Dryden: Poet or Translator?

Abstract

The tercentenary of Dryden's death finds his reputation secure. The ongoing Longman and the nearly complete California editions give Dryden as much space on the library shelves as Pope, and almost as much as Milton. Whether he was a poet, and whether what he wrote was poetry two questions the nineteenth century debated at length seem issues as dead as the terms they were couched in. Even the distinctions his strongest admirers always made, that his versification was often careless and its emotional content specious (as Johnson put it, 'he could more easily fill the ear with some splendid novelty than awaken those ideas that slumber in the heart', Lives, I, 459), are reservations that seem to have lost their point. But a long controversy is rarely unprovoked, though the terms in which it was played out may be in need of vigorous redefinition, and in this essay I want to suggest other ways of understanding why Dryden's status as a poet has been controversial in the past, and might still be felt to be difficult. Critical consensus can always be a cover for inertia, we know, and even admirers may be glad of an opportunity to reassess the grounds of their enthusiasm. In this spirit, one important question that could be raised is: which Dryden is it who is still 'alive'? That is, does anyone read the works of Dryden without selecting heavily and leaving aside large areas of his achievement? One way of responding to this fact is not to interpret it at all; Dryden simply wrote a great deal in different genres and no-one is going to be equal to the whole corpus. 'Here is God's plenty', we might say, as he so cheerfully does of Chaucer's works (Preface to Fables, Kinsley, IV, 1455). But there seems to be more to interpret than this, even by Dryden's own account. His working career is disjunctive, studded with regretful afterthoughts and self-accusations. His repudiation of his plays, in particular, • could not be more strongly stated than in To Mrs. Anne Killigrew: