The Rape of the Text deconstructs the history of criticism of
An Essay on Man
to account for, and to reverse, over 200 years of deformation and trivialization of Pope’s text by literary critics, philosophers and historians of ideas. First published in 1733-34,
An Essay on Man , Alexander Pope’s best-known philosophical poem, was highly praised by many of Pope’s European contemporaries, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant and Hume. The poem, divided into four Epistles, deals with the nature of man and his place in the universe, man as an individual, man in society and man in pursuit of happiness. Voltaire called

An Essay on Man

the most beautiful, most useful, most sublime didactic poem
in the English language, but what was formerly regarded as the pinnacle of 18th-century is now largely unread or misread. In contrast, Harold Bloom described the
Essay
as a
poetic disaster
of
absurd theodicy . After showing why the commonplaces about the
Essay
inscribed in Pope scholarship are suspect because of the mutual and abiding hostility of logocentric and aesthetic traditions of misreading, Solomon rebuts the objections made to Pope’s
philosophy
in a series of chapters demonstrating more appropriate strategies for interpreting Pope’s persona, tone, methodology, argument and figurality. Cumulatively, the chapters characterize a discourse world of
middle-state
academic sceptism that Pope shared with his admirers. Although the characterization of Pope’s discourse world in
The Rape of the Text
has implications for Pope and for 18th-century scholarship beyond the
Essay on Man , it also has implications for reading all philosophical poetry. Solomon contends that criticism of the
Essay on Man
is only an extreme example of the deformation that occurs routinely when literary critics or philosophers interpret philosophical poetry, and, in the final chapter, he calls for a
naturalization
of philosophical poetry as a genre as the necessary remedy to what he suggests is our present willful blindness.