Poet John Dryden, born #OnThisDay in 1631, was careful to switch his loyalties from Cromwell to the monarchy when winds were changing in 1660. It was a smart early career decision, as Dryden went on to become the first Poet Laureate and essentially the dean of English letters during the Restoration period.
Dryden is not particularly esteemed for his dramas (https://tinyurl.com/y7q2cxyr ), but as Samuel Johnson observes in his Life of Dryden (https://tinyurl.com/y7g572zk), “the composition and fate of eight and twenty dramas include too much of a poetical life to be omitted.”
Dryden’s most lasting fame comes from longer poems like Annus Mirabilis (1667) and Absalom and Achitophel (1681), classic translations of Virgil, Plutarch’s Lives, and Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and some prefatory essays to his work which were influential early forays in English literary criticism. He is today thought of as a great predecessor to Alexander Pope, who took Dryden’s rhyming couplets and brought them to an even greater perfection.
(And since the authors of Romanticism reacted against a whole century of *that*, it would make sense for them to feel more ambivalent towards Dryden’s poetry.)
Dryden was highly praised in the 18th century by both Johnson and Alexander Pope, the latter of whom eulogized: “Dryden taught to join / The varying pause, the full resounding line, / The long majestic march, and energy divine.” William Hazlitt, a little colder to Dryden–which is unsurprising given that he wrote in 1824 as the Romantic reaction to the poetry of Pope was in full swing:
“Dryden stands nearly at the head of the second class of English poets, viz. the artificial, or those who describe the mixed modes of artificial life, and convey general precepts and abstract ideas. He had invention in the plan of his Satires, very little fancy, not much wit, no humour, immense strength of character, elegance, masterly ease, indignant contempt approaching to the sublime, not a particle of tenderness, but eloquent declamation, the perfection of uncorrupted English style, and of sounding, vehement, varied versification. The Alexander’s Feast, his Fables and Satires, are his standard and lasting works.”
Late in his career, after the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the monarchy Dryden had bet on was no longer in power and the new king and queen replaced him as Poet Laureate with a poet almost nobody remembers, Thomas Shadwell. Dryden had to write to support himself in his last years, and ended up being driven by necessity to write some of his most important poems, including in 1697 the Alexander’s Feast, his translation of the Works of Virgil, and his Fables.
All of his works can be read at this page: (https://tinyurl.com/y7q2cxyr)
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