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6 Dryden’s ‘Baucis and Philemon’
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Published:December 2009
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Abstract
In a letter to William Wycherley of 26 December 1704, Alexander Pope wrote of Dryden that ‘those Scribblers who attack’d him in his latter times, were only like Gnats in a Summer’s evening, which are never very troublesome but in the finest and most glorious Season; (for his fire, like the Sun’s, shin’d clearest towards its setting).’ Pope’s remark may seem strange to the modern reader accustomed to regard Dryden as primarily a political poet, and the satires and religious poems of the 1680s as the summit and core of his achievement. However, Pope’s would have been the more familiar view to readers in the century after Dryden’s death. The poet’s friend Sir Samuel Garth wrote in 1717 that ‘as his earlier Works wanted no Maturity, so his latter wanted no Force, or Spirit.’ Similarly, and in the same year, William Congreve, another friend, and Dryden’s chosen literary heir, wrote that Dryden’s ‘Parts did not decline with his Years: But ... he was an improving Writer to his last, even to near seventy Years of Age; improving in Fire and Imagination, as well as in Judgement: Witness his Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day, and his Fables, his latest Performances’.
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