Dryden's Poetic Kingdoms (Routledge Revivals)

Dr. Roper describes the mode of many of Dryden’s original poems by redefining the royalism that provides the matter of some works and the metaphoric vocabulary of others. Dryden’s royalism is seen both as an identifiable political attitude and a way of apprehending public life that again and again relates superficially non-political matters to the standards and assumptions of politics in order to determine their public significance.  Dryden’s Poetic Kingdoms, first published in 1965, principally through readings of ten poems, comes to the conclusion that Dryden’s poems are most successful when they work to create a meaningful analogy between such topics as literature and politics or between the constitution of England and the constitution of Rome, the Garden of Eden, or Israel under David.

Literature & Fiction

Roper, Alan

British & Irish

Routledge

<p><p>Originally published in 1969. Alan Roper studies the degree to which Arnold achieved a unity of human significance and literal landscape. If landscape poetry is to rise above the level of what Roper calls "country contentments in verse," the poet cannot think and describe alternately; his thinking and describing must be a part of one another. That Matthew Arnold was aware of the difficulty in achieving the necessary unity becomes clear in his own criticism, which Roper examines along with a large and representative number of Arnold's poems. Considering the latter roughly in the order they were published--except for a fuller analysis of Empedocles on Etna, "The Scholar-Gipsy," and "Thyrsis"--Roper follows important changes in Arnold's view of the function and nature of poetry as it emerged in the poems themselves. Basic to the author's critical method is a distinction between geographical sites and poetic landscapes. Focusing on the ways that Arnold and, to a lesser extent, the Augustan and Romantic poets before him untied thought and description, Roper adds a critical dimension to Arnold scholarship. Concerned not with the development of Arnold's ideas nor with their sources in classical antiquity and the Romantic period, he considers Arnold a self-conscious poet who, though sometimes successful, became increasingly unsuccessful in his efforts to imbue a landscape with meaning for individual or social man.</p></p>

Arnold's Poetic Landscapes

History & Criticism

Johns Hopkins University Press

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