ABSTRACT

Dryden: Selected Poems is drawn from Paul Hammond and David Hopkins's remarkable five-volume The Poems of John Dryden, and includes a generous selection of his most important work. The great satires, MacFlecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel, are included in full, as are his religious poemsReligio Laici and The Hind and the Panther, along with a number of Dryden's translations from Horace, Ovid, Homer, and Chaucer.

Each poem is accompanied by a headnote, which gives details of composition, publication, and reception. The first-rate annotations provide information on matters of interpretation and give details of allusions that might prove baffling to contemporary readers. Some 300 years after his death, Dryden: Selected Poems will enable new generations of readers to discover the poet of whom Eliot wrote: 'we cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden'.

part |848 pages

The Poems

chapter 1|12 pages

Heroic Stanzas

chapter 2|17 pages

Astraea Redux

chapter 3|91 pages

Annus Mirabilis

chapter 4|27 pages

Mac Flecknoe

chapter 5|79 pages

Absalom and Achitophel

chapter 6|24 pages

The Medal

chapter 7|48 pages

Religio Laici

chapter 8|5 pages

To the Earl of Roscommon

chapter 9|5 pages

To the Memory of Mr Oldham

chapter 12|3 pages

Horace: Odes I ix

chapter 13|7 pages

Horace: Odes III xxix

chapter 14|7 pages

Horace: Epode II

chapter 15|16 pages

To the Memory of Anne Killigrew

chapter 16|150 pages

The Hind and the Panther

chapter 17|11 pages

A Song for St Cecilia’s Day

chapter 18|37 pages

The Tenth Satire of Juvenal

chapter 19|11 pages

To My Dear Friend Mr Congreve

chapter 20|16 pages

Alexander’s Feast

chapter 21|90 pages

Palamon and Arcite

chapter 22|14 pages

To John Driden of Chesterton

chapter 23|28 pages

Sigismonda and Guiscardo

chapter 26|47 pages

The First Book of Homer’s Ilias

chapter 27|34 pages

The Cock and the Fox

chapter 28|6 pages

The Secular Masque from The Pilgrim