John Dryden

John Dryden (1631–1700), the great dramatic and satirical poet of the later seventeenth century, whose translation of Virgil’s “Æneid” appears in another volume of the Harvard Classics, deserves hardly less distinction as a prose writer than as a poet. The present essay, prefixed to a volume of narrative poems, is largely concerned with Chaucer; and in its genial and penetrating criticism, expressed with characteristic clearness and vigor, can be seen the ground for naming. Dryden the first of English literary critics, and the founder of modern prose style.

Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern