'To Think Naturally and Express Forcibly'

“The piece of Dryden’s which is the most fun, which is the most sustained display of surprise after surprise of wit from line to line, is ‘MacFlecknoe.’” 

That “fun” in poetry is a virtue will surprise some readers. That the critic celebrating the “fun” in John Dryden’s verse is T.S. Eliot will dumbfound others. Eliot’s 1922 essay starts as a review of Mark Van Doren’s The Poetry of John Dryden (1920) and turns into a meditation on the definition of poetry. Eliot continues the thought cited above:

 

“Dryden's method here is something very near to parody; he applies vocabulary, images, and ceremony which arouse epic associations of grandeur, to make an enemy helplessly ridiculous. But the effect, though disastrous for the enemy, is very different from that of the humour which merely belittles, such as the satire of Mark Twain. Dryden continually enhances: he makes his object great, in a way contrary to expectation; and the total effect is due to the transformation of the ridiculous into poetry.”

 

My introduction to Dryden came in an English Lit survey class freshman year. We read the old reliables – “MacFlecknoe” (1682) and “Absalom and Achitophel” (1681). I was hooked, as I soon was by Swift and Pope. From the start I read satire as second cousin to light verse, an approach to poetry I had enjoyed since I was a boy. Dryden’s target in “MacFlecknoe” is Thomas Shadwell, a mediocre poet and future Poet Laureate who is remembered solely because of Dryden’s assault. He was Dryden’s Colley Cibber.

 

Let’s look at Eliot’s claim of “surprise after surprise of wit from line to line.” The opening of “MacFlecknoe” reads like a challenge: “All human things are subject to decay, / And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey.” Shadwell “stands confirm’d in full stupidity” and “never deviates into sense.” Dryden is just warming up:

 

“Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,

Strike through and make a lucid interval;

But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray,

His rising fogs prevail upon the day.”

 

And this model of satirical condescension:

 

“Thy genius calls thee not to purchase fame

In keen iambics, but mild anagram:

Leave writing plays, and choose for thy command

Some peaceful province in acrostic land.”

 

Three-hundred forty years later, Dryden can still make us laugh. Dr. Johnson writes in his “Life of Dryden”: “Perhaps no nation ever produced a writer that enriched his language with such variety of models. To him we owe the improvement, perhaps the completion of our metre, the refinement of our language, and much of the correctness of our sentiments. By him we were taught sapere et fari, to think naturally and express forcibly.” See Johnson's amusing account of Dryden's funeral.

 

Dryden is a poet we could use today. He died on this date, May 12, in 1700 at age sixty-eight.