John Dryden-poetry

The group of Dryden's poems on the Restoration-Astrea Redux, a poem on the coronation, and one to Clarendon- is of singular interest. All three are written in the couplet, the metre  that to strengthen, to perfect, and to install in public  favor  for something like a country and a half. He is not yet at his best in it, or at anything near his, best. In his next, and for many years only , important poem he relapsed into the quatrain. Annus MIrabilis (1666)  is a poem which might be taken as a text or series of texts to show the difference between the old poetry and new .


Then for the fifteen years and more , Dryden did nothing of importance in pure poetry , and his Drama -verse and other will be handled two chapters hense. He broke out again with the marvellous group of satires above referred to -Absalom and Achitophel (part 1 ,November 1682) and second part of-Absalom and Achitophel  (with important contributions from Dryden , though the whole is not his) a month later, with Religio Laici almost at the same moment. In this poem Dryden showed himself in a light which though not perhaps surprising to careful students on of his plays, could hardly have been anticipated by anyone who knew his earlier poems only.

Dryden has been strongly called "Phlegmatic" from the cool superiority  which he observes in dealing with the most exciting themes. He is in reality no more phlegmatic than Shakespeare  himself, though he is a lesser poet with a lesser range. The phlegm of the great passage on life in Aurangzeb,of the "Wandering Fires" in The Hind and the Panther , to mention no others,is a very curious humour.

The controversial verse of Religio Laici , with its tell yearning for an infallible director, is less popular than the great satiric portraits of the Absalom pieces , The Medal, and Macflecknoe, but it is not less good. Perhaps the very best of all --magnificent as are the "Zimri", the "Og" , the "Doeg" and the whole of   Macflecknoe - is the" Shimei" of the first Absalom.

For some ten years after the revolution Dryden was too much occupied with hackwork of various kinds -the chief being the Virgil -to produce much original , or even semi original , poetry ,but his genius happily inspired him, just before he died, to give the most striking proof ever given by any poet that age and ill health and the unkindness of circumstances had not affected his absolute pre-eminence over all his fellows. The so called Fables were chiefly made up of some remarkable paraphrases-Dryden himself, with more modesty, called them "translations" from Chaucer and Boccaccio.

For  some other reason, it has been fashion for  a century to call him prosaic. "The most prosaic of our great poets" ,' a classic of our prose" . But Dryden was not a prosaic poet, but he was  the poet of  a prosaic time.