Quote:
Originally Posted by ficbot
I also remember reading Dryden's prefaces and they were all about how if you didn't like the poems, it was because you were too stupid or uneducated or unrefined to properly appreciate them. He just seemed so pompous and arrogant.
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Oh, Dryden. I remember skimming a fairly interesting academic book on changes in the English language throughout the centuries* which had a little chapter-let on poetic contributions to the English language and quotes on the poets' views of language change.
And Dryden did in fact come across as a totally arrogant and pompous twit with no good words for any of his contemporaries, or any of his predecessors save Shakespeare (no standing on the shoulders of giants for him, I see), and had the gall to say of the Canterbury Tales that the stories were charming but overrated and the language was old-fashioned and dated shortly even while it was still being used, or words to that effect.
To which I ahahahaha…
what-ted since if you only look at how Dryden's own poetry looks kind of stilted in comparison to works produced less than two centuries later (while Shakespeare remains fresh, so it's hardly a style-of-the-times problem). And when you look stilted next to
Victorian poetry…
Also, "$%@%, you don't get to diss Chaucer unless you're $%^&-ing Shakespeare!"
You know that Dryden's the one who came up with that faux-rule about not ending sentences with prepositions and proceeded to edit his own early works to remove the now offending construction, which was based on the formal rules of grammar for
Latin and not actual English language usage?
So you can blame him also for manufacturing ammunition for generations of pretentious self-appointed prescriptive grammar police and being totally wrong in the bargain.
But to be fair, he did come up with that pithy aphorism about men who took wives and had children leaving hostages to Fortune, and his poetic version of the Greco-Roman myth cycles are quite an accomplishment, which doesn't hold up too badly these days, stilted language or not. And he did have huge amount of influence and a certain amount of talent.
* I'm pretty sure it's
From Old English to Standard English: A Course Book in Language Variation across Time by Dennis Freeborn, from the University of Ottawa Press, but I couldn't swear to it and it may have been something else the library had which was sitting right next to it.