John Dryden and John Denham.(Critical Essay)

In 1692, more than two decades after the death of John Denham, John Dryden paid homage to the poet as he recalled a conversation he had had "about Twenty Years ago" with Sir George Mackenzie:

 
    He asked me why I did not imitate in my Verses, the turns of Mr. 
    Waller, and Sir John Denham; of which, he repeated many to me: I 
    had often read with pleasure, and with some profit, those two 
    Fathers of our English Poetry; but had not seriously consider'd 
    those Beauties which give the last perfection to their Works." (1) 

The largesse of this tribute, the labeling of Denham and Waller as "Fathers of our English Poetry," is, on first appearances, startling considering the discrepancy between Denham's slight reputation today and the fact that throughout the 1690s Dryden is concerned--to the point of obsession--with cementing an English poetic tradition and establishing poetic genealogies. (2) Also startling, however, is what an examination of the number and nature of allusions to Denham pervading Dryden's works reveals. While Dryden rarely acknowledges his debts to Denham and while critics remark upon them only cursorily, key tenets of Dryden's critical and political stances have their roots in Denham's poetry and critical proclamations. This intricate poetic relationship sheds light on Dryden's criticism and politics--not least a previously unnoted philosophical correlation between them.

The dues owed to Denham's criticism, in particular, point to limitations in existing discussions of Dryden's works. One problem, as Jennifer Brady notes, is the tendency to isolate Dryden: "Our institutional praxis of respecting the discreteness of literary periods tends to insulate Dryden and his contemporaries from predecessors who were central to their critical self-awareness." (3) When critics do contextualize Dryden, they generally look if not to Classical and French influences then to the "big three" English predecessors (Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher) often assuming traditions rather than recognizing where Dryden was creating them. (4) Yet the parallels between Denham's and Dryden's conceptions of problems facing seventeenth-century English literature throw into relief the extent to which Dryden's criticism builds upon English precepts that go beyond Shakespeare and Jonson.

At the heart of Denham's influence lies his Royalism, even as the neglect of his place in English letters is a result of the limiting of his importance to Coopers Hill. Certainly, this famous poem signals but does not circumscribe Denham's accomplishment as a Royalist poet: one searching for a rhetoric at a time when aesthetics and politics became indistinguishable and political turmoil rendered inherently unstable any personal or public stance. (5) Willy nilly, Dryden found in Denham not only a kindred poetic spirit and English precedent for many of his own critical and poetical declarations, but a methodology that enabled him, throughout his career, to confront political chaos in an open-ended fashion while promulgating English traditions in a seemingly teleological fashion. Phillip Harth has thoroughly explicated the nature of Dryden's skepticism by showing how he contrasts his "natural diffidence" or "skeptical way of reasoning" with a "Magisterial" or "dogmatical" manner. Yet Harth traces the roots of Dryden's philosophy to that of the Royal Society, whose influences, he contends, were everywhere evident to him. (6) Further arguing that attention must therefore be paid to the specific contexts of Dryden's thought, Harth follows this skepticism through the particular theological and political debates that challenged him. The defining features of Dryden's skepticism--through which he deeply probes English tradition and monarchic authority while providing reassurances of their stability--are, however, also a natural consequence of his participation in a Royalist poetics, the spadework of which is owing to Denham. Dryden's allegiance to Denham thus also writes larger Howard Weinbrot's argument in Britannia's Issue: attention to French influences on Dryden's works has overshadowed his conscious development of an English literary tradition. While Weinbrot's discussion of the Essay of Dramatick Poesie's "poetics of nationalism" makes a convincing case for Dryden's early efforts to establish English supremacy over French literature and the neoclassicism that dominated it, Dryden's relationship with Denham points not only to his lifelong efforts toward an English and Royalist poetics but also to the consistency of an oeuvre much maligned for its inconsistency.

To begin with the seldom-remarked translation theory of both poets, much of what Dryden is praised for as the father of English literary criticism (and of English translation theory) has its roots in Denham's small body of works. T. R. Steiner's history of English translation theory is typical in positing Dryden at the beginning of an English tradition. While Dryden is renowned for his division of translation into three main types (metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation), Steiner notes, critics rarely acknowledge him as "as the spring of the Drydenian rules which we find in their essays." Nonetheless, he continues, "much circumstantial evidence supports the idea that Dryden was the chief lawgiver." (7) Steiner sees Dryden as in fact synthesizing two traditions of translation, one a French tradition that emphasized the decorum of literary language and the other an English tradition that emphasized the poetic spirit of the original. (8) He does not fully allow, however, that the essential elements of Dryden's famous theories from his first essay on the topic to his last can be found in Denham's two brief essays on translation: his "To Sir Richard Fanshaw Upon his Translation of Pastor Fido" (probably 1643-1644) and his Preface to "The Destruction of Troy" (1656).

This fundamentally English context in fact provides the seedbed for the central tenet of Dryden's thoroughly modern and on-first-appearances innovative critical theory: the idea that poets of all ages are contemporaries. Denham's translation theory, furthermore, first formulates the associated notion of a "transfusion" of poetical spirit and so the metaphor that, as Brady argues, becomes the common thread linking Dryden's many reflections on poetical relationships, ultimately "emerg[ing] as the dominant metaphor of the preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern," his last work. (9) This transfusion of spirit from one poet to another entirely complemented the two poets' Royalist sensibilities as they sought to raise aesthetics above political turmoil while directly confronting it. For, such poetic commerce insures poetic continuity--and so stabilization of tradition--even as historical particulars are transcended. (10)