John Dryden came into his own as a poet during the Exclusion Crisis (1679–81) and he maintained a superb pace of verse writing over the next several years. Absalom and Achitophel was published in November of 1681, The Medal in March of 1682, Religio Laici in November of that year; in 1684 and 1685 Dryden produced translations, miscellanies and occasional pieces; and in the early spring of 1687 he finished his longest poem, The Hind and the Panther. These works stand at the centre of Dryden’s contribution to English poetry and they display the ways in which politics engaged his imagination and emboldened his art; but they do not stand alone. The energy, refinements and ironies that characterise these works light up a number of other poems that continue to offer pleasure: his commemorative pieces on John Oldham and Henry Purcell, his send-up of literary rivals in Mac Flecknoe, his verse epistle to the young Congreve, his translations of Ovid, Horace and Virgil, and the country-life piece, To my Honour’d Kinsman, with its alluring touches of self-reflection.

What defines Dryden’s poetry and his poetic achievement and how might we best situate his work in a history of English poetry? To Dryden’s place in that history, we shall come at the end of this chapter. To matters of definition there are at least two approaches: the more obvious is in relation to his learning – his erudition, his technical knowledge, his capacity to act at once as disinterested historian and confident advocate. But Dryden’s poetry must also be defined by temperament, by Dryden’s uses of irony as a force-field within which he came to discover himself and to fashion a way of handling the world.