The Poetics of Natural History in Annus Mirabilis.(Critical Essay)

In "An Account of the Ensuing Poem," John Dryden describes his Annus Mirabilis: the Year of Wonders, 1666 as "Historical" rather than "Epick" on the grounds that "the Action is not properly one" but "broken."(1) The poem, as a matter of fact, lays out two discrete actions: the Second Anglo-Dutch War and the Great Fire of London. There is no other connection between the sea battles and the urban disaster than historical coincidence: the year of 1666 happened to see both actions. The artistic unity of the poem, which escapes any prescriptive rule, takes shape in the open-ended historical framework that, like a cabinet of curiosities or a museum, contains and displays miscellaneous items one after another. The aim of this article is to define the miscellaneousness of Annus Mirabilis as a wonderful effect of the poetics of natural history that characterizes the ideological implication of the interaction between the classical idea of poetry and the rise of the new science in Dryden's age.(2)

"An Account of the Ensuing Poem" tells us that Dryden's keen awareness of the Aristotelian concept of the Unity of Action develops into that of the formal regulation of "the sound and number" of Annus Mirabilis with a special reference to Sir William Davenant (I, 51). In the preface to Gondibert (1650), Davenant is proud of producing "the Symmetry" of the "regular species" out of"the materialls" which "with some curiosity" he has "collected."(3) His reference to "curiosity," which is a shibboleth of seventeenth-century natural history, suggests that the task of poetry should be to induce "the regular species" out of methodized collections. Dryden is encouraged by the elder poet to reconsider the Aristotelian concept of the Unity of Action with a natural historian's attitude toward the propriety of "the regular species" of poetry.

The younger poet observes in "Of Heroick Playes" (1672) that Davenant "takes the Image of an Heroick Poem from the Drama" to construct "a Plot well-form'd and pleasant, or, as the Antients call'd it, one entire and great Action" (XI, 10-11). Dryden's reconsideration of the Aristotelian poetics is connected with his interest in "the Image of an Heroick Poem" that constitutes the Unity of Action. In the preface to Annus Mirabilis (1, 55), in fact, he advances a general theory on the propriety of "the regular species" of poetry, defending his imitation of Virgil's "Images" in the poem:

 
      Such descriptions or images, well wrought ... are, as I have said, the 
   adequate delight of heroick Poesie, for they beget admiration, which is its 
   proper object; as the images of the Burlesque, which is contrary to this, 
   by the same reason beget laughter; for the one shows Nature beautified, as 
   in the picture of a fair Woman, which we all admire; the other shows her 
   deformed, as in that of a Lazar, or of a fool with distorted face and 
   antique gestures, at which we cannot forbear to laugh, because it is a 
   deviation from Nature. (I, 56) 

Discussing "images" of "heroick Poesie," Dryden tabulates the tripartite structure of his genre system. His discussion assumes that "Nature" is the origin of "the regular species" of poetry. The idea of original "Nature" enables him to observe that "Nature" is "beautified" in the "images" of "heroick Poesie" while "Nature" is "deformed" in "the images of the Burlesque"; both genres are placed in his system in reference to the same origin. His literary taxonomy is completed when he invents mechanical correspondences in cause and effect between genres and passions by attributing "admiration" and "laughter" to the two genres respectively. His argument is based on the method of natural history because it starts with the invention of "Nature" as the single origin in reference to which all the varieties with their specific qualities are constantly contained in the growing system.

The problem of the origin of art in the framework of natural history is of central importance in Dryden's writings in the 1660s. The preface to Annus Mirabilis ascribes the origin of art to "wit" as "some lively and apt description" that "sets before your eyes the absent object, as perfectly and more delightfully then nature" (I, 53). Art is, according to the author of Annus Mirabilis, as perfect as nature, but more delightful. The discourse that tries to identify art with nature is contradicted by that which insists on the superiority of art to nature. Since the "object" of "wit" is "absent," "wit" is recognized as "the faculty of imagination" that "searches over all the memory for the species or Idea's of those things which it designs to represent" (I, 53). Artistic representation is compared to natural history because both of them invent the origin of "species" in "the field of Memory" (I, 53). The central critical problem in Dryden's poetics is that nature as the origin of poetry is not present a priori but invented a posteriori in the very act of representation.

The most important piece of Dryden's critical prose in the 1660s is An Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668). The critical essay starts its symposium over the definition of drama in the burgeoning controversy between the ancients and moderns. The authority of the ancients is most strongly supported by Crites: "Dramatique Poesie had time enough, reckoning from Thespis (who first invented it) to Aristophanes, to be born, to grow up, and to flourish in Maturity" (XVII, 15). As the history of the literary genre is compared to the growing process of a vegetable creature, his underlying framework proves to be natural history. The critical framework of natural history, however, undercuts the superiority of the ancients in the field of science. The authority of the ancients is repudiated unexpectedly by Crites, who has supported it, when the topic of his discourse turns from "Arts" to "Sciences":