Classic to Modern English Literature

  Introduction: An Essay on Criticism is one of the first major poems written by the English writer,   Alexander Pope(1688–1744), published in 1711 when the author was 22 years old. It is the source of the famous quotations "To err is human; to forgive, divine", "A little learning is a dang'rous thing" (frequently misquoted as "A little knowledge is a dang'rous thing"), and "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread". The first fragmentary drafts of the work were written in Abberley in 1707. Composed in heroic couplets (pairs of adjacent rhyming lines of iambic pentameter) and written in the Horatian mode of satire, it is a verse essay primarily concerned with how writers and critics behave in the new literary commerce of Pope's contemporary age. The verse "essay" was not an uncommon form in the eighteenth-century poetry, deriving ultimately from classical forebears including Horace's Ars Poetica and Lucretius' De r