Literary Critique Of Alexander Pope and John Dryden's Works

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English poetic and prosaic style of a highly rationalistic, argumentative and logical artistic approach, often defined as "Neo-Classical" could easily be elided with criticism. In other words, art could more easily critique in a linear fashion in the Neo-Classical style.
Rather than creating a bifurcation between the intellect and the emotive, as was common in the Romanticism that came after the Neo-Classical era and functioned in reaction to it, Dryden and Pope's works on criticism show how the artist and the essayist became fused in the imagination during the Neo-Classical era and in the Neo-Classical style of writing, in heroic poetic couplets and Platonic dialogues. Rather than suggesting character development or using dramatic subtly to express thought and character, the characters and the voices of different individuals, the poet and the author's characters speak and say exactly what they mean. Pope and Dryden's art and criticism is the art and criticism of the ...

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a critic and snipe at a poet, without truly daring to take a risk and express him or herself in artistic form.
Pope, of course, is 'covering' himself a bit, in praising poets over critics, even bad ones. He adopts the poetic form for his own work of art and essay, placing himself in the category of poet rather than critic in the form his essay adopts. Yet he is advancing not a work of the emotions, but a work advancing a theory about the nature of criticism and poetry. Pope calls his poem an essay because it is argumentative in tone, yet by taking the style of the poor poets whom are criticized, he creates a kind of shield for himself against the critics whom might attack him-after ...

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