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John Dennis is known best, perhaps, as an example in Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711) of what a critic ought not to be and as one of the diving contestants in The Dunciad (1728, 1743). But he was not always a joke. During the last decade of the seventeenth century and the first decade of the eighteenth, Dennis was the foremost literary critic of his day, a force to be reckoned with, and an opponent well worthy of combat with Pope, or Richard Steele, or Joseph Addison. As a poet, playwright, critic, and political pamphleteer, Dennis pursued the kind of career that any Augustan man of letters might envy. Though his poetry and drama no doubt deserve the neglect they have suffered during the intervening centuries, his literary criticism does not, and, appropriately, Dennis, as a critic, is once again appreciated in his own right and not just laughed at as one of Pope's dunces.
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