John West, "Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, Religion and Politics in Restoration England" (Oxford UP, 2018)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Jun 6, 2019 · 38m

John Dryden is often regarded as one of the most conservative writers in later seventeenth-century England, a time-serving “trimmer” who abandoned his early commitments to the English Republic to become the poet laureate and historiographer royal of Charles II’s new regime. But, as this important new book demonstrates, Dryden never entirely left behind the ideas – and worries – about inspiration that shaped his early political and creative experiences. John West, who is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Warwick, has written a brilliant new book…