An Essay on Criticism

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 poem covers a range of good criticism and advice, and represents many of the chief literary ideals of Pope's age.

The verse "essay" was not an uncommon form in eighteenth-century poetry, deriving ultimately from classical forebears including Horace's Ars Poetica and Lucretius' De rerum natura.

Where-e'er you find the cooling Western Breeze, In the next Line, it whispers thro' the Trees; If Crystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep, The Reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with Sleep.

Pope also says, "True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,/ As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance" (362–363),[6] meaning poets are made, not born.