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 poemsReligio Laici and T

No. Title 5 Heroic Stanzas 7 Astraea 18 Annus Mirabilis 42 Mac Flecknoe 67 Absalom and Achitophel 69 The Medal 74 Religio Laici 87 To the Earl of Roscommon 89 To the Memory of Mr Oldham 96 Lucretius: Against the Fear of Death 97 Lucretius: Concerning the Nature of Love 103 Horace: Odes I ix 104 Horace: Odes III xxix 105 Horace: Epode II 111 To the Memory of Anne Killigrew 114 The Hind and the Panther 115 A Song for St Cecilia's Day 137 The Tenth Satire of Juvenal 153 To Mr Congreve 158 Alexander's Feast 165 Palamon and Arcite 168 Sigismonda and Guiscardo 169 Baucis and Philemon 171 Cinyras and Myrrha 172 The First Book of Homer's Ilias 173 The Cock and the Fox 183 The Secular Masque

John Dryden (1631-1700) was the dominant literary figure of his age. His reputation today rests primarily on his poetic output, but he was also a significant literary critic and dramatist. His wide-ranging poetry engages with the turbulent political, religious, and literary life of Restoration England, and also includes a magnificent series of creative translations.  Dryden's influence in his lifetime and in the centuries that followed should not be underestimated and he remains one of the very greatest of the English poets.

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 and 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, Dryden: Selected Poems 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'.

Paul Hammond FBA is Professor of Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on Dryden and other Restoration poets and is the author of, most recently, The Making of Restoration Poetry (2006). David Hopkins is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol, and author of several studies of Dryden; he recently co-edited volume 3 (1660-1790) of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (2005).