Bloom calls Dryden ‘the first major […] post-Miltonic poet’. That is, like Pope and Gray, he’s of that long eighteenth century, which has fallen from the curriculum and consciousness. The DNB states, ‘Dryden’s œuvre was extraordinarily wide-ranging […] only the personal lyric voice […] he eschewed’, i.e. the one to which today’s tastes respond. Nonetheless, the Romantics, ‘especially Coleridge, Keats, and Byron, held him in high esteem’.
Pope perfected heroic couplets, but Dryden is praised at his expense in Gotham by Charles Churchill, who, with the Muses,
often laid, Fast by the Thames, in Ham’s inspiring shade, Amongst those Poets, which make up your train […] Have I, at your command, in verse grown grey, But not impair’d, heard Dryden tune that lay, Which might have drawn an Angel from his sphere […] Whilst Pope, with envy stung, enflam’d with pride, Pip’d to the vacant air on t’ other side. (III. 415–22/24)
That’s Dryden, pictured at Ham House, Pope piping in his grotto over on the Middlesex bank – a sort of west London derby.
Like Ham House, Dryden flourished during the Restoration, becoming the first Poet Laureate in 1670. (The other Parkleys Poet Laureate is Tennyson.)
If any poem Dryden wrote during his laureateship could draw angels, it would be that identified by Walter Savage Landor: ‘nothing was ever written in hymn equal to the beginning of Dryden’s Religio Laici’:
Dim as the borrow’d beams of Moon and Stars To lonely, weary, wandring Travellers, Is Reason to the Soul: And as on high, Those rowling Fires discover but the Sky Not light us here; So Reason’s glimmering Ray Was lent, not to assure our doubtfull way, But guide us upward to a better Day. And as those nightly Tapers disappear When Day’s bright Lord ascends our Hemisphere; So pale grows Reason at Religions sight; So dyes, and so dissolves in Supernatural Light. (1–11)