Pope, being apparently nervous on his first appearance as a philosopher, withheld his name.

The other parts followed in the course of 1733 and 1734, and the authorship was soon avowed.

The Essay on Man is Pope's most ambitious performance, and the one by which he was best known beyond his own country.

It has been frequently translated, it was imitated both in France and Germany, and provoked a controversy, not like others in Pope's history of the purely personal kind.
The Essay on Man professes to be a theodicy.

Pope, with an echo of the Miltonic phrase, proposes to Vindicate the ways of God to man.
He is thus attempting the greatest task to which poet or philosopher can devote himself--the exhibition of an organic and harmonious view of the universe.