Title: "When beauty fires the blood"
First published: 1992
Description: "James Anderson Winn is the author of a general history of the relations between music and poetry (Unsuspected Eloquence, 1981) and a full-scale biography of a major English poet (John Dryden and His World, 1986). In this new book, he brings together his interdisciplinary expertise, his deep knowledge of Dryden, and his interest in currently urgent issues of gender, arguing that Dryden's complex and contradictory attitudes toward human sexuality helped shape his influential ideas about nature and art, beauty and virtue, imagination and judgment. In examining Dryden's artistic practice and theory from this perspective, Winn addresses topics not often noticed in previous studies of Dryden: his technical knowledge of music and painting; his lively sexual imagination; his use of conventional and unconventional notions of gender to flesh out theoretical distinctions; and the contrasting attitudes of his contemporaries, especially those of women writers. Through subtle analyses of Dryden's theatrical songs, operas, treatises on painting, and addresses to women, Winn shows that the old view of Dryden as sharp satirist, doctrinal "lawgiver," and author of a "poetry of statement" is fatally incomplete. By developing an interpretation stressing other themes, he adds several new dimensions to our understanding of the poet and his period."--Jacket.
Subjects: Love poetry, English, Art and literature, Love in literature, English Love poetry, History and criticism, Criticism and interpretation, Aesthetics, British, Love in art, British Aesthetics, History, Art, Knowledge, Contemporary England, Knowledge and learning
Places: England
People: John Dryden (1631-1700)
Time periods: 17th century
LC classification: PR3427.L65 W56 1992