“When Beauty Fires the Blood”: Love and the Arts in the Age of Dryden.

Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, (1995). First Edition. Octavo, gray cloth (hardcover), gilt lettering, xviii + 474 pp. Fine (As New) in a Fine (As New) dust jacket. From dust jacket: James Anderson Winn is the author of a general history of the relations between music and poetry (Unsuspected Eloquence, 1981) and 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 notices 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.