Earticle

초록

영어

The essay examines Pope’s “Epistle to Cobham” as an epistle about character. The poem opens with an implied discussion with Lord Cobham about human character. Pope presents two viewpoints about the character of man. One is the sceptical attitude of Montaigne who thinks that human character is unintelligible. The other is the positive attitude of philosophers, who claim that we can know about human character. Pope discusses whether or not we can get a true knowledge of human character. On the one hand, Pope insists that men are “Contraries.” On the other hand, he insists that he can account for human character by his theory of the ruling passion. For Pope the only stable element in man is his ruling passion. This thesis is supported by the portrait of Wharton, whose ruling passion is lust of praise. The portraits of the seven men back up the statement. But if we focus on the statement that we can understand the ruling passion of a living person only when he dies, it paradoxically implies that we cannot understand the character of a person when he is alive. In conclusion, Pope insists that we can understand people’s character through the ruling passion of a dying person. But the poem seems to say the opposite fact that human character is unintelligible.

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Works Cited
Abstract

키워드

저자

• 김옥수 [ Kim, Ogsoo | 제주대학교 ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  영어영문학연구 [The Jungang Journal of English Language and Literature]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1598-3293

• 수록기간

  1968~2026

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 840 DDC 810