"An Essay on Man" by Alexander Pope is an outstanding example of Augustan poetic style. It is written entirely in relatively regular end-stopped heroic couplets and yet, despite this, maintains a fairly natural and fluid rhythmical patterning.
The very regularity of the poem's rhythm and rhyme scheme suggest to the reader the ideal of calm rationality that Pope espouses. The rhythmical shape of the lines enhances the periodic style and balanced clauses to present the reader with a sort of ordered linguistic universe that recapitulates Pope's sense of cosmos.
Pope's poem exemplifies what the poet and critic Donald Davie advocated in his Purity of Diction in English Verse, a use of ordinary language that was direct and clearly readable, showing restraint in its use of poetic effects and figures and avoiding the recondite and obscure. Pope's language is distinguished by its clarity and precision and the way he approaches abstract concepts directly rather than through the abstruse metaphors of the Metaphysicals.
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