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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
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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

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