15 - Restoration poetry: Behn, Dryden and their contemporaries

Summary

Jane Spencer, citing Dustin Griffin, has observed that the period following the interregnum ‘was a transitional one between a court-based literary culture and a market-based print culture’. Aphra Behn, like Milton and Dryden, belonged ‘to both cultures – the old world of patronage and the new world of booksellers’. Whereas the next chapter focuses in detail on three of Dryden’s major poems (discussed more briefly and with different emphases, here), this chapter places Dryden alongside his fellow writers, in particular Aphra Behn, in order to explore the nature of Restoration poetry. It sees Behn and Dryden as occupying a liminal relation to previous and subsequent writing, as well as arising out of a larger context of contemporary poetry, including Rochester, Oldham, Killigrew and Philips, and looking towards Pope and Swift. In particular, areas of continuity between their poetry can be found in their responses to the heterogeneous diversity of nature, their representations of sexuality and forms of engagement with contemporary religious debate. Above all, perhaps, traditional in the broadest sense of the word, but emerging from a context of courtly libertinism, the poetry of both is engaged with the nature of individual freedom.

Critical and biographical commentary has often identified troubling contradictions and silences in the life and work of both artists: Dryden’s timely conversion to Roman Catholicism is sometimes seen as existing in tension with his assertions of poetic integrity, Behn’s political conservatism with the liberal probing of the boundaries of sexuality and gender in her poetry. Literary tradition has sometimes also oversimplified the work of both, contrasting Behn unfavourably with Philips or Finch, Dryden with Pope and Rochester, and underestimating the scope for complexity and ambiguity within their apparently transparent styles.