BIOGRAPHY AND WORKS OF JOHN DRYDEN

                 "Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide."                                 - John Dryden

                    Dryden is the greatest literary figure of the Restoration, and in his work we have an excellent reflection of both the good and the evil tendencies of the age in which he lived. If we can think for a moment of literature as a canal of water, we may appreciate the figure that Dryden is the "lock by which the waters of English poetry were let down from the mountains of Shakespeare and Milton to the plain of Pope"; that is, he stands between two very different ages, and serves as a transition from one to the other.  

LIFE OF JOHN DRYDEN : 

Born = August 19, 1631 ENGLAND

Died = May 12, 1700 (aged 68), LONDON- ENGLAND

                     Dryden was born in the village of Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, in 1631. His family were prosperous people, who brought him up in the strict Puritan faith, and sent him first to the famous Westminster school and then to Cambridge.  

                   He made excellent use of his opportunities and studied eagerly, becoming one of the best educated men of his age, especially in the classics. Though of remarkable literary taste, he showed little evidence of literary ability up to the age of thirty. By his training and family connections he was allied to the Puritan party, and his only well-known work of this period, the "Heroic Stanzas," was written on the death of Cromwell: 

                    "His grandeur he derived from Heaven alone,

    For he was great ere Fortune made him so;

And wars, like mists that rise against the sun,

    Made him but greater seem, not greater grow."

                     In these four lines, taken almost at random from the "Heroic Stanzas," we have an epitome of the thought, the preciseness, and the polish that mark all his literary work.This poem made Dryden well known, and he was in a fair way to become the new poet of Puritanism when the Restoration made a complete change in his methods. He had come to London for a literary life, and when the Royalists were again in power he placed himself promptly on the winning side. 

                    

                       During this time Dryden had become the best known literary man of London, and was almost as much a dictator to the literary set which gathered in the taverns and coffeehouses as Ben Jonson had been before him. His work, meanwhile, was rewarded by large financial returns, and by his being appointed poet laureate and collector of the port of London. The latter office, it may be remembered, had once been held by Chaucer. works of Dryden makes him very famous. he died in 1700 and was buried near chaucer in westminster abbey. 

 

WORK LIST OF JOHN DRYDEN : 

                         The numerous dramatic works of Dryden are best left in that obscurity into which they have fallen. Now and then they contain a bit of excellent lyric poetry, and in All for Love, another version of Antony and Cleopatra, where he leaves his cherished heroic couplet for the blank verse of Marlowe and Shakespeare, he shows what he might have done had he not sold his talents to a depraved audience. On the whole, reading his plays is like nibbling at a rotting apple; even the good spots are affected by the decay, and one ends by throwing the whole thing into the garbage can, where most of the dramatic works of this period belong.

POEMS OF JOHN DRYDEN: 

 

1. Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell (1659)

2. Astraea Redux (1660)

3. To His Sacred Majesty, a Panegyric on His Coronation (1661)

4. To My Lord Chancellor (1662)

5. Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders (1667)

                    Following list of poem is the

 major poems of John Dryden. so many other poems are there in his poem work List.

PROSE AND CRITICISM: 

-Of Dramatic Poesie, An Essay (1668)

- Notes and Observations on "The Empress of Morocco" (1674)

- His Majesties Declaration Defended (1681)

- A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) 

DRYDEN'S INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE: 

                     Dryden's place among authors is due partly to his great influence on the succeeding age of classicism. Briefly, this influence may be summed up by noting the three new elements which he brought into our literature. These are: 

(1) the establishment of the heroic couplet as the fashion for satiric, didactic, and descriptive poetry.

(2) his development of a direct, serviceable prose style such as we still cultivate;

(3) his development of the art of literary criticism in his essays and in the numerous prefaces to his poems. 

This is certainly a large work for one man to accomplish, and Dryden is worthy of honor, though comparatively little of what he wrote is now found on our bookshelves. After studying John Dryden we can conclude that he was the great writer, English poet, literary critic, translator and playwrights also. he was the best figure of restoration time.