by John Dryden

Critic, playwright, poet, and translator, John Dryden (1631-1700) so dominated the literary scene of the later seventeenth century that it is often referred to as “the Age of Dryden.” Dryden himself explicitly took on the responsibility of speaking for his age in a pioneering work of literary criticism, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), in which he called himself Neander, Greek for “New Man.” The year before, he had published the poem “Annus Mirabilis” (“Year of Wonders”), which celebrated the English spirit as manifested in two events of 1666: a naval victory over the Dutch, and recovery after the Great Fire of London. This and other poems on matters of public or political importance won him the honor of being named poet laureate by King Charles II in 1668. Yet most of Dryden’s literary output in the 1660s and 1670s was...