ABSTRACT

John Dryden was John Milton's younger contemporary and his admirer. Dryden had a respect for tradition, for the rules, and even for French 'correctness'. But in between Edmund Spenser and Dryden there lay the drama of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and in non-dramatic poetry, Milton with his strangely conflicting purposes. Dryden draws part of his vision from the condition of literature and the general atmosphere of ideas in his time. Dryden's example had suggested the surrender of imagination to reason, and that influenced Alexander Pope. George Gordon Byron, in one of his more extravagant eulogies of Pope, wrote that 'the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth'. The strength of Pope lies in his consistent adherence to his own aim, whatever his limitations, real and alleged, may be. Even Samuel Johnson, who admired Pope, and followed him, opened the door in his dramatic criticism to the excesses of romanticism.