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    A Study Guide for Alexander Pope's "Sound and Sense"
    A Study Guide for Alexander Pope's "Sound and Sense"
    A Study Guide for Alexander Pope's "Sound and Sense"
    Ebook30 pages1 hour

    A Study Guide for Alexander Pope's "Sound and Sense"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Alexander Pope's "Sound and Sense," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535833875
    A Study Guide for Alexander Pope's "Sound and Sense"

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      A Study Guide for Alexander Pope's "Sound and Sense" - Gale

      14

      Sound and Sense

      Alexander Pope

      1711

      Introduction

      English poet and essayist Alexander Pope published the long poem An Essay on Criticism anonymously in 1711. The essay is a 744-line poem in which Pope discusses the principles of good poetic criticism and the flaws to which critics are prone. In the course of the poem, Pope also highlights the qualities of what he considers to be good poetry. All the while, the poetry itself typically, but not unfailingly, reflects the virtues he is describing. As he discusses the importance of meter to the overall success of a poem, for example, he writes in perfectly metered verse. The poem that has become known as Sound and Sense is a fourteen-line excerpt from this much longer work. In this section, which consists of lines 362 through 375 of the larger work, Pope describes the way a poem's technical aspects, including meter and language, support the overall meaning of the poem. The sound of the poem, the rhythm, rhyme, and flow that are revealed when the poem is read, Pope insists, should mirror the sense, or meaning, of the poem. Throughout these fourteen lines, Pope emphasizes the way that mastery of technique results in a poem that reflects the writer's artistic

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