How Selected Poems drew on Metamorphoses
A documented line of influence: John Dryden demonstrably engaged Ovid’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
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On Selected Poems’s page
- Much of Dryden's late verse is Ovid in English — Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700) carries eight selections from the Metamorphoses, Books 12 and 15 among them
- He'd already Englished its first book in 1693 and used the Ovid prefaces to work out his whole theory of translation
- Dryden flatly named Book 15 "the Master-piece of the whole Metamorphoses" — go to the source he spent a career rendering
On Metamorphoses’s page
- Dryden kept coming back to Ovid for a lifetime — Englishing the first book of Metamorphoses in 1693 and theorizing translation itself in his Ovid prefaces
- His Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700) gathers eight verse selections from the poem, including Books 12 and 15
- He called Book 15 "the Master-piece of the whole Metamorphoses" — Ovid is the poet Dryden measured his own English against