Selected Poems
Dryden was the first English poet to turn both criticism and satire into high art at the same time.
Read this if you…
- have already read milton and pope, and want to read the next best contemporary
- want to mostly read about political feuds you have to look up to understand
Skip this if you…
- haven't already read pope
- aren't interested in his 17th century political themes (i wasn't)
Why It Matters
Dryden was the first English poet to turn both criticism and satire into high art at the same time. He set the template for Augustan poetry, polished and public and devastatingly witty, and Pope, Swift, and Johnson all built on it. He basically created the role of the public intellectual poet in English.
The 
Take
Only read a few of the poems .Fun how much he hates his poetic rivals, origins rap battle. Also I enjoy reading Greek and Roman classics in heroic couplets more than most other translations
Where to go next
- The Aeneid by Virgil. Selected Poems built on it. - 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
- Metamorphoses by Ovid. Selected Poems built on it. - 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
- The Odes of Horace by Horatius. Selected Poems built on it. - 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
- The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Selected Poems built on it. - 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
- Samuel by Samuel. Selected Poems built on it. - *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
- The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Selected Poems built on it. - 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
- The Iliad by Homer. Selected Poems built on it. - 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
- The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope. Selected Poems shaped it. - 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
Depicted in Art
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
Absalom hangs by his hair from an oak tree while Joab's soldiers approach to kill him; battle rages in the background.
Gustave Doré, 1866
Aeneas in the underworld with the Sibyl, surrounded by shades and the architecture of the dead.
Wenceslaus Hollar (after Franz Cleyn), 1654
Engraved frontispiece to Jacob Tonson's 1697 folio of Dryden's Virgil — the title page of the most important book Dryden published.
1697
Recommended Editions
Penguin Classics
2001
Zwicker and Bywaters's Penguin selection covers Dryden's full range: satire, ode, translation, criticism. The introduction places him squarely in Restoration politics, which is where his best work actually lives.
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Deep Dive
What It's About
This summary gives away plot details.
Notable Quotes
“Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”
“None but the brave deserves the fair.”