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John Dryden (August 19, 1631 – May 12, 1700) was
an influential English poet, literary critic, and
playwright.

He was born in a village rectory near Oundle in
Northamptonshire and educated at Westminster
School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a
professional writer throughout his life. His early
plays, often heroic tragedy, met with highly
variable success but served to promote his name
and his Royalist sentiments. Arriving in London
during the Protectorate, he attempted to
capitalise on the Parliamentarian sympathies of
his family (his cousin was a judge during the
trial of Charles I), but failed to make much
impact until the Restoration of King Charles II.
His poem, Astrea Redux, in honour of this event,
made him a name.

By 1663, the year he was made a fellow of the
Royal Society, he was prominent enough to be
accepted as a suitable husband for Lady Elizabeth
Howard, but his reputation was not really made
until Annus Mirabilis, a celebration of the events
of 1666 in pentameter quatrains. In 1668, he was
appointed to succeed William Davenant as Poet
Laureate, a post which he lost when King James II
was deposed twenty years later. For the next ten
years, his output was mainly for the stage. He led
the way in Restoration comedy, his best known work
being Marriage A-la-Mode, (1672), as well as
heroic tragedy and regular tragedy, in which his
greatest success was All For Love (1677). Dryden
was a master of the verse prologue and epilogue,
and often contributed prologues and epilogues to
other playwrights\' plays. His other works of
major importance from this period are his prefaces
and essays on drama, of which the Essay of
Dramatick Poesie (1668) is the longest and
arguably the best. In these essays, Dryden
expressed his belief that the Elizabethan
dramatists had surpassed those of Greece; argued
for the use of rhymed verse in the drama; and
examined and compared the works of Shakespeare,
Ben Jonson and John Fletcher.

From the 1680s Dryden concentrated on poetry, in
which his use of the rhymed couplet is considered
brilliant, although he continued to write plays
and composed several librettoes. His greatest
achievements were in satiric verse: the
mock-heroic MacFlecknoe, an attack on the
playwright Thomas Shadwell, and Absalom and
Achitophel, a political satire against the Whigs.
His other major works from this period are the
religious poems Religio Laici (1682) and The Hind
and the Panther (1687). The first of these was
written before, the second shortly after,
Dryden\'s conversion to Catholicism. After the
Glorious Revolution of 1688, Dryden\'s politics
left him out of favour at court, and he was forced
to write plays and translate poetry from Latin and
Greek for a living. Dryden translated works by
Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Theocritus,
in addition to his two major efforts, the complete
works of Virgil in 1697 and Fables, Ancient and
Modern (1700), a collection of translations of
Homer, Ovid, and Boccaccio, as well as modernised
adaptations from Geoffrey Chaucer. The Preface to
Fables is considered to be both a major work of
criticism and one of the finest essays in
English.

Dryden is buried in Westminster Abbey. His eldest
son, Charles Dryden, became chamberlain to Pope
Innocent XII.

Dryden\'s influence as a poet was immense both in
his lifetime and in the 18th century; his poems
were used as models by poets such as Alexander
Pope and Samuel Johnson. The attitude of the 18th
century can be summed up in Johnson\'s remark that
Dryden \"refined the language, improved the
sentiments, and tuned the numbers of English
Poetry.\" In the 19th century his reputation
waned, and, despite the interest of figures like
T.S. Eliot, it has not yet recovered completely.
Although the brilliance of his versification and
the vigour of his expression are generally
acknowledged, there has been a feeling that, as
Eliot wrote in Homage to John Dryden, Dryden \"had
a commonplace mind\" and \"lacked insight.\"

Works

    * Astraea Redux, 1660
    * The Indian Emperor (tragedy), 1665
    * Annus Mirabilis (poem), 1667
    * The Tempest (comedy), 1667, an adaptation
with William D\'Avenant of Shakespeare\'s The
Tempest
    * An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, 1668
    * An Evening\'s Love (comedy), 1669
    * Tyrannick Love (tragedy), 1669
    * Marriage A-la-Mode, 1672
    * The Conquest of Granada, 1670
    * All for Love, 1677
    * Oedipus, 1679
    * Absalom and Achitophel, 1681
    * The Medal, 1682
    * Religio Laici, 1682
    * The Hind and the Panther, 1687
    * Amphitryon, 1690
    * Don Sebastian, 1690
    * Amboyna
    * The Works of Virgil, 1697
    * Fables, Ancient and Modern 1700
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