Dryden's Criticism as Transfusion

Abstract

It is now quite normal to join company with Dryden's contemporaries and immediate successors and to view him as England's greatest translator of the classical Roman poets (and a range of other material). New work on Dryden's translations, and their literary contexts, pre-texts and determinants, has substantially modified the image of Dryden as a religious or satirical writer or the negotiator of such contemporary events as the Popish Plot. Scholars have, to be sure, continued to detect topical resonances in Dryden's poetry, increasingly within a variety of ostensibly non-political works: as Howard Erskine-Hill has written, 'The pervasiveness of Jacobite and Williamite allusion in Dryden's Aeneis may be readily traced.'1 But Dryden scholars have also rediscovered the literary context of their primary texts: the social and the political (the 'manners', in contemporary terminology) has transformed into the mental and emotional world of the poet, and we now view Dryden in company with his sources in a collaborative partnership, or spiritual communion, of poetic souls. Interest in the relationship between Dryden's literary critical writing and its historical antecedents, the subject of the present discussion, has lagged behind this important shift. Part of the problem may be that to use the term 'literary criticism' of any of Dryden's writing is inevitably to make certain assumptions about what criticism is.2 In recent years commentators have attempted to collapse criticism into 'cultural studies', or to redefine it as 'theory',3 and it is sometimes described as a hybrid mode or 'bastard discourse' within the debates of philosophical writing. Dryden himself defined it in his 'Author's Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence' simply as 'a standard of judging well' (Essays, I, 197). But to admit into the category of criticism Dryden's collected essays, dialogues, prefaces, and epistles dedicatory in prose, or to include the many occasions on which he is explicitly alluding to, translating, adapting, and implicitly judging, placing, appreciating, or otherwise interpreting other poets, or copying and re-stating other critics, would be to invoke an inescapably controversial definition of the critical process.4 To this core problem of what actually counts as criticism in Dryden, we must then add the difficulties of thinking historically about