An Essay on Man: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

An Essay on Man, credited to Alexander Pope, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of An Essay on Man, by Alexander Pope. Read by Martin Gleeson. Pope’s Essay on Man, a masterpiece of concise summary in itself, can fairly be summed up as an optimistic enquiry into mankind’s place in the vast Chain of Being. Each of the poem’s four Epistles takes a different perspective, presenting Man in relation to the universe, as individual, in society and, finally, tracing his prospects for achieving the goal of happiness. In choosing stately rhyming couplets to explore his theme, Pope sometimes becomes obscure through compressing his language overmuch. By and large, the work is a triumphant exercise in philosophical poetry, communicating its broad and commonplace truths in superbly balanced phrases which remind us that Pope, alas, is one of the most quoted but least read writers in English: “Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always To be Blest.” (Summary by Martin Geeson)

Recording facts

• Recording title: An Essay on Man
• Author credits: Alexander Pope
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 5
• Listed recording duration: 1:47:52

Catalogue topics

• poetry
• philosophy

Track guide

1. 00 - Author's Preface — 5:00
2. 01 - Epistle I — 23:05
3. 02 - Epistle II — 22:54
4. 03 - Epistle III — 25:43
5. 04 - Epistle IV — 31:11

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.