John Dryden and John Denham.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-MAR-04

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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)

In his Preface to Ovid's Epistles (1680), his first discussion of translation, Dryden indicates but does not explicitly acknowledge the impact Denham had on him. Several times he refers to Denham's theories, twice quoting from him at some length. The first quotation comes as he reiterates the Horatian warning against word for word translation: "Too faithfully is indeed pedantically: 'tis a faith like that which proceeds from Superstition, blind and zealous: Take it in the Expression of Sir John Denham, to Sir Rich. Fanshaw, on his Version of Pastor Fido." He then quotes the relevant lines from Denham's poem:

That servile path, thou nobly do'st decline, Of tracing word by word and Line by Line; A new and nobler way thou do'st pursue, To make Translations and Translators too: They but preserve the Ashes, thou the Flame, True to his Sense, but truer to his Fame. (1:115)

Just as Dryden downplays the originality of Denham's theory here, so several paragraphs later he praises his insights only to disagree with him. As he denounces imitation, he argues,

To state it fairly, Imitation of an Authour is the most advantageous way for a Translator to shew himself, but the greatest wrong which can be done to the Memory and Reputation of the dead. Sir John Denham (who advis'd more Liberty than he took himself,) gives this Reason for his Innovation, in his admirable Preface before the Translation of the second AEneid: "Poetry is of so subtil a Spirit, that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all Evaporate; and if a new Spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput Mortuum." I confess this Argument holds good against a litteral Translation, but who defends it? Imitation and verbal Version are in my Opinion the two Extreams, which ought to be avoided. (1:117-18)

Steiner takes seriously Dryden's disapproval of Denham, claiming that "Dryden's first major work of translation, the Ovid's Epistles of 1680, marked his revolt against Cowley and Denham." (11) While he later concedes that as Dryden "developed, he moved somewhat toward the freer style and the loose regulations of Cowley and Denham," (12) he is typical in failing to recognize that Denham here supplies the kernel for the emphasis on spiritual communion (the "transfusion" of one poetical "Spirit" into another) that quickly comes to dominate Dryden's discussion of poetical relationships. (13)

Already in this first essay, however, both verbal echoes of Denham and Dryden's conceptualization of translation reveal Denham's creeping influence on him. Dryden's discussion of metaphrase, for a start, owes a double (unacknowledged) debt to Denham. After the first quote from Denham cited above, Dryden continues in his own voice: "'Tis almost impossible to Translate verbally, and well, at the same time; For the Latin, (a most severe and Compendious Language) often expresses that in one word which either the Barbarity, or the narrowness of modern Tongues cannot supply in more" (1:115). He then twice states that "gracefulness" is missing from such a "servile, literal translation" (1:116). Both his choice of vocabulary and his basic points regarding the differences between languages and the need to supply the translation with a certain "grace" repeat Denham's warning against metaphrase: there are, Denham says, "certain Graces and Happinesses peculiar to every Language, which gives life and energy to the words; and whosoever...

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