Dryden: Selected Poems
is drawn from Paul Hammond and David Hopkins's remarkable five-volume The Poems of John Dryden, and includes a generous selection of his most important work. The great satires,
MacFlecknoe
and
Absalom and Achitophel,
are included in full, as are his religious poems
Religio Laici
The Hind and the Panther
, along with a number of Dryden's translations from Horace, Ovid, Homer, and Chaucer.
Each poem is accompanied by a headnote, which gives details of composition, publication, and reception. The first-rate annotations provide information on matters of interpretation and give details of allusions that might prove baffling to contemporary readers. Some 300 years after his death,
will enable new generations of readers to discover the poet of whom Eliot wrote: 'we cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden'.