SOURCE: "Annus Mirabilis and the Ideology of the New Science," in ELH, Vol. 57, No. 2, Summer 1990, pp. 307-34.

In the following excerpt, Burke contends that in Annus Mirabilis, Dryden glorifies the "new" or practical science of his era and in the process, anticipates the advent of the more "materialistic" and "republican" enlightenment that was to dominate the final half of the eighteenth century.

In an article on Dryden and the issue of human progress, Earl Miner comments that the poet's degree of enthusiasm for the new science is a "knotty problem." Though he notes that Dryden "probably wrote more progress-pieces than any other of our poets," Miner argues that Dryden's attitude to progress was, at best, qualified; one "really significant fact," Miner notes, is that the poet "wrote no Cowleyan ode on the Royal Society, as he surely would have, if he had placed his strongest hopes in the...