With Pope, Dryden is a celebrity of the Restoration. For the sake of the GRE, you need to know his poem “MacFlecknoe.” His “Epigram to Milton” also shows up with regularity, thought there are numerous poems that the GRE could choose to test over.
*“Mac Flecknoe”
Like Pope’s “Rape of the Lock,” Dryden’s “Mac Flecknoe” is a relatively short poem that is worth reading. And like “The Rape,” it is a mock epic. In it, Dryden attacks his contemporary, Thomas Shadwell in heroic couplets. The mock epic is characterized by grandiose language describing mundane, trivial things.
“Absalom and Achitophel”
A political allegory that uses biblical figures and events to stand in for a political crisis current in Dryden’s time
o Note the names: Absalom, Achitophel, and King David
o Written in heroic couplets
“All For Love“
All for Love, or the World Well Lost (1677), Dryden’s tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, represents a turning point in his career as a dramatist. Abandoning his practice of composing his plays in rhymed couplets (a method he had earlier encouraged in his Essay of Dramatic Poesie)(1668), Dryden shows here the mastery of an artist at the height of his powers. The play is especially impressive in creating genuine emotion and dramatic tension within the rigorous strictures of the neoclassical theatre; the unities of time, place, and action are strictly observed, but the story loses none of its power as a result. The work has obviously suffered in its inevitable comparison to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra—when read, Dryden’s play is usually offered as an illustration of the inadequacies of Restoration tragedy when compared to that of the English Renaissance—but such comparison is fundamentally misguided, as it ignores the vastly different conditions of performance and composition between the two eras. A masterpiece in its own right, All for Love is a product of its time, and cannot be judged according to Shakespearean standards. Indeed, a comparison of the two plays might cede Dryden the victory in certain areas. While Shakespeare’s play ranges widely over time and place, creating an epic but often awkwardly meandering sense of scope, Dryden’s tightly focused composition allows a greater degree of emotional intensity and insight—without the ability to show battles, multiple settings, or the sweeping changes of time, Dryden manages nevertheless to create a work of genuinely tragic pathos. If Dryden’s meek Cleopatra is no match for what is perhaps Shakespeare’s most brilliantly rendered female character, his Antony is a startlingly astute portrait of a great man in crisis. Most importantly, though the two authors tell the same tale, their versions are driven by quite different artistic visions: if Shakespeare’s art is motivated primarily by the passion of history’s most famous lovers, Dryden’s interest lies in the clash between the personal and the political—the dramatic clash in the play is not between the lovers and the world that seeks to divide them, but between Antony’s duties as a statesman and a Roman, and his passionate desire for the woman he loves.
“Epigram on Milton”
Three poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed;
The next, in majesty; in both the last.
The force of Nature could no further go.
To make a third, she joined the former two.
“A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”
it begins:
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began.
When Nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
Arise ye more than dead.
Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,
In order to their stations leap,
And music’s pow’r obey.
Vade Mecum 