between 1660 and 1700, a period sometimes designated the Age of Dryden. In addition to his achievements in poetry, he excelled in drama, translation, and literary criticism. Dryden wrote or coauthored twenty-seven plays over a period of nearly thirty-five years; among them were successfully produced tragedies, heroic plays, tragicomedies, comedies of manners, and operas.

For every verse of original poetry that Dryden wrote, he translated two from another poet. Moreover, he translated two long volumes of prose from French originals—in 1684, Louis Maimbourg’s Histoire de la Ligue and in 1688, Dominick Bouhours’s La Vie de Saint François Xavier—and he had a hand in the translation of the version of Plutarch’s Lives published by Jacob Tonson in 1683. The translations were usually well received, especially the editions of Juvenal and Persius (1693) and of Vergil (1697).

Dryden’s literary criticism consists largely of prefaces and dedications published throughout his career and attached to other works, his only critical work published alone being Of Dramatic Poesie: An Essay (1668). As a critic, Dryden appears at his best when he evaluates an earlier poet or dramatist (Homer, Vergil, Ovid, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, John Fletcher), when he seeks to define a genre, or when he breaks new critical ground, providing, for example, definitions of “wit” or a theory of translation.

The original English poetry of John Dryden consists of approximately two hundred titles, or about twenty thousand verses. Slow to develop as a poet, he wrote his first significant poem in his twenty-eighth year, yet his poetic energy continued almost unabated until his death forty-one years later. His poetry reflects the diversity of talent that one finds throughout his literary career, and a wide range of didactic and lyric genres are represented. With Mac Flecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden raised English satire to a form of high art, surpassing his contemporaries John Oldham, Samuel Butler, and John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, as they had surpassed their Elizabethan predecessors. He left his impression on the ode and the verse epistle, and his religious poem Religio Laici may be considered an early example of the verse essay. In the minor genre represented by prologues and epilogues, he stands alone in English literature, unexcelled in both variety and quality.

Of Dryden’s poetic achievement Samuel Johnson wrote in his Life of Dryden: “What was said of Rome, adorned by Augustus, may be applied by an easy metaphor to English poetry embellished by Dryden. . . . [H]e found it brick and he left it marble.” Johnson’s praise applies primarily to Dryden’s significant achievements in style and tone, for Dryden perfected the heroic couplet, the rhymed iambic pentameter form that was to remain the dominant meter of English verse for nearly a century. He demonstrated that a stanza form best suited to lucid and graceful aphoristic wit could be varied and supple enough to produce a range of tones. Building on the achievements of his predecessors Edmund Waller and John Denham and drawing on his own wide experience with the couplet in heroic plays, Dryden polished the form that became for him a natural mode of expression. His couplets are usually end-stopped and closed, achieving a complete grammatical unit by the end of the second line. He makes extensive use of colloquial diction to create a rational, almost conversational tone. The lines contain internal pauses that are carefully regulated, and the syntax usually follows that of idiomatic English. To keep tension in the verse, he relies primarily on balance, antithesis, and other schemes of repetition.

Dryden brought to poetry of his age the energy and directness of expression that critics describe as the most masculine of styles. Accustomed to writing soliloquies and moral arguments in the speeches of heroic drama, he incorporated into his poetry extended passages of reasoning in verse that an age that valued reason found appealing. His inclination to choose for his poetry subjects of interest to contemporaries—science, aesthetics, religion, and politics—enhanced the popularity of his work.

Dryden is essentially a poet of urbanity, wit, and reason, perhaps seeking more to persuade readers than to move them. It has justly been pointed out that his poetry lacks emotional depth. He would rather arouse indignation and scorn over what he opposes than create admiration and appreciation for what he defends. The topical and occasional nature of his poetry suggests his preoccupation with issues of interest to his own day, which are of course less interesting to subsequent ages. His imagery and figures of speech are derived from classical literature, art, and society, not from nature. Even so, modern readers still find appealing those qualities that Dryden himself prized—grace and subtlety of style, rational tone, and vigorous and direct expression.

John Dryden has been accused of being a trimmer—of expediently changing his views on religion, government, and literary standards. What evidence is there to refute this charge?

Examine the applicability of Dryden’s biblical lore in Absalom and Achitophel.

Was outrage at his nation for honoring the minor poet Thomas Shadwell a sufficient or merely a contributing provocation for Dryden to write Mac Flecknoe?

Show how Dryden’s characterizations of the speakers in Of Dramatic Poesie: An Essay reflect his critical broad-mindedness.

Discuss Dryden’s influence on literary art in the century that followed his death in 1700.

Trace Dryden’s importance as a link between the Jacobean and Restoration drama.