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The Empty Link: Zen Meditative Harmonics And Intimations Of Enlightenment In Pope1s Essay On Man And Shakespeare's Merchant Of Venice, John G. Rudy

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Commenting on its status as "unmistakably a poem of its period;' Frank Brady complains that Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man . has not fared as well among readers as have other representative epics, specifically The Prelude and Paradise Lost: "While we still retain enough of the Romantic attitude toward life to understand Wordsworth, and enough knowledge, at least, of Christianity to understand Milton, the philosophical basis of Pope's viewpoint has disappeared todaf' The problem, according to Brady, lies in the relationship between reason, the quality which lends the period one of its names, and philosophical optimism, the basis …