3 - The codes of the canon

Summary

John Dryden

I must now come closer to my present business: and not think of making more invasive Wars abroad, when like Hannibal, I am call'd back to the defence of my own Country. Virgil is attack'd by many Enemies … their principal Objection being against his Moral … we are to consider him as writing his Poem in a time when the Old Form of Government was subverted, and a new one just established by Octavius Caesar: In effect by force of Arms, but seemingly by the Consent of the Roman People.

Dryden's Preface to the Aeneid

Not Great Aeneas stood in plainer Day,

When, the dark mantling Mist dissolv'd away,

He to the Tyrians shew'd his sudden face,

Shining with all his Goddess Mother's Grace …

Britannia Rediviva

Dryden's is the only major poetic career to span both Civil War and Revolution. Yet despite the fact that he has often been portrayed as a poet whose reaction to these turmoils was that of the Vicar of Bray, recent criticism has uncovered a consistency in his underlying approach to political change, a ‘longing for an irrecoverable past’ ‘already detectable in the Hastings elegy [of 1649]’, and directed towards the ‘golden dayes’ of ‘the court of Charles I, where ceremony and the arts had been prized as they would never be again’.