ABSTRACT
An Essay on Criticism was first published on 15 May 1711. In a note on the title page of the autograph manuscript that served as the printer’s copy of the poem, Pope claimed that it was ‘Written in the year 1709’, a statement repeated in the half-title of the poem in the 1717 Works and all subsequent editions. In his editorial note to the letter on versification sent to Walsh, dated 22 October 1706, Pope re-asserted this date: ‘Mr. Walsh died at 49 Years old, in the Year 1708. The Year after, Mr. Pope writ the Essay on Criticism . . .’ (Corr. I.25n; the letter itself may be a fabrication based on a letter to Henry Cromwell of 25 November 1710). Spence records Pope’s clear statement: ‘My Essay on Criticism was writ in 1709 and published in 1711, which is as little time as ever I let anything of mine lay by me’ (OAC, I.41, no. 98, 1736). On other occasions, however, Pope suggested to Spence that he had shown a copy of the poem to Walsh in 1706 (OAC, I.31, no. 72, June 1739) or that he had written the poem ‘two or three years before it was printed’ (OAC, I.42, no. 99, 18–21 January 1743) and Jonathan Richardson Jr. claimed that ‘Mr. P. told me himself that ye Essay on Criticism was indeed written 1707, tho’ said 1709 by mistake’ (OAC, I.42, no. 98n). TE cites the possible allusion to a sermon preached by Dr White Kennett on 5 September 1707 as evidence that this part of the poem, at least, was written after that date; see Commentary to 550). In October 1708, Ralph Bridges described an encounter with Pope in a letter to Trumbull: ‘Near the Temple met “little Pope.” He would walk with me from thence to the farther end of St. James’s Park, and all that way he plied me with criticisms and scraps of poetry’ (TE, I.202). Altogether, it seems most likely that the poem’s genesis was spread over several years. In February–March 1735 Pope told Spence, ‘I wrote the Essay on Criticism fast, for I had digested all the matter in prose before I began upon it in verse’ (OAC, I.45, no. 107) and it is perhaps this distinction that accounts for his divergent accounts of the poem’s composition.
