Dryden's earlier critics, as we have seen, stressed the comprehensiveness and flexibility of the poet's human and intellectual sympathies. Dryden, Samuel Johnson thought, knew ‘more of man in his general nature’ than Pope (CH 311). His ‘philosophy’, wrote Sir Walter Scott, ‘was that of original and penetrating genius’ (CH 368). This ‘genius’ led Dryden not only into ‘philosophical’ reflection in the ordinary sense of the term – discursive expositions of general issues and dilemmas – but into vivid and enthralling depictions of specific human and natural phenomena. In his narrative verse Dryden's ‘figures and his landscapes are presented to the mind with the same vivacity as the flow of his reasoning, or the acute metaphysical discrimination of his characters’ (CH 360).

Dryden's larger imaginings often exist in a complex counterpoint with his occasional and circumstantial designs. Within a body of largely bespoke writing, he seized, or was presented with, regular opportunities to return to a number of themes and questions that might, in other circumstances or in a writer of a different temperament, have formed the subject of an epic, or of a substantial philosophical poem about humanity and its place in the larger world. (Dryden, indeed, frequently expressed his desire to write an epic – an ambition that he never realized, at least in the terms in which it was originally conceived.) A chronological treatment of Dryden's oeuvre that foregrounds the connections between each of his works and its immediate biographical or political circumstances can thus be usefully complemented by a ‘synchronic’ approach that highlights the subterranean connections of theme and preoccupation linking works from different periods and genres. Such an approach often reveals resonances and implications, which (as we saw with Dryden's ‘satire’ in Chapter 3) reverberate beyond the works’ immediate functional purpose.

To speak of larger themes in Dryden, however, is not to suggest that his ‘comprehensive speculations’ can ever be simply detached from the narrative or argumentative contexts in which they are embedded, or that they are treated by the poet in terms of any consistent viewpoint or doctrine. The probing questions asked by Dryden are often voiced not by the poet in his own voice, but by characters in plays or poems, or by classical or medieval writers whom he is translating.