 But in his Essay on Man, does Pope create a fictional character who details his views, or does he simply speak his mind in poetic form? The more intuitive answer is the latter, but Beardsley is committed to the former. What makes the Essay on Man didactic, he says, is not that it contains arguments put forward by Pope (arguing is an illocutionary act), but that it contains imitations of arguments put forward by a fictional character (PC: 60–61). We know this because Pope