| dc.description.abstract | The aim of this study has been to determine the elements in the English tradition of letters that relate directly to the rhetorical-poetic as it was conceived during the Restoration and practiced by John Dryden and to apply that knowledge in the reading of Dryden's two verse essays. The process of study has been, first, to examine the critical documents known, used, and written by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers for discovering their conception of the nature of poetry, the role of the poet, and the habitual procedure in writing poems. Second, it has undertaken to determine the educational practice relevant to composition, and, third, to analyze the shifts in attitudes toward literature brought about by social and scientific changes. Finally, the process has entailed an application of the derived information about the rhetorical-poetic tradition to the analysis of some works of Dryden composed during the years 1680-1689, with the particular goal of answering some critical questions about Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther. The investigation has indicated that from the mid-sixteenth century into the Augustan Age the chief conception of literature was uniform in its baste formulations. To the majority of writers the objective was to instruct the reader so that he would more nearly fulfill his potentiality as a human being, living within the order of nature, obedient to God by means of his right reason, and responsible in action toward his fellow man. The means of that instruction, the writers believed, was a serious craft of discourse which could be taught, learned, and practiced. The poet, though gifted above ordinary men in his imagination and judgment, could only succeed in his office by upholding the highest principles of his art. The principles the writers located in the practice of the Greco-Roman poets, the precepts of Aristotle and Horace, and the rhetorics of Cicero and Quintilian. The Humanistically oriented educational system of rhetoric trained generations of writers by the procedures of invention, disposition, and elocution. This common foundation underlies the surface alterations in style, brought about by changing conditions, and marks a continuous rhetorical-poetic tradition until nineteenth-century Romanticism came. A close study of Dryden's two politico-religious poems shows that his choices of organization and embellishment are consonant with that tradition. Both Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther are conscientious endeavors to write poems according to the principles of this central English art of poetry. | |
