Dryden : selected poems

John Dryden (1631-1700) was the dominant literary figure of his age.

His reputation today rests primarily on his poetic output, but he was also a significant literary critic and dramatist.

His wide-ranging poetry engages with the turbulent political, religious, and literary life of Restoration England, and also includes a magnificent series of creative translations.

Dryden's influence in his lifetime and in the centuries that followed should not be underestimated and he remains one of the very greatest of the English poets. "Dryden: Selected Poems" is drawn from Paul Hammond and David Hopkins's remarkable five-volume "The Poems of John Dryden", and includes a generous selection of his most important work.

The great satires, Mac Flecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel, are included in full, as are his religious poems "Religio Laici" and "The Hind and the Panther", along with a number of Dryden's translations from Horace, Ovid, Homer, and Chaucer.

Each poem is accompanied by a headnote, which gives details of composition, publication, and reception.The first-rate annotations provide information on matters of interpretation and give details of allusions that might prove baffling to contemporary readers.

Some 300 years after his death, "Dryden: Selected Poems" will enable new generations of readers to discover the poet of whom Eliot wrote: 'we cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden'.

Paul Hammond FBA is Professor of Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds.

He has published widely on Dryden and other Restoration poets and is the author of, most recently, "The Making of Restoration Poetry" (2006).

David Hopkins is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol, and author of several studies of Dryden; he recently co-edited volume 3 (1660-1790) of "The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English" (2005).