ABSTRACT
John Drydenian scholarship flourishes, and its crowning glories are the five volumes of the Poems edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins and published by Longman between 1995 and 2005. Dryden has long been dogged by the question of sincerity. In accordance with Fortune's usual bargain, his willingness to please his patrons and audiences has made his work less pleasing in the longer term. Dryden's awareness of the prickles within his praises is clear from the shape taken by his first foray into satire. Translation offered him the freedom to pursue imaginative but not merely imaginary friendships without the risk of seeming to intrude. The 'transfusion' of modernisation suits Dryden's poems because — despite their attachment to contemporary events — they stretch imaginatively through time, both back to the past and on towards the future into which they are set to drift on the current of affairs.
