Cloth binding. Black lettering with gilt title on front cover.

What Dryden achieved in his poetry was neither the emotional excitement of the early nineteenth-century romantics nor the intellectual complexities of the metaphysicals. His subject matter was often factual, and he aimed at expressing his thoughts in the most precise and concentrated manner. Although he uses formal structures such as heroic couplets, he tried to recreate the natural rhythm of speech, and he knew that different subjects need different kinds of verse. In his preface to Religio Laici he says that “the expressions of a poem designed purely for instruction ought to be plain and natural, yet majestic… The florid, elevated and figurative way is for the passions; for (these) are begotten in the soul by showing the objects out of their true proportion…. A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth.”

John Dryden (1631 – 12 May 1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was appointed England’s first Poet Laureate in 1668.

He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Romanticist writer Sir Walter Scott called him “Glorious John”.