John Dryden (1631-1700) was Charles II's poet laureate and the dominant literary figure of his time, even though Milton still lived and published Paradise Lost in 1665. He moved easily from a pro forma Puritanism under Cromwell to enthusiastic Anglicanism under Charles II to Catholicism under James II. The period 1660-1700 is sometimes called the Age of Dryden. He loved Virgil and the French, and thought English literature literally unruly, though he loved Shakespeare. He valued concision, preciseness, and order, qualities which drew him to the closed couplet form, and it was his advocacy which made the heroic couplet the dominant form for a century. This neoclassicism should not keep us from noting that he loved Virgil for his musical qualities, too, and that Dryden was a great verse master, as his follower Pope always acknowledged.
John Wilmost, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1648-1680) was a friend of Charles II, who nevertheless occasionally banished Rochester from court. He was a patron of Dryden but also hired thugs to beat him up. Known for occasional satiric and amorous verse.
Other Restoration Figures include the authors of Restoration comedies, the best being William Wycherley (1641?-1715--The Country Wife, 1675) and William Congreve (1670-1729--The Way of the World, 1700). The "heroic tragedies" of the period are so full of inflated sentiment that no one reads them now; the best tragedies, both in blank verse, are Dryden's All for Love (1677, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra) and Venice Preserved [1682] by Thomas Otway (1652-1685), For the real flavor of the period, one might have as much fun reading the diaries of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703).
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) had the same great-grandfather as Dryden but is mainly distinguished for prose satires like The Battle of the Books (1704), The Tale of a Tub (1704), "A Modest Proposal" (1729), and Gulliver's Travels. Languishing in an Irish parish, he broke with the Whigs (and with some friends) to support the Tories, who rewarded him only with promotion to a deanship, still in Ireland. He hated being stuck in Ireland, though he was Anglo-Irish by birth; even so, he was outraged at the English exploitation of Ireland. The "Stella" to whom he addressed poems was actually Esther Johnson, whom he had tutored while working for her patron Sir William Temple; their exact relation remains a mystery.
John Gay (1685-1732) is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera (1728), a play with ballads, which satirised Sir Robert Walpole but has outlasted its subject in popular appeal. [The Brecht-Weill Three Penny Opera is a modern adaptation.] He was also a poet and a friend of both Pope and Swift--indeed, of everybody.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) made Keats looks tall--the painter Joshua Reynolds described him as "four feet six high, very hump-backed and deformed"--perhaps the result of a childhood encounter with a wild cow or (more likely) of a tubercular infection. His parents were Roman Catholic, a serious disadvantage at the time, but his precocious poetic efforts attracted attention. His early Pastorals appeared in 1709. An Essay on Criticism [1711] was called a masterpiece by Joseph Addison in the Spectator--later more hostile to Pope. The Rape of the Lock [1712, rev. 1714]]. He was friendly with the Tory writers of the Scriblerus club, including Jonathan Swift and Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, who was accused of treason and fled to France when the Whigs came in under George I. Pope himself retreated to the country to work on his well-subscribed Iliad, which began appearing in 1715; it guaranteed his pre-eminence and made him rich without a patron required. .. .. .. The Dunciad was originally [1728] directed against Lewis Theobald, who had denounced the err[A[Aors in Pope's Shakespeare edition; it was put out anonymously, as was An Essay on Man [1733], which thus garnered much praise from his many enemies. The final version of The Dunciad [1743] attacked Colley Cibber, the actor-playwright who was George II's poet laureate. Although on the outs with his govt. most of his life, he was clearly the best poet of his age, often known as the Age of Pope. They called themselves the "Augustan" Age, after Rome in the time of Augustus, when Virgil and Horace provided the great age of Latin literature.
James Thomson (1700-1748) was a man typical of his age but remarkably hard to pigeon-hole as a poet. An ambitious young Scot, he left college to come to London and try his fortunes as a writer. He made his name with Winter in 1726 and finished up the rest of The Seasons by 1730. Its blank verse owes something to Milton, though its diction is often neoclassical. Its praise for nature has sometimes led to his being regarded as a "pre-Romantic," but he has links with the topographical poetry of the 17th and 18th centuries. His only other work of any interest is his last, The Castle of Indolence (1748), which is in Spenserian stanzas but is also thought of pre-Romantic in its deliberate (very Spenserian) archaism.
Two other Scotsmen were more truly fore-runners of the Romantic movement. James McPherson (1736-1796) was a Highland school-master who wowed and fooled most of his contemporaries with Celtic epics supposedly translating an ancient bard named Ossian. Robert Burns (1759- 1796) began as folk poet and barely left home before he was 30; when his poems were published in 1786, he was a national celebrity, but he spent little time in Edinburgh, returning home to marry and drink himself to death.
Thomas Gray (1716-1771), educated at Cambridge and later a professor of history and modern languages there, refused the laureateship in 1757. Was buried at Stoke Poges in Bucks, the probable village of "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" (begun in 1740's, finished about 1750, an immediate popular success). The Eighteenth Century is also known for great prose. Highpoints include the essays of Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Steele (1672-1729); the histories of David Hume (1711-1776, also an influential philosopher) and Edward Gibbon (1737-1794--Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), the literary criticism of Samuel Johnson (1709-1784); and the famous Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) by James Boswell (1740-1795). It is also, of course, the century of the rise of the novel: Daniel Defoe (1660?-1719), Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), Henry Fielding (1707-1754), Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), Tobias Smollett (1721-1771).