Constructing Classicism: Dryden And Purcell

Abstract So Pope in the ‘The first Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated’ (II. 267 − 9), placing Dryden at a crucial point in the evolutionary narrative of English poetry — a point at which force marries with elegance of form in a way that constitutes the ‘classical’. Dryden had been complicit in the construction of an earlier version of this narrative, which saw the reign of Charles II identified as the Augustan age of English poetry — exhibiting the same refinement of cruder precedents as had been achieved by Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, while not yet overtaken by the restless striving for effect that afflicted their successors, Persius, Seneca, and Lucan. Later adjustments to this model were concerned with the exact chronological placing of the apex-whether, for instance, the truly Augustan reign might have been Anne’s rather than Charles’s. But there was a clear understanding that the writers of the Restoration stood closer to the summit than their Jacobean and Caroline predecessors and that this distinction resulted from a more faithful conformity to the practice of the best ancients.