John Dryden was considered the most influential man of literature in the second half of the 17th century. He was the first of the great English neo-classical poets. He was well known for his poems, drama, and criticism. He called himself Neander, the "new man," in his essay Of Dramatic Poesy (1668), and implied that he was spokesman for the concerns of his generation and the embodiment of its tastes (King 189). .
Dryden was born in 1631 to a Puritan family in Aldwinkle All Saints, Northamptonshire. He was the oldest of fourteen children. His family was not rich, but they managed to scrape enough money together to send him to school at Westminster and at the University of Cambridge, where he received a B.A. degree in 1654. In 1657, he went to London and briefly served Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell's government in a minor position (Sherburn 711). He wrote an elegy on the death of Cromwell called Heroic Stanzas. He then turned right around and wrote a congratulatory poem to Charles II, who was ascending the throne. He was now a Royalist, and his two poems celebrating the Restoration, Astraea Redux and Panegyric, were topics of much political controversy. .
On December 1, 1663, he married Lady Elizabeth Howard. She was his friend's sister. It was rumored that John had been bullied into marriage by her brothers. Some say that they were happily married, but most of my research concluded that they did have problems. She was a woman with many issues, and she always seemed to be surrounded by unnecessary drama. She wrote a letter to the second Earl of Chesterfield, in which she vaguely depicted an intimate affair with a nobleman. John could never please her and she treated him for the most part very badly. They both loved their children though, and that was the one thing that they agreed on (Stephen 65). .
In 1662, Dryden was elected as a member of the Royal Society. Until then, he had no real source of income.
