'Metempsychosis': A Metaphor for Literary Tradition in Dryden and his Contemporaries1

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 6; p. 56
• Main Author: Terry, Richard
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.1995
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Chaucer, Geoffrey (1340?-1400); Dryden, John (1631-1700); English literature; Jonson, Ben (1573-1637); Metaphor; Pythagoras (570?-490 BC); Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)
• ISSN: 0954-0970

[...]a metaphor was not original to Dryden: the acclaiming of Chaucer as the 'father of our English poets' dates back at least as far as Puttenham (1582); and this association of the poetic vocation with creative filiation was given literal embodiment in the early seventeenth century by a group of young writers dancing attendance on Ben Jonson, including the likes of Thomas Randolph, Richard Brome and Nathan Field, who styled themselves 'Sons of Ben'.2 Yet, while not being the metaphor's first proposer, Dryden remains, as a modern commentator has pointed out, 'pre-eminently the critic who conceives of poetic creation and influence as paternal'.3 Not surprisingly his use of the conceit is uniquely prolific: [...]for writers of the immediate post-Restoration era, the literary past became an era from which their own literary present seemed to have been rudely divided, one effect of such a discontinuity being that the very entity of a native tradition was reified in stronger terms than ever before. [...]mooted is the related idea that the soul, as it were, assimilates its own genealogy, so that Hastings's death entails another dying for all the parental and ancestral figures who have preceded him: 'Must all these ag'd Sires in one Funeral / Expire?' The point of the compliment is to stress the roundedness of Hastings's abilities, seen as having been realized through the diverse nature of his transmigratory heritage, but such diversity also militates against his being seen as the beneficiary of a unified tradition. Yet even if Chaucer's status as the originator of the native canon is decided early, a methodical elaboration of the contents of the canon, especially as takes place within a discourse distinct from that of personal veneration, has to wait until an extraordinary wave of canon-forming works in the 1580s and 90s, including ones by Sir Philip Sidney, William Webbe, George Puttenham and Francis Meres.17 Thus far, however, the matter at issue has consisted of drawing up a file of authors out of which the canon will be constituted; and it is only in the seventeenth century that writers begin to deliberate on tradition as a medium of continuity, and in particular to develop metaphors explanatory of the nature of literary influence and inheritance.