Volume 35, Number 4 · March 17, 1988
The Case for Dryden
By Robert M. Adams
John Dryden and His World
by James Anderson Winn
Yale University Press, 651 pp., $29.95
As long ago as 1921, T.S. Eliot, in reviewing a new book on Dryden by Mark Van Doren, remarked that 'we cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden; and to enjoy Dryden means to pass beyond the limitations of the nineteenth century into a new freedom.' Van Doren's book—quiet, eloquent, and thoughtful, like the man himself—provided a wonderful introductory appreciation of Dryden's poetry. It emphasized qualities that admirers of the poet have never ceased to cherish—his energy of expression, elegant versification, the power to think in poetry. In 1934 another clean and cogent little book; Louis I. Bredvold's Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden, undertook to erase the lingering smears on the poet's memory left by the repeated charges of his contemporaries that he was a servile turncoat—the man who praised Cromwell, then celebrated the restoration of Charles II, and became a Catholic with the accession of James II.
Review, 3563 words
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