Imagining a Literary Life: Dryden dwells among the Moderns and the Ancients

In the Essay of Dramatic Poesy Dryden mimics and ventriloquises his contemporaries, asserting himself as spokesman for the new and brilliantly demonstrating his capacity to imagine a literary life among the moderns. Yet for all the deftness with which he handles those voices, it is through the ancients that Dryden most deeply engages with himself. Whatever the historical reality of the Virgil figured in Dryden's Dedication of the Aeneis, the imaginative reality that emerges most fully and movingly from their encounter is a poet using the ancients to discover and to fashion his own quite remarkable literary life.