ABSTRACT
Taste in poetry has changed so extremely in the last century and a half that for many persons John Dryden and his school are practically unreadable. For the intelligent student of poetry this is not true. Dryden is one of the most significant figures in the history of English verse; for he perhaps more than any other single person formulated a method for poetry that has appealed to disciples (some of them, to be sure, only metrical imitators) as different as Pope, Gray, Churchill, Byron, Keats, and T.S.Eliot; a method that for two generations after his death dominated English verse. Dryden’s way was not that of the sensuous romantic, “tremblingly alive all o’er,” unlocking his heart of hearts for the public to see; it is rather an impersonal, almost editorial, criticism of life. Much of the time it hardly seems to be “the language of the emotions,” and seldom is it merely that of the senses. It is a method that conceives of poetry as intellectual utterance emotionally or imaginatively suffused so as to persuade a public “audience.” It is, in short, the poetry of eloquence, which, in spite of John Stuart Mill and his followers, is not merely a reputable but an essential method for poets living as Dryden did in times of public emergency. His poetry is “occasional”; and the occasions which it celebrates are public and important-or were in his day. As time passes, however, the importance of occasions fades; the obvious journalistic character of such poetry requires annotation, and annotation is insufferable tedium to later casual readers of verse.
