John Dennis: Enthusiastic Passions, Cultural Memory, and Literary Theory

Despite Edward Niles Hooker's magisterial Critical Works of John Dennis (1939-43), Dennis (1657-1734) has barely avoided the trash heap of history. ¹ The Augustan dramatist and critic has only occasionally succeeded since then in transcending the pages of Hooker's excellent edition, and studies of his work still remain limited by Pope's having so effectively reduced him to a minor blotch on the little Queen Anne Man's far more brilliant career. ² Like all of the other hapless writers entombed in the Dunciad, Dennis has survived primarily as the butt of Pope and his fellow Scribblerians' jokes or, at best, as a minor figure requiring the stronger ally of a canonized author to gain entrance into modern criticism. Indeed, the most recent discussion of Dennis (1998) treats him primarily in relation to Pope's Essay on Criticism. ³ But Dennis's own varied and thoughtful career in literary criticism, as Hooker realized, still deserves more careful attention in its own right.

There have been notable exceptions to the long shadow of Pope. Jeffrey Barnouw, Irène Simon, and David Morris have offered valuable evidence of Dennis's unique contribution to early Augustan aesthetics. ⁴ His important defense of Milton before Addison's, as well as his possible philosophical kinship with Locke, Hobbes, Shaftesbury, and Kant, have been argued as ways to make Dennis intellectually respectable. ⁵ Yet even these best modern discussions of Dennis's aesthetics see him more as providing certain answers to literary questions about imagination and sublimity than as raising historically important cultural questions. What could be thought, felt, and theorized after the world had already been "turned upside down" in the Civil War? Dennis criticism now needs to incorporate the interests of critical generations since Hooker's. Only by putting the aesthetic issues raised by Dennis's works into the larger cultural and historical contexts of religious politics and advances in learning in the late Restoration can we discover how well Dennis both exemplifies the cultural and ideological dynamics of the turn of the eighteenth century in England, and how he also transcends that narrow window of time more than we have recognized. Dennis's legacy of a politicized aesthetics fraught with ideological tensions is to be found not so much in Pope's satires, where he is merely reduced to parody, but in the epic poetry and theories of Wordsworth, his one true canonized fan. ⁶ Well before Wordsworth's passing 1805 observation that "Poetry is passion: it is the history or science of feelings," Dennis had proclaimed in 1701 "[t]hat Passion is the chief Thing in Poetry, and that all Passion is either ordinary Passion or Enthusiasm." ⁷ Unlike Wordsworth, however, Dennis had discovered that the history of feelings did not mesh easily with the rise of science.

Although this essay does echo one common theme in Dennis criticism, suggesting at the end his critical position in Wordsworth's attempt to wrest Romanticism from Neoclassicism, it avoids another critical commonplace in Dennis studies. It does not treat Dennis's critical works from 1700-1705 as reducible to his last major critical treatise, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704). I instead argue that his critical opinions on poetry and the sublime significantly change between that later most-anthologized treatise and his earlier, more daring and lengthy rhapsody, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701). I examine how the post-Civil War politics of enthusiasm are central to the ideological tenor and tension of The Advancement. I also aim to restore the importance of his Large Account of Taste to any summary views of his aesthetic principles. ⁸ As an exemplary figure for the modernizing world of the early eighteenth century, Dennis reveals how fully politicized the far-from-disinterested world of aesthetic values had become by 1701, and how difficult it could be to try to maintain simultaneous and sincere allegiance to Locke, Longinus...