ABSTRACT
The greater poets of the Restoration period clearly were John Milton and John Dryden. These men represent two developments at the end of the Renaissance. Milton preserved the elevation and glowing richness of the humanist intellect, while Dryden developed in the realistic, critical, and skeptical tradition initiated in part by Montaigne. Milton in his post-restoration poems thought and worked in terms of the higher genres, epic and tragedy, and he thus achieved the acme of English neo-classical distinction.1 Dryden worked in inferior genres, and the lesser poets in general followed Dryden in this respect. At the end of the century, to be sure, Sir Richard Blackmore (c. 1655-1729) was pouring forth interminable epic strains; but these were not highly regarded. The most acclaimed poems, apart from Milton’s, were in general satirical or didactic. There was, of course, much writing and singing of popular political songs and ballads as well as songs of love and drinking; but these were regarded much of the time as non-literary. Normally poems in these lower genres were written in a familiar, facetious, and at times even a vulgar or actually indecent tone: the dignity of Augustanism tended to be slighted, but it was still valued for nobler efforts.
