JOHN DRYDEN
JOHN DRYDEN Dryden's contributions to English criticism are significant and spectacular. His genius is myriad and his achievements are tremendous. Dryden was a great poet, a great satirist, a great dramatist and a great critic. He found English language brick and made it marble. Dryden is rightly called the father of English criticism. It was Dryden and Dryden alone who thought to determine upon the principles of the merit of composition. Dryden did not take the comprehensive views of literature as a hole nor did he write on the problems connected with it. He was the first English critic who took the criticism seriously and thought deeply over all the problems connected with literature. He wrote brilliant appreciations of the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Fletcher and Ben Jonson. The most important quality of Dryden as a critic was his liberal outlook was the pioneer of the liberal classicism. This liberalism was his first great quality an