Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:21:26.631Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Ideology of Restoration Poetic Form: John Dryden

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Laura Brown
Laura Brown*
Affiliation:
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Although intellectual historians have rejected the notion that Dryden was a skeptic, recent readings of his specific works have increasingly emphasized irony and absurdity. This critical contradiction can serve as an interpretive tool: a full account of Dryden's poems must explain their tendency to attract the imputation of skepticism. In their images, extended analogies, dramatic actions, and structural premises, Dryden's poetic works share a formal core characterized by disjunction, incommensurability, or the failure of congruence. This unreconciled disjunction reflects a continual struggle to override a contradiction. It represents the aesthetic codification of anxiety, the literary elaboration of an ideology at odds with itself. Dryden's poetry manifests the contradictions in his grasp of the realities of his age. In its disjunctivity, it reveals the anxieties of the Restoration settlement, and in its blind advocacy of a conservative and static ideal, it sees the realities of a progressive and dynamic historical process.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 97 , Issue 3 , May 1982 , pp. 395 - 407
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1982

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Alssid, Michael W. “The Design of Dryden's Aureng-Zebe.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 64(1965):452–69.Google Scholar
Alssid, Michael W. “The Perfect Conquest: A Study of Theme, Structure, and Characters in Dryden's The Indian Emperor.” Studies in Philology 59(1962):539–59.Google Scholar
Amis, George T. “The Structure of the Augustan Couplet.” Genre 9(1976): 37–58.Google Scholar
Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: NLB, 1974.Google Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. “The Study of Poetry.” In Essays: English and American. Ed. Charles W. Eliot. 1886; rpt. New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1910. Originally published as the General Introduction to The English Poets. Ed. T. H. Ward. 1880.Google Scholar
Bredvold, Louis I. The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1934.Google Scholar
Budick, Sanford. Dryden and the Abyss of Light: A Reading of Religio-Laici and The Hind and the Panther. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Chiasson, Elias J. “Dryden's Apparent Scepticism.” Harvard Theological Review 54(1961): 207–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, John R. “‘To the Memory of Mr. Oldham’: Dryden's Disquieting Lines.” Concerning Poetry 3(1970): 43–49.Google Scholar
Dryden, John. All for Love. Ed. Vieth, David. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1972.Google Scholar
Dryden, John. The Works of John Dryden. Vol. 1: Poems 1649-1680. Ed. Edward Niles Hooker, H. Swedenberg, T. Jr., Dearing, Vinton A., Carey, Frederick M., Dick, Hugh G., Davies, Godfrey, Monk, Samuel H., and Smith, John Harrington. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1956. Vol. 2: Poems 1681-1684. Ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., and Vinton A. Dearing. Berkeley. Univ. of California Press, 1972. Vol. 3: Poems 1685-1692. Ed. Earl Miner, Vinton A. Dearing, Norman Austin, Samuel H. Monk, and Thomas G. Rosenmeyer. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969. Vol. 4: Poems 1693-1696. Ed. A. B. Chambers, William Frost, and Vinton A. Dearing. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974. Vol. 11: Plays. Ed. John Loftis, David Stuart Rodes, Vinton A. Dearing, George R. Guffey, Alan Roper, and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ehrenpreis, Irvin. “Continuity and Coruscation: Dryden's Poetic Instincts.” In Irvin Ehrenpreis and James M. Osborn. John Dryden 2. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Univ. of California, 1978, 1–26.Google Scholar
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Poetry and Imagination.” In Letters and Social Aims. Vol. 8 of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Boston: Houghton, 1865.Google Scholar
Empson, William. “Dryden's Apparent Scepticism.” Essays in Criticism 20(1970): 172–81.Google Scholar
Fisher, Alan S. “Daring to Be Absurd: The Paradoxes of The Conquest of Granada.” Studies in Philology 73(1976): 414–39.Google Scholar
Fujimura, Thomas H. “Dryden's Religio Laid: An Anglican Poem.” PMLA 76(1961): 205–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffin, Dustin. “Dryden's ‘Oldham’ and the Perils of Writing.” Modern Language Quarterly 37(1976): 133–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harth, Phillip. Contexts of Dryden's Thought. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968.Google Scholar
Harth, Phillip. “Empson's Interpretation of Religio Laid.” Essays in Criticism 20 (1970): 446–50.Google Scholar
Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution: 1603–1714. 1961; rpt. New York: Norton, 1966.Google Scholar
Hoffman, Arthur W. John Dryden's Imagery. Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1962.Google Scholar
Hooker, Edward Niles. “Dryden and the Atoms of Epicurus.” ELH 24(1957): 177–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hope, A. D. “Anne Killigrew; or, The Art of Modulating.” Southern Review: An Australian Journal of Literary Studies 1 (1963): 4–14. Rpt. in Hope, The Cave and the Spring: Essays on Poetry. Adelaide, Australia: Rigby, 1965, 129–43.Google Scholar
Hume, Robert D. “Dryden's Apparent Scepticism.” Essays in Criticism 20 (1970): 492–95.Google Scholar
Jefferson, D. W. “‘All, all of a piece throughout’: Thoughts on Dryden's Dramatic Poetry.” In Restoration Theatre. Ed. Brown, John Russell and Harris, Bernard. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 6. London: Edward Arnold, 1965, 159–76.Google Scholar
Jefferson, D. W. “Aspects of Dryden's Imagery.” Essays in Criticism 4(1954): 20–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kearful, Frank J. “Tis Past Recovery': Tragic Consciousness in All for Love.” Modern Language Quarterly 34(1973): 227–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Bruce. Dryden's Major Plays. London: Oliver and Boyd, 1966.Google Scholar
LeClercq, Richard V. “The Academic Nature of the Whole Discourse of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.” Papers on Language and Literature 8(1972): 27–38.Google Scholar
Macaulay, Thomas Babington. “John Dryden.” In Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays. New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1860, 1:321–75. Originally published in The Poetical Works of John Dryden. 1826.Google Scholar
McFadden, George. Dryden: The Public Writer, 1660–1685. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKeon, Michael. Politics and Poetry in Restoration England: The Case of Dryden's Annus Mirabilis. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Miner, Earl. “Dryden and the Issue of Human Progress.” Philological Quarterly 40 (1961): 120–29.Google Scholar
Miner, Earl. “Dryden's Apparent Scepticism.” Essays in Criticism 21 (1971): 410–11.Google Scholar
Miner, Earl. Dryden's Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1967.Google Scholar
Newman, Robert S. “Irony and the Problem of Tone in Dryden's Aureng-Zebe.” Studies in English Literature 10(1970):439–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Price, Martin. To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964.Google Scholar
Profitt, Bessie. “Political Satire in Dryden's Alexander's Feast.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 11(1970): 1307–16.Google Scholar
Roper, Alan. “Characteristics of Dryden's Prose.” ELH 41(1974):668–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roper, Alan. Dryden's Poetic Kingdoms. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965.Google Scholar
Schilling, Bernard N. Dryden and the Conservative Myth: A Reading of Absalom and Achitophel. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961.Google Scholar
Trowbridge, Hoyt. “The Place of Rules in Dryden's Criticism.” Modern Philology 44(1946): 84–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vieth, David M. “Concept as Metaphor: Dryden's Attempted Stylistic Revolution.” Language and Style 3 (1970): 197–204.Google Scholar
Vieth, David M. “Irony in Dryden's Ode to Anne Killigrew.” Studies in Philology 62(1965): 91–100.Google Scholar
Vieth, David M. “Shadwell in Acrostic Land: The Reversible Meaning of Dryden's Mac Flecknoe.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 9(1979):503–16.Google Scholar
Waith, Eugene. The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1962.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wallace, A. E. “Dryden and Pyrrhonism.” Notes and Queries 202(1957): 251–52.Google Scholar
Wasserman, Earl R. The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1959.Google Scholar
Zwicker, Steven N. Dryden's Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation. Providence, R.I.: Brown Univ. Press, 1972.Google Scholar