10 - John Dryden

Summary

Readers comparing the accounts of Dryden offered by his most influential critic from the twentieth century, Mark Van Doren, and from the eighteenth, Samuel Johnson, might be forgiven for thinking that they were reading about two entirely different poets. ‘Dryden’, Van Doren tells us, ‘was rarely successful in his descriptions of Nature and his accounts of the human passions’ (‘what data he did possess upon these subjects’, he adds, ‘he had borrowed, not very happily, from the classical poets’). Dryden’s attempts at fancy or passion always result in ‘absurdity and bathos’. He never displayed ‘a happy gift for turning up images’. ‘More journalist than artist’, Dryden ‘is virtually barren of illuminating comments on human life which move a reader to take new account of himself’. He was ‘most at home when he was making statements’. Since he ‘never got outside himself’, he mostly ‘failed to learn anything by his translating’. He was inspired not by ‘happy perceptions of identities in the world of nature and man’ but by ‘circumstances’. His religious and political verse displayed no ‘conspicuous principles of his own concerning Church and State’. In his ratiocinative verse he was ‘a versifier of propositions rather than a philosopher resorting to poetry, or even a poet speculating’. His amatory poetry never goes ‘deeper than the painted fires of conventional Petrarchan love’. He ‘did not tell a story particularly well’. His Fables ‘catered to a jaded taste that craved the strong meat of incest, murder, flowing blood, cruel and sensual unrealities’.