Optimism versus Pessimism in Pope's Essay on Man and Leapor's Essay on Woman Both Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, Epistle 2 and the Essay on Mary Leapor's woman they expose the fatalistic thesis that neither man nor woman can "win", since every individual exists in a world of compromises. Yet, thanks to each author's singular technique of sculpting his own ideas with the literary tools of contrast, argumentation and syntax, the nuclei of the two essays are overturned, evolving into distinct, but contrary, perspectives of Man (compared to humanity) and man. The existence of women. Pope states that a profusion of compromises establishes a certain point of equilibrium in which Man is suspended “on this isthmus of a mean state” (Magill 2629). Having defined the boundaries 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 an individual. While consistent with Pope's theory of life's extremes, Mary Leapor uses contrasting images within specific female case studies to expose the woman's life as condemned to slavery by her inevitable fate. The opinions of the two poets ultimately oppose each other. While Pope experiments with punctuation and precision, Leapor explores the effects of personalization. Subtly but convincingly proposing an optimistic perspective that man's confused position is his claim to fame, Pope intones his poem with an uplifting vitality readily conveyed to his reader; while Leapor regards the Woman's confused position as the ruin of the essence of life and transitively condemns her reader to the incurable pessimism she so vividly recounts. The essence of man, as defined by Pope, is a series of paradoxical, but concrete, series of contrasting situations. .... middle of sheet ......les: 1968.Dixon, Peter. The world of the pope's satires. Methuen & Co, London: 1968. Lonsdale, Roger. Women poets of the eighteenth century. Ed. Oxford University Press, London: 1952. Morris, David B. Wit, Rhyme and Couplet: Style as Content in Pope's Art. Jackson-Wallace, New York: 1993. Rosslyn. 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 Silence of the Pope: Trivializing an Essay by Johnson: An Academic Annual. New York: 1992. on the man." L'Age Tillotson, Geoffrey. On Pope's poetry. Clarendon Press, Oxford: 1950. Thomas, Claudia N. Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women Readers of Southern Illinois. University Press, Carbondale: 1994.