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History of English Literature

Notes “Restoration” to denote the literature that began and flourished under Charles II, whether that
literature was the laudatory ode that gained a new life with restored aristocracy, the eschatological
literature that showed an increasing despair among Puritans, or the literature of rapid
communication and trade that followed in the wake of England’s mercantile empire.

8.1 Dryden’s Contribution

Dryden was the dominant literary figure and influence of his age. He established the heroic
couplet as a standard form of English poetry by writing successful satires, religious pieces, fables,
epigrams, compliments, prologues, and plays with it; he also introduced the alexandrine and
triplet into the form. In his poems, translations, and criticism, he established a poetic diction
appropriate to the heroic couplet—Auden referred to him as “the master of the middle style”—
that was a model for his contemporaries and for much of the 18th century. The considerable loss
felt by the English literary community at his death was evident from the elegies that it inspired.
Dryden’s heroic couplet became the dominant poetic form of the 18th century. The most influential
poet of the 18th century, Alexander Pope, was heavily influenced by Dryden, and often borrowed
from him; other writers were equally influenced by Dryden and Pope. Pope famously praised
Dryden’s versification in his imitation of Horace’s Epistle II.i: “Dryden taught to join/The varying
pause, the full resounding line, / The long majestic march, and energy divine.” Samuel Johnson
summed up the general attitude with his remark that “the veneration with which his name is
pronounced by every cultivator of English literature, is paid to him as he refined the language,
improved the sentiments, and tuned the numbers of English poetry.” His poems were very widely
read, and are often quoted, for instance, in Tom Jones and Johnson’s essays.
Johnson also noted, however, that “He is, therefore, with all his variety of excellence, not often
pathetic; and had so little sensibility of the power of effusions purely natural, that he did not
esteem them in others. Simplicity gave him no pleasure.” The first half of the 18th century did not
mind this too much, but in later generations, this was increasingly considered a fault.
One of the first attacks on Dryden’s reputation was by Wordsworth, who complained that Dryden’s
descriptions of natural objects in his translations from Virgil were much inferior to the originals.
However, several of Wordsworth’s contemporaries, such as George Crabbe, Lord Byron, and
Walter Scott were still keen admirers of Dryden. Besides, Wordsworth did admire many of Dryden’s
poems, and his famous “Intimations of Immortality” ode owes something stylistically to Dryden’s
“Alexander’s Feast”. John Keats admired the “Fables,” and imitated them in his poem Lamia. Later
19th century writers had little use for verse satire, Pope, or Dryden; Matthew Arnold famously
dismissed them as “classics of our prose.” He did have a committed admirer in George Saintsbury,
and was a prominent figure in quotation books such as Bartlett’s, but the next major poet to take an
interest in Dryden was T. S. Eliot, who wrote that he was ‘the ancestor of nearly all that is best in
the poetry of the eighteenth century’, and that ‘we cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred
years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden.’ However, in the same essay, Eliot accused
Dryden of having a “commonplace mind.” Critical interest in Dryden has increased recently, but,
as a relatively straightforward writer his work has not occasioned as much interest as Andrew
Marvell’s or John Donne’s or Pope’s.
Dryden is also believed to be the first person to posit that English sentences should not end in
prepositions because it was against the rules of Latin grammar. Dryden created the prescription
against preposition stranding in 1672 when he objected to Ben Jonson’s 1611 phrase the bodies that
those souls were frightened from, although he didn’t provide an explanation of the rationale that
gave rise to his preference.
Dryden’s reputation is greater today, contemporaries saw the 1670s and 1680s as the age of courtier
poets in general, and Edmund Waller was as praised as any. Dryden, Rochester, Buckingham, and
Dorset dominated verse, and all were attached to the court of Charles. Aphra Behn, Matthew Prior,
and Robert Gould, by contrast, were outsiders who were profoundly royalist. The court poets
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