Dryden : John (1631-1700), English poet, dramatist, translator, & critic. The later 17th century is sometimes termed “the age of Dryden”.
... love, now in his colde grave, Allone withouten any companye? See what Dryden makes of this naive yet touching world-cry: Vain man! how various a bliss we crave, Now warm in love, now withering in the grave! Never, O never more to see the sun! Still dark, in a damp vault, and still alone! Dryden is obviously "arty". He gets out as much alliteration as possible. Chaucer too... very essence of the joie de vivre in the sensation of sunlight, but the thought has no depth of feeling in it. Arnold has done in a positive way what Dryden fails to do in a negative: Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun? Dryden, however, fails not simply because his way is negative: he fails because the negativeness is underlined too ostentatiously. In the right context and in... authenticity we can at once recognise by contrasting this poetry with what a well-known later writer has done with it in the attempt to modernise Chaucer and make him presentable to a more cultured sense. Dryden, seeing the archaic and often childlike form in which Chaucer's work stood, tried to put him in the garb of eighteenth century language — and, in doing so, brought about often just a garb without any ...
... sympathy for much of the work of Pope and Dryden, but I can see their extraordinary perfection or force in their own field, the masterly conciseness, energy, point, metallic precision into which they cut their thought or their verse ,and I can see too how that can with a little infusion of another quality be the basic of a really great poetic style , as Dryden himself has shown in his best work . But... sympathy for much of the work of Pope and Dryden, but i can see their extraordinary perfection or force in their own field, the masterly conciseness, energy, point, metallic precision into which they cut their thought or their verse, and I can see too how that can with a little infusion of another quality be the basis of a really great poetic style, as Dryden himself has shown in his best work. But... discrediting of some and the rehabilitation of the discredited. That happened to Pope and Dryden. Keats and his contemporaries broke their canons and trampled over their corpses to reach romantic freedom; now there is a rehabilitation. But all this is something of an illusion—for mark that even at the worst Pope and Dryden retained a place among the great names of English literature. No controversy, no d ...
... unredeemed intellectuality and even the very first elements of the genuine poetic inspiration are for the most part, one might almost say, entirely absent. Pope and Dryden and their school, except now and then and as if by accident,—Dryden especially has lines sometimes in which he suddenly rises above his method,—are busy only with one aim, with thinking in verse, thinking with a clear force, energy... of a consummate and often Page 98 impeccable excellence. Moreover some work was done especially by Dryden which even on the higher levels of poetry can challenge comparison with the work of the Elizabethans and the greater poets of later times. Even the satire of Pope and Dryden rises sometimes into a high poetic value beyond the level they normally reached and they have some great outbursts... arrives at a brutal, but still a genuine and sometimes really poetic vigour and truth of expression. Energy and driving force, the English virtues, are, indeed, a general merit of the verse of Pope and Dryden and in this respect they excel their French exemplars. Their expression is striking in its precision; each couplet rings out with a remarkable force of finality and much coin of their minting has passed ...
... While Milton, compared with Shakespeare in two of his splendid bursts of the vital mind, fared very well in his own domain, Dryden came a bit of a cropper, rhetorically artificialising what was spontaneous and moving in the Mediaeval singer. It may be tempting to aver that Dryden failed because he wrote in an age when the Poetic Intelligence acted from its surface part — the part which put into verse-form... is capable of being inspired and the surface part of the mind can also catch the Muse's breath. Let me pick out from the age in which Dryden flourished a passage which exemplifies a successful employment of the sheer reason in a poetic shape. My passage is from Dryden himself and is concerned with the very reason we are speaking of with a comparison of its range to the range of what was known as revealed... at religion's sight; So dies and so dissolves in supernatural light. I have always regarded these couplets as poetic inspiration flowing through the movement of the pure intellect. I am sure Dryden, Page 393 living in a period when wisdom was expected to be allied to wit, would have been pleased if someone had told him: "Starting with the belief that not only the moon but also ...
... sympathy for much of the work of Pope and Dryden, but I can see their extraordinary perfection or force in their own field, the masterly conciseness, energy, point, metallic precision into which they cut their thought or their verse, and I can see too how that can with a little infusion of another quality be the basis of a really great poetic style, as Dryden himself has shown in his best work. But there... discrediting of some and the rehabilitation of the discredited. That happened to Pope and Dryden. Keats and his contemporaries broke their canons and trampled over their corpses to reach romantic freedom; now there is a rehabilitation. But all this is something of an illusion—for mark that even at the worst Pope and Dryden retained a place among the great names of English poetic literature. No controversy... thought to Blake or Donne in former times, when I was in England, for instance? But now they bid fair to be reckoned among the great poets. I see that Byron is in the depths, the quotations for Pope and Dryden are rising; it was very different in those days. 5 February 1932 Page 671 Dilip says, "If you want to publish your literary work, you must see that people understand it—not the public ...
... conservative school of Johnson & Goldsmith all the revolutionary tendencies, not one or many but all, of the later poets. His earliest poem, the Ode on Spring, has many of the characteristics of Pope and Dryden; one of his latest, the Ode on Vicissitude, has many of the characteristics of Wordsworth. He is therefore the typical poet of his age, which, as regards poetry, was an age of transition. What... of another period in English literature. It differs alike in subject-matter, in spirit and in form. Many modern critics have denied the name of poetry to it altogether. Matthew Arnold calls Pope and Dryden classics not of poetry, but of prose, he says that they are great in the regions of half poetry; other critics while hesitating to go so far, say in substance much the same thing; Gosse, for instance... it in a surface manner recalling just so much as maybe perceived by a casual glance. Of sympathy with Nature or close observation of it, there is hardly a single instance in English poetry between Dryden and Thomson. 4ṭḥ The exclusion of human emotion, i.e. to say poetry was not only limited to the workings of the human mind and human nature but to cultured society and to the town, & not only to ...
... some higher power for uplifting and transfiguration. It is because that is not always done by Pope and Dryden that I once agreed with Arnold in regarding their work as a sort of half poetry; but since then my view and feeling have become more catholic and I would no longer apply that phrase,—Dryden especially has lines and passages which rise to a very high poetic peak,—but still there is something... certain kind of perfection there may be with a lesser rhythmic appeal but I do not find it here, the pitch of sound is only that of what may be described as the highly moved intellect. In the lines from Dryden 10 the second has Page 67 indeed the true note but the first is only clever and forcible with that apposite, striking and energetic cleverness which abounds in the chief poets of that... —J. C. Squire × In liquid burnings or on dry to dwell Is all the sad variety of hell. —Dryden × Well is it that no child is born of thee. The children born of thee are sword and fire, Red ...
... quality yet unique for evoking poetry from language of the commonest. The fourth phase of Classicism comes in the so-called Augustan Age of England, the age of Dryden and Pope. As Sri Aurobindo remarks: "It took for its models the Augustan poets of Rome, but it substituted for the strength and weight of the Latin manner... governed by the desire to please the urbane intellect and the decorous sentiment, some memorable moments are there of steady incisiveness and metallic mobility in Dryden and of intense archness and effective clatter in Pope. Pope's truly imaginative moments are Page 26 no more than a few... prisoners in the body's cage: Dim lights of life, that burn a length of years, Useless, unseen, as lamps in sepulchres. Once or twice in Dryden we even get an instance of what the dear-thinking intellect can do supremely in an external manner when a deep inspiration blows through it. The opening of Religio ...
... time on it. PURANI: Charu Dutt says that the modern poets are trying to follow Pope and Dryden in their play with words, their metrical devices, etc. SRI AUROBINDO: How? Pope and Dryden are very clear in what they say, while you can't make out anything of the Modernists. As regards metre, Pope and Dryden are formalists and limited. One may say they don't play with words. The Modernists are un ...
... the more metallic vigours of verse. This side of the national mind would prepare us for English poetry as it was until Chaucer and beyond, for the ground-type of the Elizabethan drama, the work of Dryden and Pope, the whole mass of eighteenth-century verse, Cowper, Scott, Wordsworth in his more outward moments, Byron without his Titanism and unrest, much of the lesser Victorian verse, Tennyson without... stream of Caroline lyrics, is that of a trivial intellectuality which does not follow the lead of Milton and is the exact contrary of the Elizabethan form and spirit, the thin and arid reign of Pope and Dryden. Another violent and impatient breaking away, a new outburst of wonderful freshness gives us the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Blake with another spirit and another language of the spirit. ...
... e emphasis, because they are the key to the immediately following reaction of English poetry with its turn in Milton towards a severe and serious intellectual effort and discipline and its fall in Dryden and Pope to a manner which got away from the most prominent defects of the Elizabethan mind at the price of a complete and disastrous loss of all its great powers. English poetry before Milton had... form and concentrated narrowness of the observing eye. This movement rises on one side into the ripened classical perfection of Milton, and falls away on the other through Waller into the reaction in Dryden and Pope. Page 89 ...
... turns of speech, like the Metaphysicals, and to the use of Latinisms and involved syntax ("periods") like Milton. In his satirical and reflective passages, he instinctively goes back to the vigour of Dryden and Pope, their epigrammatic and antithetical manner, as in the following lines: There is no miracle I shall not achieve. What God imperfect left, I will complete, Out of a tangled... in Sri Aurobindo's reflective style. Where the matter is familiar to the reader and it can therefore be spicily presented, we have the balanced and antithetical style developed in the manner of Dryden and Pope: What God imperfect left, I will complete, Out of a tangled mind and half-made soul His sin and error I will eliminate; 17 Ibid., p. 586. 18 Ibid., p. 588 ...
... Kalidasa. Others again approach her Page 313 with a fine or clear intellectual sense of her charm as do some of the old classical poets. Hardly in the rank of poets are those who like Dryden & Pope use her, if at all, only to provide them with a smooth or well-turned literary expression. Vyasa belongs to none of these, and yet often touches the first three at particular points without ...
... Wakefield, a poem of Tennyson or a book of Milton, at most two plays of Shakespeare, a work of Bacon's or Burke's full of ideas which he is totally incompetent to digest and one or two stray books of Pope, Dryden, Spenser or other, & to crown this pretentious little heap a mass of second-hand criticism dealing with poets & writers of whom he has not studied a single line. When we remember that English is the ...
... Better to hunt in fields, for health unbought, Than fee the doctor for a nauseous drought. The wise for cure, on exercise depend; God never made his work, for man to mend. John Dryden ...
... or three little slips. First, the jellyfish is not a "unicellular" creature. If it were, it would be quite invisible. The amoeba is unicellular and has to be studied under a microscope. Second, the Dryden-Ode does not end with "Music shall untune the sky" but with "And Music shall..." You have to put three dots before "Music", or else quote it correctly after reinstating the matter omitted after "devour" ...
... thing by far is to have a command of metaphor" as Herbert Read expressed, and metaphor remains "the life-principle of poetry, the poet's chief test and glory." This dictum went to such an extent that Dryden pronounced "imaging is, in itself, the very height and life of poetry." All these comments seem to suggest that a conscious and deliberate indulgence in image making is at the core of poetic creation ...
... more minute care and detailed perfection what he has revealed in a wide sweep. Herein perhaps lies the difference between a poet and a versifier, an artist and a craftsman — a Shakespeare and a Dryden. It would be, perhaps, more correct to say that the poet is a revealer of greater but hidden splendours than that he is a creator 1 Savitri, p. 242. Page 242 ...
... they do not belong to the company of the universal poets, like Homer and Shakespeare, in whom everything human touches some chord and passes into music. But they are closer to common life than Pope or Dryden, even than Milton or Spenser. It would be hard to think of another man who combined, as Blake did, an extraordinary power of vision with the tenderest compassion for the outcast and the oppressed, ...
... chance upon a frieze of engravings in which scenes of the tale of Troy are depicted. Aeneas is greatly moved by this discovery and raises a moan in which not a single English translator of Virgil from Dryden down to our day has introduced the "tears of things". When we study the original we cannot help seeing that the "of" in that phrase can have another sense in its Latin form than the possessive: it ...
... mental poetry. For, such poetry has several kinds of movement. And in the age - the so-called English "Augustan" - which succeeded that of Milton we have a skilful language of the mind - the language of Dryden, Pope and others - yet with-out the natural nobility which moves in Milton. Rather there is a polished efficiency arranging glitters of thought. Even when a finer note is added, a tinge of truer feeling ...
... The Future Poetry Chapter XIX The Victorian Poets The epoch associated in England with the name of Victoria was in poetry, like that of Pope and Dryden, an age of dominant intellectualism; but, unlike that hard and sterile period, it has been an imaginative, artistic intellectualism, touched with the greater and freer breath of modern thought and its ...
... drama as a robust presentation of life and incident and passion. And because this is not a true idea and, in any case, it is quite inconsistent with the turn of their own genius, they fail inevitably. Dryden stumbling heavily through his rhymed plays, Wordsworth of all people, the least Elizabethan of poets, penning with a conscientious dullness his Borderers , Byron diffusing his elemental energy in ...
... fancies, echoes learned and imitative rather than uplifted and transformed. This is what is sometimes called classical poetry, the vigorous and excellent but unemotional and unuplifted poetry of Pope and Dryden. It has its inspiration, its truth and value; it is admirable in its way, but it is only great when it is lifted out of itself into intuitive writing or else invaded by the heart. For everything that ...
... make us not only conceive adequately, but see the object or idea in a certain temperate lucidity of vision. The difference can best be illustrated by an example of each kind taken at random, one from Dryden, Whate'er he did was done with so much ease, In him alone 'twas natural to please:— and the other from Wordsworth, The waves beside them danced, but they Outdid the sparkling waves ...
... century A.D.: can a book which he dates to the close of the third century - that is, about 300 years earlier - be ranked as a recent work? Can anybody in the twentieth century speak legitimately of Dryden and Johnson and Pope as recent writers? On the strength of Dandin's alleged word, more logical is J. Jolly's attempt to prove the contemporaneity of the Daśakumāracharita and the Arthaśāstra. ...
... Ganges"). It stands in general for India. Virgil, in his Georgics (111.26-27), writes: In foribus pugnam ex auro solidoque elephanto Gāngāridum faciam victorisque arma Quirini. Dryden renders the lines: High o'er the gate in elephant and gold The crowd shall Caesar's Indian war behold. C. Day Lewis, in our own time, translates them: On the doors of my temple ...
... 182-3 Dirghatama, 162-6 Discabolo, 170 Donne, 74, 80 -Divine Poems, 80 ln -"Annvnciation", 81n -"The Litanie", 80n -The Progress qf the Soule, 80n Douve,217 Dryden, 85 Duncan, 170 Durga,180 ECKHART, 131 Edgar, 171-3 Egypt, 298 Einstein, 300 Eiseley, Loren, 295n - The Immense Journey, 295n Eliot, T. S., 88, 140-4, 147-8, 196, ...
... somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical age whose representatives are Pope and Dryden. We can go farther down and land in the domain of versification—although here, too, there can be a good amount of beauty in shape of ingenuity, cleverness and conceit: Voltaire and Delille are of this ...
... Pierre Teilhard 35-37 De Ruggiero, Guido 450 Dharma 11 Dickinson, Emily 314 Dowsett, Norman 18 Drewett, William H.6 Dryden, John 310,341 Dutt, Tom 253 Eliot, T.S. 44,198,267,272,314,389,391, 397,408,411,413,414,453 Emerson, R.W. 332 Erie 47,50,51 Essays ...
... —P.B. Shelley Page 306 And Paradise was opened in his face. —John Dryden These are what Sri Aurobindo has aptly described as "discoveries of an unexpected and absolute phrase", 49 and since phrase, thought, pitch, rhythm all fuse into a revelatory blaze in ...
... scientist as well as a poetic creator, but the moment he begins to argue out his system intellectually in verse or puts a dressed-up science straight into metre or else inflicts like Wordsworth or Dryden rhymed sermons or theological disputations on us, he is breaking the law. And even if he does not move so far astray, yet the farther he goes in that direction even within the bounds of his art, he ...
... action and passion wonderful to the life soul in us in Shakespeare, seen and spoken with nobility and grandeur of vision and voice in Milton, intellectualised vigorous or pointed commonplace in Pope and Dryden, played with elegance and beauty on the lesser strings with the Victorians or cast out here and there a profounder strain of thought or more passionate and aspiring voice, and if the most spiritual ...
... manner, or Milton's Page 177 Those thoughts that wander through eternity, or any of his stately rolling lines or periods of organ music will do for a great illustration. Pope and Dryden simply overdid the reliance on measure and chained themselves up in a monotony of pointed metrical effect. The succeeding poets got back to the greater freedoms of tone and used them in a new way, ...
... not from the creative vision or a moved intensity of poetic feeling. Creative vision or the moved intensity can come in to lift this motive but, except rarely, it does not lift it very high. It is Dryden and Juvenal who have oftenest made some thing like genuine poetry out of satire, the first because he often changes satire into a vision of character and the play of psychological forces, the other ...
... shortcomings peculiar to his own nature. There is nothing of that common aim and manner which brings into one category Page 126 the Elizabethan dramatists or the contemporaries of Pope and Dryden. We have to cast an eye upon them successively at their separate work and see how far they carried their achievement and where they stopped short or else deviated from the path indicated by their own ...
... something of the original - Leishman's Rilke, Eliot and others who have translated St. John Perse in such a way as to make a shining contribution to the art of translation." Surely Chapman or Pope or Dryden, in their remarkably successful compositions, cannot be considered truly "faithful" to their models and yet they have achieved genuine poetry. Chapman in particular has come in for praise. But an ...
... the wrong-headedness of Johnsonian criticism by referring to Johnson's own balancing against one of the most admired passages in Macbeth three couplets from Dryden's drama, The Indian Emperor. Dryden gives the stage-direction: "Enter Cortez alone in a night-gown" — and then the speech of the night-gowned hero: All things are hush'd, as Nature's self lies dead; The mountains seem to nod ...
... Aurobindo's words, 5 "from the prison of the formal metrical mould, rhetorical style, limited subject-matter, absence of imagination and vision imposed by the high pontiffs of the pseudo-classical cult [Dryden and Pope and Johnson] . ... Some pale effort is made to recover something of the Shakespearian wealth of language or of the softer, more pregnant colour of the pre-Restoration diction and to modify ...
... mind we would have "poetical thinking or even poetical philosophy of a rather obvious kind, sedate, or vigorous, prompt and direct, or robustly power-ful". 19 Examples can be drawn from the work of Dryden and Pope, Cowper and Scott and Browning. On the vital plane the Teutonic element would be far more at home poetically than the Latin, for nervous vehemence and energy of character and rush of incident ...
... combining flexibility of internal movement and frequent enjambment with the monumental phrase—a sort of transference of the spirit of Miltonic blank verse to the conditions of the couplet as practised by Dryden and others of his age. The nine lines beginning, Page 334 As once against the loud Euphratic host The lax Ionians of the Asian coast Drew out their numbers... ...
... poetry. For, such poetry has several kinds of movement. And in the age - the so-called English "Augustan" - which succeeded that of Milton we have a skilful language of the mind - the language of Dryden, Pope and others - yet without the natural nobility which moves in Milton. Rather there is a polished efficiency arranging glitters of thought. Even when a finer note is added, a tinge of truer ...
... the 20th century, who have produced pure satire in their own individual ways. 3 This is how Sri Aurobindo has commented on a few of the great names occurring in the field of satire: "It is Dryden and Juvenal who have oftenest made something like genuine poetry out of satire, the first because he often changes satire into a vision of character and the play of psychological forces, the other ...
... Gay as inscribed on his tomb in the Westminster Abbey: Life is a jest; and all things show it, I thought so once; but now I know it. 5 Ex. 3: Here is an epitaph composed by Dryden who allies humour with solemnity to convey with a telling effect the frustrations of a conjugal life: Page 228 Here lies my wife: here let her lie! Now she's at rest - and so ...
... wonderfully elastic, medium for poetic expression, inexhaustible in its potentialities, rather comparable to blank verse in the Age of Shakespeare or heroic verse (or the couplet) in the Age of Dryden and Pope. It is said that the Adi-Kavi (the 'first' poet), Valmiki, was walking on the shores of the Yamuna one morning when he perceived a pair of kraunca birds in sportive play on the branch ...
... somewhere in between. Lower in the rung where the mental medium occupies a still more preponderant place we have intellectual poetry, poetry of the later classical age whose representatives are Pope and Dryden. We can go farther down and land in the domain of versification – although here, too, there can be a good amount of beauty in shape of ingenuity, cleverness and conceit: Voltaire and Delille are of ...
... humour. What a diversity of themes, and what a variety of approaches! The twelve great masters of style: Aeschylus and Dante: Dante and Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Blake: the poetry of the school of Dryden and Pope: Shelley's Skylark: Baudelaire's "vulgarity": Anatole France's "ironising": Walter de la Mare's Listeners: five kinds of poetic style: austerity in poetry: architectonics in poetic co ...
... p. 123 23. Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo, pp. 120-1 24. Purani, The Life, p. 63 25. Ibid., p. 64 26. Sri Aurobindo, Vol 3, pp. 130-31 27. Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, 11. 156-8 28. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 3, p. 81 29. Purani, The Life, p. 41 30. Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 1, p. 9 31. Ibid., p. 15 32 ...
... nor "dissevering" could have done the work with anything of the felicity brought by this word in several ways. We can watch piquancy gathering force- and passing into a wonderful felicity in Dryden's characterisation of what we may call the pleasures of the pains of hell: In liquid burnings or in dry to dwell Is all the sad variety of hell. If we go by his name, I suppose the poet ...
... Good translations like Dryden's Virgil and Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam are equally poems by virtue of their finish and their essential fidelity to their originals.* Sri Aurobindo's letters contain other perceptive remarks too, as for example: There are two ways of rendering a poem from one language into another - * Cf. George Sampson: "Dryden's Virgil is literally Dryden's Virgil... Its readers ...
... s who is also the world's greatest poetic dramatist, Shakespeare! We have already compared Shakespeare's speech of the Life Force with Chaucer's of the subtle physical and, en passant, with Dryden's of the poetic intelligence, but not with the last-named at its best, nor with the best the poetic intelligence itself is capable of. A time was when Shakespeare himself was hailed as a mighty thinker ...
... flooded her the sound Occult soham ̣ - om ̣ - ham ̣ - yam ̣ - ram ̣ - vam ̣ - lam.̣ 26 May 2002 Brahmāndhāra : Darkness of Brahma or the Great Night, the Night of God; Dryden's is genuine night full of idiocy and ignorance. soham ,̣ om,̣ ham,̣ yam,̣ ram,̣ vam,̣ lam ̣are the seven sounds that come from the seven Chakras, from above below, in the subtle-physical. The ...
... genius, all the maturest abundance of its spontaneity and skill lying still un-published in the desk of the Yogi indifferent to fame. Even that little, however, is enough to make us repeat Dryden's famous eulogium of Chaucer: "Here is God's plenty." And the expression takes on a special hue of meaning when we turn to another class of poems from his pen, which are devoted to embodying a more ...
... or King's. The puny stature of the typical Indian undergraduate must have sorely pained Sri Aurobindo. How true was it of the Indian scholar, as it was true (though the context is different) of Dryden's Achitophel: A fiery soul, which working out its way, Fretted the pigmy body to decay: And o'er informed the tenement of clay. 27 The average Indian scholar didn't care for physical ...
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