This book is a concise introduction, drawing on the latest research, to the life and work of the most celebrated English poet of the late seventeenth century. It is unusual in stressing not only the poet's responses to events, personalities, and ideas of his day, but also the way in which his work engages (in a far more speculative and pluralistic way than is often supposed) with human issues and dilemmas of permanent concern: the relation of human to animal and inanimate nature; the forces, internal and external which serve to ennoble, enrich and confound human endeavour; the capacities and limits of human reason; the relations between the sexes. Dryden emerges from this study as, simultaneously, 'a man of his times' and a writer with important things to say to us all.