The verse essay has fallen out of style so definitively that even the most recalcitrant of teachers won’t bother assigning to their students the classics of the genre. Lucretius thought poetry a sufficient vehicle for 7,400 lines of philosophy in “De Rerum Natura” (circa 50 B.C.), and any number of British writers at the end of the 17th century and beginning of the 18th century wrote argumentative pieces in poetic forms. There’s John Dryden’s 1682 “Religio Laici,” for example, and Daniel Defoe’s “Jure Divino” (1701). 

And then there are the two major verse essays of Alexander Pope (1688–1744): “An Essay on Criticism” (1711) and “An Essay on Man” (1733). Last May, The New York Sun presented a brief passage from Epistle II of “An Essay on Man” — the glittering lines that run “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan. / The proper study of Mankind is Man.” So perhaps it’s time to look to his earlier work and consider why the young Pope, in one of his first major poems, would devote 744 lines to an extended argument about the nature of poetry.

Part of the answer is Horace’s “Ars Poetica” (circa 19 B.C.), the Latin verse epistles that form one of the classic works of literary theory. We forget the confidence, the arrogance, of Pope as a young man: already at age 22 assuming he was engaged in conversation with, and able to correct, the greatest poets of the past. But part of the answer, too, is Pope’s sense of the sterility of poetry at the beginning of the 18th century. Dryden’s mastery of the heroic couplet had bequeathed to English verse a precise instrument — but it seemed to Pope to have been falsely taken as sufficient for poetic writing, as though all poetry needed was to be in rhymed pentameter couplets.

Pope still wants highly structured verse. But he points to Timotheus of Miletus (circa 446 B.C.–357 B.C.), who added an extra string to the ancient Greeks’ musical lyre. And Pope demands that, in poetry, “sound must seem an echo to the sense.” “An Essay on Criticism” contains such much-quoted lines as “To err is human; to forgive, divine” and “A little learning is a dang’rous thing” and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” But in its essence, the verse essay is a young poet’s proclaiming an Ars Poetica for his own time: a correction to all the poets around him.

Sound and Sense (an excerpt from An Essay on Criticism, Part 2)
by Alexander Pope

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, 
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. 
Hear how Timotheus’ varied lays surprise, 
And bid alternate passions fall and rise!

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.