Secondly, check out this fun, free-to-enter competition at the Magma blog, in which you choose a poem to ban from the school syllabus and say why in less than 300 words. The winner gets a poetry anthology and an annual subscription to Magma – so well worth entering.

Thirdly, all UK orders of Salt books before Christmas will be sent with free postage. If you want to surprise your friends and relatives, I’d guess my book would be among the more unpredictable gifts of the year. Anything called The Opposite of Cabbage is the last thing most people would expect to receive – but none the worse for that. I’d also recommend recent Salt collections by Tony Williams (The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street) and Liz Gallagher (The Wrong Miracle), which I plan to say something about on this blog if I have the time. Of course, there’s also Emily Benet’s Shop Girl Diaries, even if we male types might pretend we don’t read the Christmas book we buy for the women in our lives.

Readers from other countries, don’t despair. The Book Depository will also send Salt books with free postage, although my book appears to be out of stock at the time of writing this…

These days, poets tend to carry out their arguments in prose, which is a loss for all of us, I think. Those who just want everyone to get along and stop fighting, laudable a notion as that may be, are trying to overturn what history has shown as inevitable, but Dryden’s approach at least has the merits of literary quality and entertainment for generations to come.

A minor poet (and priest), Robert Flecknoe, is characterised as a King of Nonsense looking for a successor and, according to Dryden, Shadwell is the ideal heir:

…’tis resolv’d; for nature pleads that he
Should only rule, who most resembles me:
Sh——, alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years.
Sh—— alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirm’d in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Sh—— never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through and make a lucid interval;
But Sh——’s genuine night admits no ray,
His rising fogs prevail upon the day:
Besides his goodly fabric fills the eye,
And seems design’d for thoughtless majesty

Don’t hold back, JD! I guess this poem is all most people will ever know of poor old Flecknoe and Shadwell. Towards the end comes a passage of biting satire, this time mocking Shadwell’s writing:

With whate’er gall thou sett’st thy self to write,
Thy inoffensive satires never bite.
In thy felonious heart, though venom lies,
It does but touch thy Irish pen, and dies.
Thy genius calls thee not to purchase fame
In keen iambics, but mild anagram:
Leave writing plays, and choose for thy command
Some peaceful province in acrostic land.
There thou may’st wings display and altars raise,
And torture one poor word ten thousand ways.
Or if thou wouldst thy diff’rent talents suit,
Set thy own songs, and sing them to thy lute.

Just as well Dryden isn’t around today…

I enjoyed it to an extent, but I confess that I didn’t feel really gripped by it. There were a few tedious sections that were just too drawn out. On the other hand, the poem is sprinkled with pithy phrases:

Some truth there was, but dash’d and brew’d with lies,
To please the fools, and puzzle all the wise.
Succeeding times did equal folly call,
Believing nothing, or believing all.

and:

So easy still it proves in factious times
With public zeal to cancel private crimes.

I can why Pope drew aphoristic inspiration from Dryden and, although Pope probably hit the mark with greater consistency, Dryden’s efforts still impressed me. His characters, however, didn’t have the same impact as, say, Milton achieves in Paradise Lost. Dryden’s plotting Achitophel is no match for Milton’s Satan, and Absalom also seems pretty thin. On the other hand, the psychology of ambition and Absalom’s dilemma (his ambition versus his denial of it) is handled well and the philosophical tangents are quite interesting. Dryden also can’t match the complexity of Milton’s diction and syntax, but I guess Milton had the advantage of writing a supple blank verse which allowed for more expansive phrasing compared to Dryden’s tight rhymed couplets – two different aesthetics.

Dryden drips with irony and was clearly born to be a satirist. The poem clearly is as much about events surrounding his own king, Charles II, as the biblical King David. It’s a public poem, engaging with some of the key issues of his day. Dryden ironises to considerable effect and even more so in Macflecknoe, a lighter poem, which I probably enjoyed more and will come to next time.

I’ve been reading the introduction by Roger Sharrock to an old Selected Poems of John Dryden (Heinnemann, 1963, 1968), which I must have picked up secondhand some years ago. The former owner has written on the book only once, on the inside title page – “Is Gulliver’s Travels a Novel?” – so his/her mind may not quite have extended as far as the contents. This is a shame, as it’s a splendid introduction to the predominant ideas of the 17th century, how they influenced Dryden, what he himself questioned, and what made him stand out from the pack. Sharrock certainly demonstrates how easy it is to nod assent to contemporary fashions as if they possess innate truths rather than simply being products of an age, which ages to come will pull apart under their own microscope:

“The modern reader, whether consciously or not, is usually guided by notions of what a poem should be which derive from symbolism. It should be, not do; it should not state something, but offer a unified experience not definable in any other terms, so that its operation may be better compared to that of a flower or a musical phrase or to a dance movement than to the non-poetic use of words in discourse. Dryden’s poems emphatically do things; they point to purposes outside the poems, they make statements which can be paraphrased as political manifestos or logical arguments.” (p.15)

I can see some of my assumptions in there, and assumptions are always worth questioning – both at an intellectual level and in the practice of writing and evaluating poetry. Anyway, I’m going to read a little Dryden over the next week or so. He has a reputation for ordered reason and neo-classicism. The Romantics disliked his work, feeling that there was too much mind and not enough heart in it, but Eliot spoke out in his favour, as did (perhaps even more commendably) Hopkins before it had become trendy to do so. Sharrock says of Dryden’s work that “its predominant qualities are energy and exuberance,” and also that “absurdity is given a certain poetic grandeur and even beauty in his humorous passages.” I’ve read Dryden before, but never with a great deal of attention, and I’m looking forward to the experience.

The event is also being screened in the Byre Theatre in St Andrews. It would be fun to go there, but I’m not going to make it. I will tune in on my computer though. A unique event, which you can watch wherever you are in the world.

The February date at the GRV would be Valentines Day, 14 February. Rather than doing the usual line-up of three poets, I’m considering holding a kind of Poetry LoveFest. The nascent plan is to get 20-30 poets to write a poem (or a short prose piece) each inspired by a different verse from the Song of Songs, which I would provide for them. On the night, all the poems would be read, mostly by their authors, but some might be written by folk at too much of a distance and I could get skilled readers to read these ones. But would people go for that (and bring their loved ones), or are people going to prefer a quiet, romantic evening for two around the dinner table? Only one way to find out, I suppose…

And from about a year later, Picture This (live from Glasgow, I think). The song contains one of the great lines of the modern rock lyric:

“I will give you my finest hour,
the one I spend watching you shower.”