"What an Englishman in Parliament oughto be": The Politics of Dryden's "To My Honour'd Kinsman"

Abstract

John Dryden uses one of his final, original poems, "To My Honour'd Kinsman," published barely a month before his death, to define his political and poetic legacy. Couched in the guise of traditional verse forms—retirement poetry, panegyric, familiar verse epistle—"Kinsman" voices the oppositional politics of Country Party ideology. Dryden recognized fully that real political power had, by 1699, shifted from monarch to Parliament. With this poem, he seized the opportunity that his cousin's return to a Parliamentary seat afforded him to create a portrait of an ideal MP and the views that he should hold. Dryden's kinsman, however, is not that ideal, and the poem is about Dryden himself, rather than his namesake cousin. "Kinsman" articulates the tenets of the Country Party: the natural suitability of the landed gentry for governance; the necessity of individual integrity and virtue; an isolationist foreign policy; an emphasis on naval power, rather than land forces in Europe; and a nostalgic English chauvinism. For Dryden, writing "To My Honour'd Kinsman" is a patriotic act, appropriate to the public role of the poet. At the end of his life, he employed the cultural power of oppositional poetry to dictate to Parliament the direction that he wished English politics to follow and to leave what he calls a "memorial" to himself.