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Personal information
• One of fourteen children
• Attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge (1664)
• Married Elizabeth Howard, 1663
• Had three sons
Dryden
• Called “the first of the moderns”
• He envisaged a new age of reasonableness and scientific progress
Dryden
He underwent a steady progression toward traditional authority:
Politically from a Whig to a Tory (under Charles II)
Religiously from Protestant to Catholic (in 1685, under James II)
Dryden
• In 1668, he was appointed the poet laureate by Charles II
• In 1688, he lost his laureateship upon the accession of Protestants William and Mary in the Glorious Revolution; wrote mostly translations after
Dryden His work expressed colloquialism in style
and secularism in point of view because: 1. He favored the idea of conversational
plainness in writing
2. He believed in the modern thought of a secular society founded upon reason
Contributions to Writing:
1. perfects the heroic couplet
2. masters the art of satirical poetry
I. Tyranny: of Aristotle
II. Emancipation: by Bacon and others, ending with Charleton
III. Consequence:
Appropriate recognition for the new “king”