The Poems of John Dryden, 2 vols.: 1649-1681, 1682-1685.

Why is it so hard, not so much to interest students in Dryden, as to make them read him with pleasure and profit? After all, amongst literary scholars Dryden has in recent years enjoyed a renaissance. It was perhaps not surprising that historicizing critics such as Steven Zwicker should have found so much to interest them in a poet who for many years stood close to the centre of English political and literary life. It was less to be expected that a virtuoso close reader such as Eric Griffiths should have pitched on Dryden for the subject of his 1992 British Academy Chatterton lecture, since close reading is precisely the kind of attention which Dryden's poetry is, by reputation, unable to sustain. The task which Griffiths set himself in that lecture was similar to that undertaken by Christopher Ricks in Milton's Grand Style; to vindicate certain principles of reading by demonstrating their …