In the discussion of Pope, the word “wit” is perhaps the most misunderstood and misused one.

The
evolutions of the meaning of a single word “wit,” as Spingarn says, “parallel the general changes of
literary taste in the nation” (1957, xxxi). In English Renaissance, wit generally denotes a person’s whole
intellectual capacity. After Ben Jonson, wit becomes “identical with the imaginative or rather fanciful
element in poetry” (xxx).

Pope first makes a distinction between false wit and true wit. False wit, as Pope conceives it, is wit for
wit’s sake, sacrificing the resonance of the whole to meet the ingenuity of a part. False wit is an
unnatural mode of writing in the neoclassical context, for it excludes the regulating and organizing
function of any literary rules or conventions. False wit in Pope’s aesthetics corresponds to Epicureanism
repudiated in his ethics—both overemphasize the emotional side of human nature, and both fall short
of a comprehensive understanding of nature and man. By enshrining artists’ individual passion, false wit
has reduced art to mere egocentric, and more often eccentric, representation of “general nature.”

“True Wit,” on the contrary, is “Nature to Advantage drest” (Pope 1961, 297). It is the ability, like Joshua
Reynolds’s masterful hand, to draw the nameless grace of nature through delicate mixture of colors, or,
like Homer’s “living words,” to represent man in action in vivid imagery (Pope 1965, 114). True wit,
deemed by La Rochefoucauld to be inseparable from judgment, “like Light, pierces into the very Bottom
of Things, observes all that ought to be observed there, and discovers what seemed to be past
anybody’s finding out”