John Dryden: A Study of His Poetry

by Mark van Doren

Includes an "The Authorship of Mac Flecknoe"

298 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1920

About the author

Mark van Doren was an American poet, writer and critic. He was a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, Whittaker Chambers, and Beat Generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Collected Poems 1922–1938 and he was literary editor of The Nation, in New York City (1924–1928), and its film critic, 1935 to 1938.

Reviews

[Chrissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Dryden lives...as one who elastically paced the limits of a dry and well-packed mind." (p. 266) This quote sums up how I discovered this book, poking around the shelves in the very back corner of the second story of my local library and it is a good summary of Mr. Van Doren's overall argument. I didn't expect to find this book as engaging as I did, although the author's assumptions regarding common knowledge and language did make some of his arguments more opaque than otherwise.

This was a solid read for me, with the author giving a thorough and clear overview of Dryden's verse with plenty of examples. The more interesting parts for me concerned the uses of and expectations for poetry both before and immediately after Dryden's time. Mr. Van Doren emphasizes Dryden's more intellectual and cultural basis for writing (as opposed to personal or sentimental), sometimes marking out words and styles as "masculine" or "feminine" with a slight edge given to the former. This minor distraction aside (the distinction implied a qualitative judgement whose value I don't share), the author brought in a variety of critical opinions from Dryden's peers in addition to his own and laid out a theory of how to read the poems and what strengths to look for that was helpful and prompted me to look for further collections of Dryden's work.

There is little biographical or historical material explained and many Latin quotes are untranslated such that the work as a whole felt as if it would make a good supplemental piece for additional historical study (and language learning--Latin wasn't commonly taught in the schools I attended).
Although I will never hear this poetry in the same way the author does, I will hear/read poetry differently (hopefully more carefully) after encountering this book.