Selected Poems

This compilation features "Annus Mirabilis," a celebration of the tumultuous events of 1666, casting the catastrophic effects of war, plague, and London's Great Fire as a providential gesture from which the nation would arise, phoenix-like, to greater heights. Other selections include Dryden's great satires "Absalom and Achitophel" and "Mac Flecknoe," along with "Songs from Mariage a la Mode," "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham," "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day," "Epigram on Milton," and "Alexander's Feast."

A rich selection of an important poet's most significant and influential verse, this compilation is a must for students and teachers of English literature as well as for poetry lovers.

In his lifetime, John Dryden gained fame at the cost first of gossip and scandal and then of suspicion and scorn. He wrote to order, currying favor with the Crown and repeatedly savaging its enemies. Yet the finest works of his political and spiritual imagination- "Absalom and Achitophel" and "The Hind and the Panther"-develop the themes of envy, ambition, and misdeed in ways that far transcend their era. During the Glorious Revolution, Dryden fell from patronage and favor: he then transformed himself into perhaps the greatest of English translators, a superb interpreter of Virgil and Horace, Juvenal and Persius, Boccaccio and Chaucer.

With a preface and annotations accompanying each poem, modernized spelling and punctuation, and an informative introduction and chronology, this Penguin Classics edition is the only paperback volume of its kind available.

John Dryden (1631-1700) was the consummate literary professional and the most important writer of the late seventeenth century. Poet Laureate of England from 1668 to 1688, Dryden wrote with perfection in all the genres of his age-lyric and literary essay, play and polemic, elegy and confession.