of decision-making, a little learning can lead to grossly inaccurate judgments. Individuals with limited knowledge may rely on cognitive biases or heuristics, leading to flawed decisions. This can be particularly damaging in fields such as politics or economics, where decisions can impact the lives of many.

The Importance of Lifelong Learning

To mitigate the dangers of a little learning, it is crucial to foster a culture of lifelong learning. This involves continuously seeking to expand our knowledge and understanding, questioning our assumptions, and critically evaluating information. Lifelong learning promotes intellectual humility, recognizing the limits of our knowledge and the potential for growth.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

An Essay on Criticism

1928 facsimile reprint.

CRITICISM .

In search of Wit these lose their common Sense , And then turn Criticks in their own Defence. Those hate as Rivals all that write; and others But envy Wits , as Eunuchs envy Lovers . All Fools have still an Itching to deride, And fain wou'd be upon the Laughing Side: If Mævius Scribble in Apollo ' s spight, There are, who judge still worse than he can write . Some have at first for Wits , then Poets past, Turn'd Criticks next, and prov'd plain Fools at last; Some neither can for Wits nor Criticks pass, As heavy Mules are neither Horse or Ass . Those half-learn'd Witlings, num'rous in our Isle, As half-form'd Insects on the Banks of Nile ; Unfinish'd Things, one knows not what to call, Their Generation's so equivocal : To tell 'em, wou'd a hundred Tongues require, Or one vain Wit's , that wou'd a hundred tire. But you who seek to give and merit Fame, And justly bear a Critick's noble Name,

Be sure your self and your own Reach to know. How far your Genius, Taste , and Learning go; Launch not beyond your Depth, but be discreet, And mark that Point where Sense and Dulness meet . Nature to all things fix'd the Limits fit, And wisely curb'd proud Man's pretending Wit: As on the Land while here the Ocean gains, In other Parts it leaves wide sandy Plains; Thus in the Soul while Memory prevails, The solid Pow'r of Understanding fails; Where Beams of warm Imagination play, The Memory's soft Figures melt away. One Science only will one Genius fit; So vast is Art, so narrow Human Wit; Not only bounded to peculiar Arts , But oft in those , confin'd to single Parts . Like Kings we lose the Conquests gain'd before, By vain Ambition still to make them more: Each might his sev'ral Province well command, Wou'd all but stoop to what they understand .

First follow Nature , and your Judgment frame By her just Standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature , still divinely bright, One clear, unchang'd and Universal Light, Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart, At once the Source , and End , and Test of Art . That Art is best which most resembles Her ; Which still presides , yet never does Appear ; In some fair Body thus the sprightly Soul With Spirits feeds, with Vigour fills the whole, Each Motion guides, and ev'ry Nerve sustains; It self unseen , but in th' Effects , remains. There are whom Heav'n has blest with store of Wit, Yet want as much again to manage it; For Wit and Judgment ever are at strife, Tho' meant each other's Aid, like Man and Wife . 'Tis more to guide than spur the Muse's Steed; Restrain his Fury, than provoke his Speed; The winged Courser, like a gen'rous Horse, Shows most true Mettle when you check his Course.

Against the Poets their own Arms they turn'd, Sure to hate most the Men from whom they learn'd. 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 . Some on the Leaves of ancient Authors prey, Nor Time nor Moths e'er spoil'd so much as they: Some dryly plain, without Invention's Aid, Write dull Receits how Poems may be made: These lost the Sense, their Learning to display, And those explain'd the Meaning quite away. You then whose Judgment the right Course wou'd steer, Know well each Ancient's proper Character , His Fable, Subject, Scope in ev'ry Page, Religion, Country, Genius of his Age : Without all these at once before your Eyes, You may Confound , but never Criticize . Be Homer ' s Works your Study , and Delight , Read them by Day, and meditate by Night,

And tho' the Ancients thus their Rules invade, (As Kings dispense with Laws Themselves have made) Moderns , beware! Or if you must offend Against the Precept , ne'er transgress its End , Let it be seldom , and compell'd by Need , And have, at least, Their Precedent to plead. The Critick else proceeds without Remorse, Seizes your Fame, and puts his Laws in force. I know there are, to whose presumptuous Thoughts Those Freer Beauties , ev'n in Them , seem Faults: Some Figures monstrous and mis-shap'd appear, Consider'd singly , or beheld too near , Which, but proportion'd to their Light , or Place , Due Distance reconciles to Form and Grace. A prudent Chief not always must display His Pow'rs in equal Ranks , and fair Array , But with th' Occasion and the Place comply, Oft hide his Force, nay seem sometimes to Fly . Those are but Stratagems which Errors seem, Nor is it Homer Nods , but We that Dream .

Still green with Bays each ancient Altar stands, Above the reach of Sacrilegious Hands, Secure from Flames , from Envy's fiercer Rage, Destructive War , and all-devouring Age . See, from each Clime the Learn'd their Incense bring; Hear, in all Tongues Triumphant Pæans ring! In Praise so just, let ev'ry Voice be join'd, And fill the Gen'ral Chorus of Mankind ! Hail Bards Triumphant ! born in happier Days ; Immortal Heirs of Universal Praise! Whose Honours with Increase of Ages grow , As Streams roll down, enlarging as they flow! Nations unborn your mighty Names shall sound, And Worlds applaud that must not yet be found ! Oh may some Spark of your Cœlestial Fire The last, the meanest of your Sons inspire, (That with weak Wings, from far, pursues your Flights; Glows while he reads , but trembles as he writes ) To teach vain Wits a Science little known , T' admire Superior Sense, and doubt their own!

OF all the Causes which conspire to blind Man's erring Judgment, and misguide the Mind, What the weak Head with strongest Byass rules, Is Pride , the never-failing Vice of Fools . Whatever Nature has in Worth deny'd, She gives in large Recruits of needful Pride ; For as in Bodies , thus in Souls , we find What wants in Blood and Spirits , swell'd with Wind ; Pride, where Wit fails, steps in to our Defence, And fills up all the mighty Void of Sense ! If once right Reason drives that Cloud away, Truth breaks upon us with resistless Day ; Trust not your self; but your Defects to know, Make use of ev'ry Friend —— and ev'ry Foe . A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring: There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.

Fir’d with the Charms fair Science does impart, In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Art; While from the bounded Level of our Mind, Short Views we take, nor see the Lengths behind , But more advanc'd , survey with strange Surprize New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise! So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try, Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky; Th' Eternal Snows appear already past, And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last: But those attain'd , we tremble to survey The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way, Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandring Eyes, Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise! [ 4 ] A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit With the same Spirit that its Author writ , Survey the Whole , nor seek slight Faults to find; Where Nature moves , and Rapture warms the Mind;

Nor lose, for that malignant dull Delight, The gen'rous Pleasure to be charm'd with Wit. But in such Lays as neither ebb , nor flow , Correctly cold , and regularly low , That shunning Faults, one quiet Tenour keep; We cannot blame indeed —— but we may sleep . In Wit, as Nature, what affects our Hearts Is not th' Exactness of peculiar Parts; 'Tis not a Lip , or Eye , we Beauty call, But the joint Force and full Result of all . Thus when we view some well-proportion'd Dome, The World ' s just Wonder, and ev'n thine O Rome !) No single Parts unequally surprize; All comes united to th' admiring Eyes; No monstrous Height, or Breadth, or Length appear; The Whole at once is Bold , and Regular . Whoever thinks a faultless Piece to see, Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be. In ev'ry Work regard the Writer's End , Since none can compass more than they Intend ;

All which, exact to Rule were brought about, Were but a Combate in the Lists left out. What! Leave the Combate out ? Exclaims the Knight; Yes, or we must renounce the Stagyrite . Not so by Heav'n (he answers in a Rage) Knights, Squires, and Steeds, must enter on the Stage . The Stage can ne'er so vast a Throng contain. Then build a New, or act it in a Plain . Thus Criticks, of less Judgment than Caprice , Curious , not Knowing , not exact , but nice , Form short Ideas ; and offend in Arts (As most in Manners ) by a Love to Parts . Some to Conceit alone their Taste confine, And glitt'ring Thoughts struck out at ev'ry Line; Pleas'd with a Work where nothing's just or fit; One glaring Chaos and wild Heap of Wit: Poets like Painters, thus, unskill'd to trace The naked Nature and the living Grace , With Gold and Jewels cover ev'ry Part, And hide with Ornaments their Want of Art .

[ 5 ] True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, What oft was Thought , but ne'er so well Exprest , Something , whose Truth convinc'd at Sight we find, That gives us back the Image of our Mind: As Shades more sweetly recommend the Light, So modest Plainness sets off sprightly Wit: For Works may have more Wit than does 'em good, As Bodies perish through Excess of Blood . Others for Language all their Care express, And value Books , as Women Men , for Dress: Their Praise is still —— The Stile is excellent : The Sense , they humbly take upon Content. Words are like Leaves ; and where they most abound, Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found. False Eloquence , like the Prismatic Glass , Its gawdy Colours spreads on ev'ry place ; The Face of Nature was no more Survey, All glares alike , without Distinction gay:

Where-e'er you find the cooling Western Breeze , In the next Line, it whispers thro' the Trees ; If Chrystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep , The Reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with Sleep . 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. Leave such to tune their own dull Rhimes, and know What's roundly smooth , or languishingly slow ; And praise the Easie Vigor of a Line, Where Denham ' s Strength, and Waller ' s Sweetness join. 'Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence, The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense . 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 shou'd like the Torrent roar. When Ajax strives, some Rocks' 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. Hear how [ 10 ] Timotheus ' various Lays surprize, And bid Alternate Passions fall and rise! While, at each Change, the Son of Lybian Jove Now burns with Glory, and then melts with Love; Now his fierce Eyes with sparkling Fury glow; Now Sighs steal out, and Tears begin to flow : Persians and Greeks like Turns of Nature found, And the World's Victor stood subdu'd by Sound ! The Pow'r of Musick all our Hearts allow; And what Timotheus was, is Dryden now. Avoid Extreams ; and shun the Fault of such, Who still are pleas'd too little , or too much . At ev'ry Trifle scorn to take Offence, That always shows Great Pride , or Little Sense ; Those Heads as Stomachs are not sure the best Which nauseate all, and nothing can digest.

Yet let not each gay Turn thy Rapture move, For Fools Admire , but Men of Sense Approve ; As things seem large which we thro' Mists descry, Dulness is ever apt to Magnify . Some French Writers, some our own despise; The Ancients only, or the Moderns prize: Thus Wit , like Faith by each Man is apply'd To one small Sect , and All are damn'd beside. Meanly they seek the Blessing to confine, And force that Sun but on a Part to Shine; Which not alone the Southern Wit sublimes, But ripens Spirits in cold Northern Climes ; Which from the first has shone on Ages past , Enlights the present , and shall warm the last: (Tho' each may feel Increases and Decays , And see now clearer and now darker Days ) Regard not then if Wit be Old or New , But blame the False , and value still the True . Some ne'er advance a Judgment of their own, But catch the spreading Notion of the Town;

They reason and conclude by Precedent , And own stale Nonsense which they ne'er invent. Some judge of Author's Names , not Works , and then Nor praise nor damn the Writings , but the Men . Of all this Servile Herd the worst is He That in proud Dulness joins with Quality , A constant Critick at the Great-man's Board, To fetch and carry Nonsense for my Lord. What woful stuff this Madrigal wou'd be, To some starv'd Hackny Sonneteer, or me? But let a Lord once own the happy Lines , How the Wit brightens ! How the Style refines ! Before his sacred Name flies ev'ry Fault, And each exalted Stanza teems with Thought! The Vulgar thus through Imitation err; As oft the Learn'd by being Singular ; So much they scorn the Crowd, that if the Throng By Chance go right, they purposely go wrong; So Schismatics the dull Believers quit, And are but damn'd for having too much Wit .

Some praise at Morning what they blame at Night; But always think the last Opinion right . A Muse by these is like a Mistress us'd, This hour she's idoliz'd , the next abus'd , While their weak Heads, like Towns unfortify'd, 'Twixt Sense and Nonsense daily change their Side. Ask them the Cause; They're wiser still , they say; And still to Morrow's wiser than to Day. We think our Fathers Fools, so wise we grow; Our wiser Sons , no doubt, will think us so. Once School-Divines our zealous Isle o'erspread; Who knew most Sentences was deepest read ; Faith, Gospel, All, seem'd made to be disputed , And none had Sense enough to be Confuted . Scotists and Thomists , now, in Peace remain, Amidst their kindred Cobwebs in Duck-Lane . If Faith it self has diff'rent Dresses worn, What wonder Modes in Wit shou'd take their Turn? Oft, leaving what is Natural and fit, The current Folly proves the ready Wit ,

And Authors think their Reputation safe, Which lives as long as Fools are pleas'd to Laugh . Some valuing those of their own Side , or Mind , Still make themselves the measure of Mankind; Fondly we think we honour Merit then, When we but praise Our selves in Other Men . Parties in Wit attend on those of State , And publick Faction doubles private Hate. Pride, Malice, Folly , against Dryden rose, In various Shapes of Parsons, Criticks, Beaus ; But Sense surviv'd, when merry Jests were past; For rising Merit will buoy up at last. Might he return, and bless once more our Eyes, New Bl —— —s and new M —— —s must arise; Nay shou'd great Homer lift his awful Head, Zoilus again would start up from the Dead. Envy will Merit as its Shade pursue, But like a Shadow, proves the Substance too; For envy'd Wit, like Sol Eclips'd, makes known Th' opposing Body's Grossness, not its own .

When first that Sun too powerful Beams displays, It draws up Vapours which obscure its Rays; But ev'n those Clouds at last adorn its Way, Reflect new Glories, and augment the Day. Be thou the first true Merit to befriend; His Praise is lost, who stays till All commend; Short is the Date, alas, of Modern Rhymes ; And 'tis but just to let 'em live betimes . No longer now that Golden Age appears, When Patriarch-Wits surviv'd a thousand Years , Now Length of Fame (our second Life) is lost, And bare Threescore is all ev'n That can boast: Our Sons their Fathers' failing Language see, And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be. So when the faithful Pencil has design'd Some fair Idea of the Master's Mind, Where a new World leaps out at his command, And ready Nature waits upon his Hand; When the ripe Colours soften and unite , And sweetly melt into just Shade and Light,

When mellowing Time does full Perfection give, And each Bold Figure just begins to Live ; The treach'rous Colours the few Years decay, And all the bright Creation fades away! Unhappy Wit , like most mistaken Things, Repays not half that Envy which it brings: In Youth alone its empty Praise we boast, But soon the Short-liv'd Vanity is lost! Like some fair Flow'r the in the Spring does rise, That gaily Blooms, but ev'n in blooming Dies . What is this Wit that does our Cares employ? The Owner's Wife , that other Men enjoy, Then more his Trouble as the more admir'd , Where wanted , scorn'd, and envy'd where acquir'd ; Maintain'd with Pains , but forfeited with Ease ; Sure some to vex , but never all to please ; 'Tis what the Vicious fear , the Virtuous shun ; By Fools 'tis hated , and by Knaves undone! Too much does Wit from Ign'rance undergo, Ah let not Learning too commence its Foe!

Of old , those met Rewards who cou'd excel , And such were Prais'd who but endeavour'd well : Tho' Triumphs were to Gen'rals only due, Crowns were reserv'd to grace the Soldiers too. Now those that reach Parnassus ' lofty Crown, Employ their Pains to spurn some others down; And while Self-Love each jealous Writer rules, Contending Wits becomes the Sport of Fools : But still the Worst with most Regret commend, For each Ill Author is as bad a Friend . To what base Ends, and by what abject Ways , Are Mortals urg'd by Sacred Lust of Praise ? Ah ne'er so dire a Thirst of Glory boast, Nor in the Critick let the Man be lost! Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join; To err is Humane ; to Forgive, Divine . But if in Noble Minds some Dregs remain, Not yet purg'd off, of Spleen and sow'r Disdain, Discharge that Rage on more Provoking Crimes, Nor fear a Dearth in these Flagitious Times.

No Pardon vile Obscenity should find, Tho' Wit and Art conspire to move your Mind; But Dulness with Obscenity must prove As Shameful sure as Impotence in Love . In the fat Age of Pleasure, Wealth, and Ease, Sprung the rank Weed, and thriv'd with large Increase; When Love was all an easie Monarch's Care; Seldom at Council , never in a War : Jilts rul'd the State, and Statesmen Farces writ; Nay Wits had Pensions , and young Lords had Wit : The Fair sate panting at a Courtier's Play , And not a Mask went un-improv'd away: The modest Fan was lifted up no more, And Virgins smil'd at what they blush'd before —— The following Licence of a Foreign Reign Did all the Dregs of bold Socinus drain; Then first the Belgian Morals were extoll'd; We their Religion had, and they our Gold: Then Unbelieving Priests reform'd the Nation, And taught more Pleasant Methods of Salvation;

Where Heav'ns Free Subjects might their Rights dispute, Lest God himself shou'd seem too Absolute . Pulpits their Sacred Satire learn'd to spare, And Vice admir'd to find a Flatt'rer there! Encourag'd thus, Witt's Titans brav'd the Skies, And the Press groan'd with Licenc'd Blasphemies —— These Monsters, Criticks! with your Darts engage, Here point your Thunder, and exhaust your Rage! Yet shun their Fault, who, Scandalously nice , Will needs mistake an Author into Vice ; All seems Infected that th' Infected spy, As all looks yellow to the Jaundic'd Eye. Learn then what Morals Criticks ought to show, For 'tis but half a Judge's Task , to Know . 'Tis not enough, Wit, Art, and Learning join; In all you speak, let Truth and Candor shine: That not alone what to your Judgment ' s due, All may allow; but seek your Friendship too.

Be silent always when you doubt your Sense; Speak when you're sure , yet speak with Diffidence ; Some positive persisting Fops we know, Who, if once wrong , will needs be always so ; But you, with Pleasure own your Errors past, And make each Day a Critick on the last. 'Tis not enough your Counsel still be true , Blunt Truths more Mischief than nice Falshoods do; Men must be taught as if you taught them not ; And Things ne'er known propos'd as Things forgot : Without Good Breeding, Truth is not approv'd, That only makes Superior Sense belov'd . Be Niggards of Advice on no Pretence; For the worst Avarice is that of Sense : With mean Complacence ne'er betray your Trust, Nor be so Civil as to prove Unjust ; Fear not the Anger of the Wise to raise; Those best can bear Reproof , who merit Praise .

'Twere well, might Criticks still this Freedom take; But Appius reddens at each Word you speak, And stares, Tremendous ! with a threatning Eye , Like some fierce Tyrant in Old Tapestry ! Fear most to tax an Honourable Fool, Whose Right it is, uncensur'd to be dull; Such without Wit are Poets when they please, As without Learning they can take Degrees . Leave dang'rous Truths to unsuccessful Satyrs , And Flattery to fulsome Dedicators , Whom, when they Praise , the World believes no more, Than when they promise to give Scribling o'er. 'Tis best sometimes your Censure to restrain, And charitably let the Dull be vain : Your Silence there is better than your Spite , For who can rail so long as they can write ? Still humming on, their old dull Course they keep, And lash'd so long, like Tops , are lash'd asleep .

False Steps but help them to renew the Race, As after Stumbling , Jades will mend their Pace. What Crouds of these, impenitently bold, In Sounds and jingling Syllables grown old, Still run on Poets in a raging Vein, Ev'n to the Dregs and Squeezings of the Brain ; Strain out the last, dull droppings of their Sense, And Rhyme with all the Rage of Impotence ! Such shameless Bards we have; and yet 'tis true, There are as mad, abandon'd Criticks too. [ 11 ] The Bookful Blockhead, ignorantly read, With Loads of Learned Lumber in his Head, With his own Tongue still edifies his Ears, And always List'ning to Himself appears. All Books he reads, and all he reads assails, From Dryden ' s Fables down to D —— — y ' s Tales .

Tho' Learn'd well-bred; and tho' well-bred, sincere; Modestly bold, and Humanly severe? Who to a Friend his Faults can freely show, And gladly praise the Merit of a Foe ? Blest with a Taste exact, yet unconfin'd; A Knowledge both of Books and Humankind ; Gen'rous Converse ; a Soul exempt from Pride ; And Love to Praise , with Reason on his Side? Such once were Criticks , such the Happy Few , Athens and Rome in better Ages knew. The mighty Stagyrite first left the Shore, Spread all his Sails, and durst the Deeps explore; He steer'd securely, and discover'd far, Led by the Light of the Mæonian Star . Not only Nature did his Laws obey, But Fancy's boundless Empire own'd his Sway. Poets, a Race long unconfin'd and free, Still fond and proud of Savage Liberty ,

Receiv'd his Laws, and stood convinc'd 'twas fit Who conquer'd Nature , shou'd preside o'er Wit . Horace still charms with graceful Negligence, And without Method talks us into Sense, Does like a Friend familiarly convey The truest Notions in the easiest way . He, who Supream in Judgment, as in Wit, Might boldly censure, as he boldly writ, Yet judg'd with Coolness tho' he sung with Fire ; His Precepts teach but what his Works inspire. Our Criticks take a contrary Extream, They judge with Fury , but they write with Fle'me: Nor suffers Horace more in wrong Translations By Wits , than Criticks in as wrong Quotations . Fancy and Art in gay Petronius please, The Scholar's Learning , with the Courtier's Ease . In grave Quintilian ' s copious Work we find The justest Rules , and clearest Method join'd;

Thus useful Arms in Magazines we place, All rang'd in Order , and dispos'd with Grace , Nor thus alone the Curious Eye to please, But to be found , when Need requires, with Ease. The Muses sure Longinus did inspire, And blest their Critick with a Poet's Fire . An ardent Judge , that Zealous in his Trust, With Warmth gives Sentence, yet is always Just ; Whose own Example strengthens all his Laws, And Is himself that great Sublime he draws. Thus long succeeding Criticks justly reign'd, Licence repress'd, and useful Laws ordain'd; Learning and Rome alike in Empire grew, And Arts still follow'd where her Eagles flew ; From the same Foes, at last, both felt their Doom, And the same Age saw Learning fall, and Rome . With Tyranny , then Superstition join'd, As that the Body , this enslav'd the Mind ;

All was Believ'd , but nothing understood , And to be dull was constru'd to be good ; A second Deluge Learning thus o'er-run, And the Monks finish'd what the Goths begun. At length, Erasmus , that great, injur'd Name, (The Glory of the Priesthood, and the Shame !) Stemm'd the wild Torrent of a barb'rous Age , And drove those Holy Vandals off the Stage. But see! each Muse , in Leo ' s Golden Days, Starts from her Trance, and trims her wither'd Bays! Rome ' s ancient Genius , o'er its Ruins spread, Shakes off the Dust , and rears his rev'rend Head! Then Sculpture and her Sister-Arts revive; Stones leap'd to Form , and Rocks began to live ; With sweeter Notes each rising Temple rung; A Raphael painted, and a [ 12 ] Vida sung!

Immortal Vida ! on whose honour'd Brow The Poet's Bays and Critick's Ivy grow: Cremona now shall ever boast thy Name, As next in Place to Mantua , next in Fame! But soon by Impious Arms from Latium chas'd, Their ancient Bounds the banish'd Muses past: Thence Arts o'er all the Northern World advance, But Critic Learning flourish'd most in France . The Rules , a Nation born to serve, obeys, And Boileau still in Right of Horace sways. But we , brave Britains, Foreign Laws despis'd, And kept unconquer'd and unciviliz'd , Fierce for the Liberties of Wit , and bold, We still defy'd the Romans as of old . Yet some there were, among the sounder Few Of those who less presum'd , and better knew ,

Who durst assert the juster Ancient Cause , And here restor'd Wit's Fundamental Laws . Such was the Muse, whose Rules and Practice tell, Nature's chief Master-piece is writing well. Such was Roscomon —— not more learn'd than good , With Manners gen'rous as his Noble Blood; To him the Wit of Greece and Rome was known, And ev'ry Author's Merit , but his own. Such late was Walsh , —— the Muse's Judge and Friend, Who justly knew to blame or to commend; To Failings mild , but zealous for Desert; The clearest Head , and the sincerest Heart . This humble Praise, lamented Shade' ! receive, This Praise at least a grateful Muse may give! The Muse, whose early Voice you taught to Sing, Prescrib'd her Heights, and prun'd her tender Wing, (Her Guide now lost) no more attempts to rise , But in low Numbers short Excursions tries:

Content, if hence th' Unlearned their Wants may view, The Learn'd reflect on what before they knew: Careless of Censure , not too fond of Fame , Still pleas'd to praise , yet not afraid to blame , Averse alike to Flatter , or Offend , Not free from Faults, nor yet too vain to mend .

• ↑ —— De Pictore, Sculptore, Fictore, nisi Artifex judicare non potest . Pliny.
• ↑ Omnes tacito quodam sensu, sine ulla arte, aut ratione, quæ sint in artibus ac rationibus recta ac prava dijudicant. Cic. de Orat. lib.3.
• ↑ Neque tam sancta sunt ista Præcepta, sed quicquid est, Utilitas excogitavit; Non negabo autem sic utile esse plerunque; verum si eadem illa nobis aliud suadebit utilitas, hanc relictis magistrorum autoritatibus, sequemur. Quintil. l. 2. cap. 13.
• ↑ Diligenter legendum est, ac pœne ad scribendi sollicitudinem: Nec per partes modo scrutanda sunt omnia, sed perlectus liber utique ex Integro resumendus. Quintilian.
• ↑ Naturam intueamur, hanc sequamur; Id facillimè accipiunt animi quod agnoscunt. Quintil. lib. 8. c. 3.
• ↑ Abolita & abrogata retinere, insolentiæ cujusdam est, & frivolæ in parvis jactantiæ. Quint. lib. 1. c. 6. Opus est ut Verba a vetustate repetita neque crebra sint, neque manifesta, quia nil est odiosius affectatione, nec utique ab ultimis repetita temporibus. Oratio, cujus summa virtus est perspicuitas, quam sit vitiosa si egeat interprete? Ergo ut novorum optima erunt maximè vetera, ita veterum maximè nova. Idem.
• ↑ Ben. Johnson ' s Every Man in his Humour .
• ↑ Quis populi sermo est? quis enim? nisi carmine molli Nunc demum numero fluere, ut per severos Effugit junctura ungues: scit tendere versum, Non secus ac si oculo rubricam dirigat uno . Persius , Sat. 1.
• ↑ Fugiemus crebras vocalium concursiones, quæ vastam atque hiantem orationem reddunt . Cic. ad Herenn. lib. 4. Vide etiam Quintil. lib. 9. c. 4.
• ↑ Alexander ' s Feast, or the Power of Musick; An Ode by Mr. Dryden.
• ↑ Nihil pejus est iis, qui paullum aliquid ultra primas litteras progressi, falsam sibi scientiæ persuasionem induerunt: Nam & cedere præcipiendi peritis indignantur, & velut jure quodam potestatis, quo ferè hoc hominum genus intumescit, imperiosi, atque interim sævientes, Stultitiam suam perdocent. Quintil. lib. I. ch. 1.
• ↑ M. Hieronymus Vida , an excellent Latin Poet, who writ an Art of Poetry in Verse .

This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.

Public domain Public domain false false

• Early modern poetry
• 18th century works
• Pages using pixel widths (border)
• Borders using maxwidth parameter
• Borders using style parameter
• Pages using center block with width parameter
• Dropinitials with image
• Headers applying DefaultSort key
• Page breaks with a label

Navigation menu

English Guide

Help center

A little learning is a dangerous thing: Learn what the means through example!

What does “a little learning is a dangerous thing” mean.

"A little learning is a dangerous thing" means that having a small amount of knowledge can be risky or harmful.

What context can I use the in?

He thought he knew enough to fix the car, but a little learning is a dangerous thing and he ended up making it worse.

She tried to give advice on investing, but a little learning is a dangerous thing and her suggestions led to financial losses.

He attempted to give a presentation on a complex topic, but a little learning is a dangerous thing and he ended up confusing the audience

Is “A little learning is a dangerous thing” an expression, an idiom, or a proverb?

“A little learning is a dangerous thing” is a proverb. A proverb is a short saying that teaches us something important or gives us advice. Unlike an idiom, it’s easy to understand even if it uses figurative language.

How would I use “A little learning is a dangerous thing” effectively in context?

You can use "A little learning is a dangerous thing" to caution someone about the risks of having limited knowledge or expertise in a particular subject. It implies that having a small amount of knowledge can lead to mistakes, misunderstandings, or even harm. For example, if a friend is attempting to fix their car without proper training, you might say, 'Be careful! A little learning is a dangerous thing. It's best to leave it to a professional.'

He attempted to give a presentation on a complex topic, but a little learning is a dangerous thing and he ended up confusing the audience.

Similar phrases to “A little learning is a dangerous thing”:

Half-knowledge is more dangerous than ignorance

Having incomplete or partial knowledge can be more harmful than having no knowledge at all.

He thought he understood the concept, but half-knowledge is more dangerous than ignorance, and his actions caused further confusion.

Penny wise, pound foolish

Being overly focused on saving small amounts of money can lead to greater financial losses in the long run.

He refused to hire a professional to fix the plumbing issue, but penny wise, pound foolish, as the problem worsened and cost him more in repairs.

Know enough to be dangerous

Having a limited understanding of a subject that can lead to misguided actions or decisions.

He had read a few articles on investing, but he only knew enough to be dangerous, and his investment choices resulted in significant losses.

Good things to know:

Where does the phrase “a little learning is a dangerous thing” come from.

The origin of the phrase "A little learning is a dangerous thing" can be traced back to Alexander Pope's poem 'An Essay on Criticism' published in 1711. In the poem, Pope warns against the dangers of having superficial knowledge and emphasizes the importance of deep understanding and expertise.

Is “A little learning is a dangerous thing” common in everyday conversation?

Yes, "A little learning is a dangerous thing" is a well-known proverb and is commonly used in everyday conversation. People often use it to highlight the importance of acquiring deep knowledge and expertise in a subject before attempting to apply it.

What tone does “A little learning is a dangerous thing” have?

"A little learning is a dangerous thing" conveys a tone of caution and warning. It suggests that having only a superficial understanding of a topic can lead to negative consequences.

Can “A little learning is a dangerous thing” be used in informal and formal settings?

Yes, "A little learning is a dangerous thing" is considered a formal phrase. It is often used in educational or intellectual contexts to emphasize the importance of thorough learning and expertise. However, it can also be used in informal conversations to convey the same idea.

Can it be used by itself, or is it usually part of a sentence?

It is commonly used as part of a sentence to convey its full meaning. For example, 'He thought he knew enough to fix the car, but a little learning is a dangerous thing.' However, in informal conversations, people might understand the phrase even if used alone, like saying 'Be careful! "A little learning is a dangerous thing".' to imply caution.

Synonyms & Antonyms

• superficial knowledge is perilous
• limited understanding can be harmful
• shallow learning is risky
• a smattering of knowledge is treacherous
• partial knowledge is hazardous
• in-depth knowledge is empowering
• expertise is valuable
• thorough learning is beneficial
• deep understanding is advantageous
• complete knowledge is safe

This content was generated with the assistance of AI technology based on RedKiwi's unique learning data. By utilizing automated AI content, we can quickly deliver a wide range of highly accurate content to users. Experience the benefits of AI by having your questions answered and receiving reliable information!

This Day in Quotes

The famous quotations and phrases linked to each day of the year

“A little learning is a dangerous thing.” (A little knowledge, too, but that’s a misquote.)

Most people have heard the old line of poetry: “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

It became a proverbial saying that has been — and is still is — used and repurposed in many ways .

The common variation is “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” However, that’s an misquote of the original line written by British poet Alexander Pope in his work An Essay on Criticism .

This famous “essay” is actually a book-length poem.

Pope first published it anonymously exactly three hundred years ago today on May 15, 1711 .

It’s composed in iambic pentameter . That’s the poetic style with words that have an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, thus sounding like “da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM”.

There are two other famous lines in Pope’s An Essay on Criticism almost everyone knows, even they’ve never read the poem.

One is the “To err is human, to forgive divine.” The other is “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

If you have read Pope’s An Essay on Criticism , you know it’s not an easy task.

It’s composed in a flowery, antique style and full of obscure references that make it hard for modern readers to grasp.

For example, here’s a longer passage that includes the famed “little learning” quote:

“A little learning is a dangerous thing Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. Fired at first sight with what the muse imparts, In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts While from the bounded level of our mind Short views we take nor see the lengths behind But more advanced behold with strange surprise, New distant scenes of endless science rise!”

This type of poesy is a bit reminiscent of Shakespeare. And, Shakespeare wrote some of his famous sonnets and verses of his plays in iambic pentameter.

But, personally, I find Shakespeare’s work much more enjoyable to read or hear than Pope’s and generally easier to comprehend.

With apologies to my high school and college English teachers, Pope’s poem An Essay on Criticism sounds to me like:

“Blah-BLAH, blah-BLAH…A little learning is a dangerous thing…blah-BLAH, blah-BLAH…To err is human…blah-BLAH, blah-BLAH…fools rush in…blah-BLAH, blah-BLAH.”

Of course, I only absorbed a little learning back in those days. (Hey, it was the Sixties.)

I encourage you to read the entire poem for yourself and draw your own conclusions about its Pierian spring of poetic wisdom.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page or send me an email .

Related reading, listening and stuff…

Related Posts

“my man friday.”, “the shot heard round the world”, “our american professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.”, the genesis of “the almighty dollar” – from genesis to washington irving….