Carey Senior Fellow 2004-05
Anna Battigelli
State University of New York, Plattsburgh
John Dryden and the Roman Catholic Tradition in England
No poet exerted greater influence on late seventeenth-century
English literary culture than John Dryden (1631-1700). During his
expansive career, which included works in every major genre, he
codified literary taste and immersed himself in both political and
religious controversy. Two of his longest and most important poems
are religious: Religio Laici (1682) and The Hind and
the Panther (1687). Yet Dryden’s religious thought has
never been seriously explored. His religious poems have been read
in narrowly political ways, as expedients toward Dryden’s
political advancement. These poems have also been read apolitically,
as authentic religious gestures involving great, even heroic, personal
sacrifice. Neither of these readings adequately acknowledges the
interplay of religion and politics, and both overlook Dryden’s
relentlessly ironic sensibility.
This project has two aims: 1) it places Dryden’s work within
the context of seventeenth-century religious controversy; and 2)
it exposes the richness of that controversy by permitting the full
range of the voices that shaped it—a range often limited in
subsequent accounts of the controversy—to be heard. Dryden’s
later career was defined by the loss of his public posts as Poet
Laureate and Historiographer Royal, a consequence of his conversion
to Roman Catholicism. Having once been the crown’s spokesman,
he became, after the Revolution of 1688, the spokesman for an unpopular
minority. His sustained interest in his identity as an English Roman
Catholic pervades his later work. As he codified a national literary
tradition for a nation of sharply divided religious sensibilities,
he emphasized the elasticity and comprehension of the Western cultural
inheritance, an inheritance threatened by political and religious
intolerance on all sides following the Protestant Reformation. The
inheritance for which Dryden argues embraces both the classical
and the Christian worlds, as well as specifically English traditions.
It also celebrates opposing sensibilities: Horace’s urbane
restraint and Juvenal’s indignant ferocity; Homer’s
rugged individuality and Virgil’s majestic polish; ancient
achievement and modern progress. The dialogic amplitude of his religious
poems exemplifies this interest in comprehension. The church tradition
to which he converted, the literary tradition he codified, the English
national identity he hoped for—each is defined by its capacity
to embrace conflicting sensibilities.
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