Optimism versus pessimism in the Pope's essay on man and Leapor's essay on woman The essay on Alexander Pope's Man, Epistle 2, and Mary Leapor's Essay on Wife expound the fatalist claim. that neither man nor woman can “win,” because each individual exists in a world of compromise. Yet through each author's singular technique of sculpting their ideas with the literary tools of contrast, argument, and syntax, the cores of the two essays run back to back, moving toward distinct, but opposing, perspectives , of man (in relation to humanity) and The existence of woman. Pope asserts that a profusion of compromise establishes a certain point of equilibrium where Man is suspended “on this isthmus of an intermediate state” (Magill 2629). After having defined the limits of Man's oscillations through a procession of clever paradoxes of words, Pope reconciles Man's unpredictable balance, or fulcrum, as the essence of Man as 'individual. Although consistent with Pope's theory of the extremes of life, Mary Leapor uses contrasting images in specific female case studies to denounce the woman's life as doomed to slavery by her inevitable fate. The points of view of the two poets ultimately conflict. While Pope experiments with punctuation and precision, Leapor explores the effects of personalization. Subtly but convincingly offering an optimistic perspective, according to which man's confused position is his claim to fame, Pope intones his poetry with an uplifting vitality easily conveyed to his reader; while Leapor considers the confused position of the woman as the tragic destiny of the essence of life and transitively condemns her reader to the incurable pessimism that she recounts so vividly. The essence of man, as defined by Pope, is a series of paradoxical, yet concrete, sets of contrasting women. .... middle of paper ......les: 1968.Dixon, Peter. The world of the Pope's satires. Methuen & Co, London: 1968. Lonsdale, Roger. Women poets of the 18th century. Ed. Oxford University Press, London: 1952. Morris, David B. Wit, Rhyme and Couplet: Style as Content in Pope Art. Jackson-Wallace, New York: 1993. Rosslyn. Excerpted from Alexander Pope: A Literary Life. Cambridge UP, Cambridge: 1993. Sherburn, George. The best of the Pope. Ronald Press Company, New York: 1929. Soloman, Harry M. “Johnson's Silencing of Pope: Trivializing an Essay of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual.” New York: 1992. on Man. » The AgeTillotson, Geoffrey. On the pope's poetry. Clarendon Press, Oxford: 1950. Thomas, Claudia N. Alexander Pope and His Readers in Eighteenth-Century Southern Illinois. University Press, Carbondale: 1994.