John Dryden

Bücher

Angebote / Angebote:

Excerpt from John Dryden: The Poet, the Dramatist, the CriticHas - the importance of his in¿uence. It is this nice ques tion of in¿uence that I wish to investigate first, in relation to what I may call the filjmternawrymglmipwta tor, that is, in our history, we to say that poets like Shakespeare and Milton 'were without in¿uence? Certainly not, but in ¿uence, in the sense in which we can cope with the term, is something more limited. The dis proportion between Shakespeare and his imme diate followers, among the dramatists, is so great that the in¿uence of Shakespeare is a tri¿ingthing in comparison with Shakespeare himself, and as for Milton, that was so peculiar a genius that although he had plenty of mimics during the eighteenth century, he can hardly be said to have any followers. For in¿uence, as Dryden had in¿uence, a poet must not be so great as to overshadow all followers. Dryden was followed' by Pope, and a century later, by Samuel John son, borh men of great original genius, who developed the medium left them by Dryden, in ways which cast honour both on them and on him. It should seem then no paradox to say that Dryden was the great in¿uence upon English verse that he was, because he was not too great to have any in¿uence at all. He was neither the consummate poet of earlier times, nor the eccen tric poet of later. He was happy both in his predecessors and in his successors. A hundred years rs a long time for the stamp of one man to remain upon a literature 5 poets' in¿uence and reputation cannot last so long in our days, and 6' that makes Dryden a central, a typical figurein English letters. He is in himself the Malherbe, the Boileau, the Corneille and almost the Moliere (almost, because Congreve refined and surpassed him in comedy) of the seventeenth century in England, and to him, as much as to any indi vidual, we owe our civilisation.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.