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    John Dryden

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    MUHAMMAD SHAHID
    John Dryden was an influential English poet, playwright, literary critic and historian. He was born in 1631 in England and studied at Cambridge University. He wrote many plays, poems and critical works that followed neoclassical rules and forms. Some of his most famous works include All for Love, Absalom and Achitophel, Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther. He served as Poet Laureate from 1668 until 1688 and helped establish principles of literary criticism in England. Dryden made important contributions to English literature as one of the first major English writers to follow neoclassical ideals of order, clarity and appeals to reason over imagination.

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    John Dryden

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    MUHAMMAD SHAHID
    64 views8 pages
    John Dryden was an influential English poet, playwright, literary critic and historian. He was born in 1631 in England and studied at Cambridge University. He wrote many plays, poems and critical works that followed neoclassical rules and forms. Some of his most famous works include All for Love, Absalom and Achitophel, Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther. He served as Poet Laureate from 1668 until 1688 and helped establish principles of literary criticism in England. Dryden made important contributions to English literature as one of the first major English writers to follow neoclassical ideals of order, clarity and appeals to reason over imagination.

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    John Dryden was an influential English poet, playwright, literary critic and historian. He was born in 1631 in England and studied at Cambridge University. He wrote many plays, poems and critical works that followed neoclassical rules and forms. Some of his most famous works include All for Love, Absalom and Achitophel, Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther. He served as Poet Laureate from 1668 until 1688 and helped establish principles of literary criticism in England. Dryden made important contributions to English literature as one of the first major English writers to follow neoclassical ideals of order, clarity and appeals to reason over imagination.

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    64 views8 pages

    John Dryden

    Uploaded by

    MUHAMMAD SHAHID
    John Dryden was an influential English poet, playwright, literary critic and historian. He was born in 1631 in England and studied at Cambridge University. He wrote many plays, poems and critical works that followed neoclassical rules and forms. Some of his most famous works include All for Love, Absalom and Achitophel, Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther. He served as Poet Laureate from 1668 until 1688 and helped establish principles of literary criticism in England. Dryden made important contributions to English literature as one of the first major English writers to follow neoclassical ideals of order, clarity and appeals to reason over imagination.

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    John Dryden

    John Dryden
    • Poet, born in August 1631 at Aldwinkle All Saints, Northamptonshire,
    England. He studied at Cambridge, and went to London in 1637, where he
    wrote several plays and satires for the court. His first successful play,
    written in heroic couplets, was The Indian Emperor (1665). After 1676, he
    began to write in blank verse, producing his best play, All for Love (1678).
    In 1668 he became Poet Laureate and in 1670 historiographer royal. Called
    to defend the king's party, he wrote a series of satires, notably Absalom and
    Achitophel (1681), which did much to turn the tide against the Whigs. To
    this era also belong the didactic poem Religio laici (1682), which argues the
    case for Anglicanism, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), marking his
    conversion to Catholicism. His political reward was a place in the customs;
    but he lost his laureateship on the accession of William III (1688).
    • He also wrote a number of important critical works, many in his late years.
    To this era also belong the didactic poem Religiolaici (1682), which argues
    the case for Anglicanism, and The Hind and the Panther (1687), marking
    his conversion to Catholicism. His political reward was a place in the
    customs; but he lost his laureateship on the accession of William III (1688).
    He also wrote a number of important critical works, many in his late years.
    He died on 1 May 1700 in London and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
    The famous works
    1-Dramatic Works
    • The Rival Ladies (1664)
    • Secret-Love; or, The Maiden-Queen (1668).
    • Oedipus: A Tragedy (1679).
    • Don Sebastian, King of Portugal.
    2-Prose
    • Of Dramatic Poesy, An Essay (1668).

    • Notes and Observations on "The Empress


    of Morocco" (1674).
    • His Majesties Declaration Defended (1681)
    3- Poetry
    • To His Sacred Majesty, a Panegyric on
    His Coronation (1661)
    • Fables Ancient and Modern (1700)
    Dryden as neo -classicist
    • Both in theory and practice Dryden was essentially a neo-classicist. In his
    criticism as well as his creative work he appears as a supporter of1 the theory
    and practice of the Greek and Latin writers of antiquity, even though he
    always disclaims any slavish adherence to those "rules" which were
    enunciated long ago.
    • “The father of English criticism” is the title conferred on John Dryden by Dr.
    Johnson who said, “Dryden may be properly considered as the father of
    English Criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine upon
    principles the merit of composition. ” Dr. Johnson’s verdict has been
    supported by critic after critic. Even a modern critic like T. S. Eliot supports
    this view. And George Saintsbury very aptly remarks : “He established the
    English fashion of criticising, as Shakespeare did the English fashion of
    dramatising—the fashion of aiming at delight, at truth, at justice, at nature, at
    poetry, and letting the rules take care of themselves.”
    • Dryden's neo-classicism signifies mainly the following two characteristics:
    • (i) His appreciation and recommendation of the theory and practice of
    the ancient Greek and Roman writers (and also their old Italian and
    contemporary French imitators);
    • (ii) His critical and realistic appraisal of his own times through the
    handling of topical and realistic themes having a direct and immediate
    bearing upon his society and times.
    • Basically, Dryden's neo-classicism. like the classical temper of his
    times, was a reaction against the decadent romanticism of the
    preceding age. The metaphysical tradition of Donne in the hands of
    his followers was, in the words of a critic, "guiding poetry towards a
    wilderness of nonsensical thought and of grotesque form".
    "Somehow," says the same critic, "unconsciously, yet nonetheless
    firmly, "there arose towards the middle of the [seventeenth] century a
    desire for a change, a reversion to something more orderly and more
    definite. The glorious days of Elizabeth had gone for ever. Now there
    were the tendencies for repressing the formless poetry, the formless
    prose, and the extravagant philosophy. This repression led to the
    pseudo-classicism of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
    centuries. It found no greater champion than John Dryden.

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