John Dryden - Selected Poems

PENGUIN CLASSICS John Dryden was born in 1631 and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He may have acted as clerk to his cousin Sir Gilbert Pickering, Lord Chamberlain to Oliver Cromwell. He published a poem on the death of Cromwell in 1659, but his political sympathies lay with the restored monarchy and he was eventually rewarded with the offices of Poet Laureate in 1668 and Historiographer Royal in 1670. Drydens first play, a comedy, The Wild Gallant, appeared in 1663, the year of his marriage, and it marked the beginning of a long and successful theatrical career. His best and best-known play, All for Love, appeared in 1677; among others were Marriage A-la-Mode, Aureng-Zebe and Love Triumphant.

After the Revolution in 1688 he lost his offices and pension and returned to the theatre to write again for a living. Drydens most important early poem, Annus Mirabilis, illustrates his skill in writing panegyric verse, but it is for his satiric poetry that he is best remembered. He once wrote: They say my talent is satire. If it be so tis a fruitful age, and there is an extraordinary crop to gather. His satiric masterpiece, Absalom and Achitophel, was published in 1681. Throughout his mature work Dryden declares political and religious convictions, but in poems like Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther they are so intricately bound together and so thoroughly inflected by the shifting policies of late Stuart rule that it is difficult wholly to be certain of the poets political or religious values.

Above all, Dryden was a man of letters of rare versatility who turned his hand to almost all available varieties of literary expression nondramatic verse, heroic tragedy, comedy, songs, translations and critical essays. He died in 1700 and is buried in Westminster Abbey. Steven N. Zwicker is Stanley Elkin Professor of Humanities at Washington University in St Louis. His books include Drydens Political Poetry (1972), Politics and Language in Drydens Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (1984) and Lines of Authority (1993); and he has edited Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (1987), Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (1998) and The Cambridge Companion to English Literature: 16501740 (1998). David by Waters was educated at Washington University in St Louis, and now teaches at Northern Illinois University.

He is the author of Dryden in Revolutionary England (1991), a study of the political rhetoric of Drydens late works. We would like to dedicate this edition to William and Cecilia Wright and to William and Susan Bywaters, a new generation of readers.

. The Elkin Matthews manuscript, a contemporary copy of MacFlecknoe, lines 159, Folger Shakespeare Library (see p. 531). .

The Preface to Absalom and Achitophel marked by a contemporary reader, Folger Shakespeare Library (see p. xi). . The title-page of the first edition of Religio Laici, Narcissus Luttrells copy with his comment, date and price of purchase, Folger Shakespeare Library (see p. 547). .

The DrydenTonson contract: Account of the second payment of the first subscription to the Virgil; Final accounting of the DrydenTonson Virgil, Folger Shakespeare Library. All illustrations are drawn from the Folger Shakespeare Library, John Dryden Collection, formed by Percy J. Dobell; they are reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

In his last years Dryden often felt the need to defend his morals, his religion, his politics, even his poetry. For nearly a quarter of a century he had held high literary office and mingled with the great; he had curried royal and aristocratic favour and patronage, writing to order or on commission, bolstering officialdom, aiming to injure the Crowns enemies and caress its friends. He wrote about politics and religion, about trade and empire; he wrote for the theatre and for public occasion; he composed songs, fables, odes and panegyrics, brilliant satire and savage polemic; he translated from many languages and formulated an idiomatic, familiar and fluent prose style.

Dryden virtually invented the commercial literary career; and through all the turns of a difficult public life, he fashioned from his own unlikely personality from his privacy, self-doubts, even verbal hesitation (qualities mocked by his enemies) a public figure of literary distinction. But he attained this celebrity at the cost of gossip and scandal and, in the last decade of his life (after the Glorious Revolution and his removal from the laureateship), of suspicion and scorn. The poets beginnings give no hint of literary greatness or the likelihood of fame. He was born in 1631 in a country town and to comfortable circumstance; he was educated at Westminster School and graduated A.B. from Trinity College, Cambridge. He held minor public office in the 1650s but had written almost nothing before he was twenty-seven.

Then, rather suddenly, and for a writer rather belatedly, Dryden began his long career as public poet. He mourned Oliver Cromwell in 1659 (Heroic Stanzas) and in what looks a sudden and convenient turn of allegiance he celebrated the return of monarchy in 1660, writing poems to Charles II, to the Lord Chancellor and to the Duchess of York; he praised the Royal Society (To Dr. Charleton, 1663) and defended the Royal Navy and its aristocratic high command (Annus Mirabilis, 1667). The first years seem a series of calculated moves; and the combination of talent, application and opportunity was crowned when Dryden was named Poet Laureate in 1668. But in addition to fashioning a career in the 1666s, Dryden also forged a new drama an epic theatre whose themes and language echoed the idioms of heroic verse and a body of literary criticism that, had he done nothing else, would have made his lasting reputation. Indeed, Drydens most important creation in the 1660s was the Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668).

Along with Sir Philip Sidneys Defence of Poesy and Samuel Johnsons Lives of the Poets, Drydens Essay is central to our literature and to the creation of English literary criticism. More than any predecessor or rival, Dryden brought together all the strands of classical and contemporary European literary theory. Some of Drydens early plays have been all but forgotten, but he worked steadily at a craft that would enable him to create a comic masterpiece in Marriage A-la-Mode (1671), turn Miltons Paradise Lost into theatre in