This is Episode 85 of Poems for the Speed of Life.
Today's poem is a passage from "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope.
Alexander Pope was an English poet of the 18th century. When he was 12 he contracted an illness — most probably a form of tuberculosis — which left him in poor health for the rest of his life. He was a lifelong Catholic at a time when that meant being barred from university and public life, and he made a living through popular translations of Homer’s classics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, and through his own poetry, including "The Rape of the Lock", a mock-epic which satirized the London upper-classes.
"An Essay on Criticism" is a long poem that contains such well known lines as "To err is human; to forgive, divine" and "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
The poem offers wisdom and guidance for what poets — and the rest of us too — should strive for in work. This episode includes just a few lines, from the beginning of Part 2, which talks about the dangers of pride, especially when it comes to what we think we know.
You can read the poem here.
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