Poet Squab

Claude Rawson

  • John Dryden and His World by James Anderson Winn
    Yale, 651 pp, £19.95, November 1987, ISBN 0 300 02994 2
  • John Dryden edited by Keith Walker
    Oxford, 967 pp, £22.50, January 1987, ISBN 0 19 254192 7

There is an anonymous portrait of Dryden, ‘dated 1657 but probably 1662’, which shows a full-fed figure with plump alert eyes, comfortable and predatory. He seems poised between repletion and dyspepsia, like a bewigged Nigel Lawson, arrested for all time at the moment of incipient eructation. James Winn says: ‘His short, squat figure later led his enemies to call him “Poet Squab”, and the plump birdlike face in this picture justifies the nickname.’ When Rochester, about 1675 or 1676, called him by that name, perhaps for the first time, in his ‘Allusion to Horace’, the idea was that Dryden couldn’t manage gentlemanly smuttiness, the ‘mannerly obscene’, though he tried:

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