John Dryden
1631–1700 · England
“Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”
The lineage through John Dryden
Drew From(7)
who shaped John Dryden
via The Aeneid
- The crown of Dryden's Selected Poems is his 1697 Aeneis — Virgil's epic recast in English heroic couplets
- It was the great labor of his late career, called the pinnacle of his work as a translator
- Read the Aeneid first and you see what Dryden was wrestling into English: the original he set out to make speak
via Metamorphoses
- Much of Dryden's late verse is Ovid in English — Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700) carries eight selections from the Metamorphoses, Books 12 and 15 among them
- He'd already Englished its first book in 1693 and used the Ovid prefaces to work out his whole theory of translation
- Dryden flatly named Book 15 "the Master-piece of the whole Metamorphoses" — go to the source he spent a career rendering
- Several of Dryden's finest lyrics in Sylvae are Horace wearing English dress
- His Happy the Man is a free paraphrase of Horace's Ode 3.29 — the carpe-diem serenity is borrowed wholesale
- Reading the Odes first shows you exactly what Dryden was reaching for: the relaxed, self-possessed wisdom he made his own
- When Dryden wanted models, he reached back three hundred years to Chaucer — modernizing the Knight's Tale into the couplets of Palamon and Arcite
- His Preface names the debt plainly: "I could have done nothing without him"
- Read the Tales first and you hear what Dryden was polishing — the same stories, the medieval grain of them, made new in his hands
- Absalom and Achitophel, the centerpiece here, is a line-by-line retelling of 2 Samuel — Achitophel, David, and Absalom are lifted straight from scripture
- Dryden trusts his readers to know the original cold, so the allegory only lands if you can hear the biblical story under the Restoration politics
- Read Samuel first and Dryden's double game opens up: every name carries its scriptural fate and its contemporary target at once
via The Decameron
- Three of Dryden's Fables are lifted straight from Boccaccio — Sigismonda and Guiscardo, Theodore and Honoria, Cymon and Iphigenia — with "Boccace" credited on the title page
- Reading the Decameron tales first shows you exactly what Dryden kept, cut, and heightened in turning Italian prose into English couplets
- The seed of these poems is a 14th-century storyteller — go back to him and the borrowing is unmistakable
- Dryden's Homer translations bring the Iliad into English heroic couplets — the first book in full, plus Hector's last parting from Andromache
- To render Homer is to take the measure of the source; reading the original Greek epic first shows you what Dryden was wrestling into rhyme
- He set his Homer beside his Virgil, claiming the whole epic lineage for English verse
Inspired(1)
who John Dryden shaped
- Dryden's Mac Flecknoe is the first great mock-heroic poem in English — the form Pope would perfect
- It taught the whole trick: deploy the full machinery of epic on something gloriously trivial, and let the gap do the comedy
- Pope called Dryden his master — and The Rape of the Lock is what a master's pupil builds next
Portraits
Posthumous oil portrait by Maubert (NPG 1133), an independent likeness of the poet near the end of his life distinct from the Kneller and Wright traditions.
James Maubert, 1700
Dryden in his mid-thirties around the year of his appointment as Poet Laureate, head and shoulders, looking aside in a curled wig.
John Michael Wright, 1668
Late portrait of Dryden in a heavy wig, three-quarter view, the elder-statesman image used for the 1697 Virgil frontispiece.
Godfrey Kneller, 1693
Famous Quotes
“Beware the fury of a patient man.”
“None but the brave deserves the fair.”
“Men are but children of a larger growth; / Our appetites as apt to change as theirs.”
“A man so various, that he seem'd to be / Not one, but all mankind's epitome.”
About John Dryden
English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary scene of Restoration England. He was the first official Poet Laureate and established the heroic couplet as the dominant verse form. His critical essays helped define English literary criticism, and his translations of Virgil and Chaucer set standards for the art.