The Works of John Dryden

When I was a child, I was a fan of a series of books that offered portable versions of the great works of the leading poets. One can imagine "The Portable Keats" or "The Portable Browning." One can not imagine "The Portable Dryden." That would be like "The Portable Thomas Wolfe." Some writers simply can not be captured in a small cage. The Wordsworth edition serves as an excellent start to Dryden, covering his political poems, his plays and his translations. While one could argue that some plays were left out of the anthology and should have been included, the basics are there. When finished, the reader can claim to know Dryden's work fairly well. Two minor quibbles. The text is small and hard to read. I often had to resort to using a magnifying glass. The introduction, while solid, was not exactly satisfying. Dryden's reputation has continued to ebb over the decades (despite the best efforts of say T.S. Eliot or Samuel Johnson or Mark van Doren) and there remains much that is obscure in his life and his work. Footnotes or endnotes would have been appreciated. Still, this book remains the place to start to understand and appreciate this forgotten poet.