Excerpt from Dramatic Essays
John Dryden was born at Aid winkle All Saints, Northamptonshire, on the 9th August 1631, and was educated at Westminster and at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1654, the year in which he took his degree, his father died, leaving him a small property. He then drifted to London, where he seems for a time to have been employed in some secretarial capacity or clerkship. His first substantial experiment in literature - the "Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell" - appeared in 1659. In these bombastic verses, with all their crudities, affectations, and "metaphysical" conceits, not even the most prescient critic could have detected any indication of the splendid powers which Dryden's work was presently to reveal. With the return of the Stuarts the young poet found it convenient to change his politics, and his next publications celebrated the "happy restoration" and coronation of Charles II. These are marked indeed by a great advance in form and style, but they are now chiefly valuable as showing that Dryden's genius ripened very slowly. In 1663 he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, sister of his friend, Sir Robert Howard, the Crites of the "Essay of Dramatic Poesy;" but the union was not a fortunate one.
By this time Dryden was working his way steadily into notice as a playwright, though he gained no pronounced success till the production (in collaboration with Howard) of "The Indian Queen" in 1664, and its sequel, "The Indian Emperor," in 1665. Then came the plague, the closing of the theatres, and the composition of the "Essay of Dramatic Poesy" and the long "heroic" poem, "Annus Mirabilis." The faults of the latter work are numerous and glaring; but it has vigour and distinction, and easily placed its author in the front rank of English poets at a time when poetic genius was at a low ebb, and there were few indeed to contest his position.
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