John Dryden 1631-1700

Born into a strongly Puritan family, Dryden lived as a young man through the dour decade of Com­monwealth rule. He went to London where his early work was more striking for its political self-contradiction than for its literary quality: within two years he wrote Heroic Stanzas praising Oliver Cromwell and Astiea Redux, celebrating the Res­toration of Charles II. In London Dryden married the daughter of an earl; and he joined the Royal So­ciety, believing that "a man should be learned in several sciences ... to be a complete and excellent poet." His best years were spent in court circles which reacted strongly against Cromwellian aus­terity. If he changed his opinions with the times, he was far from alone in doing so. Dryden's long poetic career spanned the four decades from the Restoration in 1660 to the end of the seventeenth century. He wrote in most of the literary forms that were popular during that time. To make a living he wrote nearly thirty plays-a few are still performed today) and a series of distin­guished translations of Virgil and other classical authors. His finest works were his long poems in rhymed couplets on political, religious, and liter­ary themes. Dryden's best poetry was often in­spired by some particular occasion like the great fire of London in 1666 or a plot against King Charles II in 1681. For almost twenty years Dryden was England's poet laureate, but had to resign in 1688 when James II was expelled and Catholics were deprived of public office. "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day" is an inventive testimony to the powers of music, intended to be sung as well as read (and given its noblest musical expression in Handel's setting, written some fifty years later than the poem). The excerpt from Mac Flecknoe, a witty at­tack on Thomas Shadwell, a minor poet and play­wright, shows Dryden's superb gifts in verse satire. As he himself wrote, the great art of the satirist is to do his job elegantly rather than crudely: "There is a vast difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place.'* In poetry Dryden set an enduring style with his neat "heroic couplets" —paired lines of rhymed iambic pentameter. In prose Dryden es­tablished the neoclassical standards of order, bal­ance, and harmony; his greatest work of literary criticism is An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in which appears his famous appreciation of Shakespeare. Dryden's significance in the history of English literature is greater than that of any one of his works considered in itself. His influence was so great that the last quarter of the seventeenth cen­tury is, by common consent, the "Age of Dryden," His achievement was to unite a classical concep­tion of order and clarity with traditional English energy and inventiveness. Both in his lucid prose and in his balanced, harmonious poetic couplets, he fashioned techniques that would dominate Eng­lish writing for a century. For those whose minds were formed in that tradition, Dryden was a kind of founding father." As Samuel Johnson wrote in 1779, "What was said of Rome, adorned by Augus­tus, may be applied by an easy metaphor to English poetry embellished by Dryden: he found it brick, and he left it marble."