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Dryden's Purposes of Poetry

by IlanaSimons 11:49 AM
Categories: literature & life

The poet John Dryden once said that a poem had the two purposes of "delight[ing] and instruct[ing] mankind."  We make literature--or any story we build about life--to entertain and to teach us.

 

The second part of his line, about "instructing" us, refers in some sense to a biological truth.  Our ability to tell stories is an evolutionary prize.  Our brains developed the ability to make stories because that's a useful way of learning lessons from the past.  We remember things, play imaginative games about cause and effect, and so learn what behaviors might lead to success, or a good life.  Narrative is our testing ground for learning about the cause and effect of human behavior. 

 

Animals learn from the "stories" they make in a similar way.  A dog remembers that the last three times he peed in the house, he was yelled at.  Now, when he evokes the sensory memory of peeing inside, he can associate it with negative consequences.  He holds these practically useful stories with him, as a guidebook.  Stories are a way to investigate the past to set plans for the future.

 

The second part of what Dryden said was that stories "delight."  "Delight" seems like the more distinctly human side of the equation.  Birds sing, but humans kill time in the world of words like other animals don't.  We have a lot of stories to "delight" us: bedtimes stories, narrative prayers to sustain religions, dreamy novels like Twilight to get our minds off daily life. 

 

But while the "delight," or entertainment, side of storytelling sounds like the fun part of Dryden's equation, he's probably referring to a complex thing here, too.  We are not just the beast that loves entertainment, but the beast that needs it.  It's because we ruminate on our boredom that we need distraction; it's our anxiety that drives our need for Romance; it's our tendency to fret about death that drives our need for a Fantasy about immortals.  The delight-thing is so well developed because the need-to-be-delighted-thing is so well developed. 

 

I'm thinking of an example.  Yesterday, a friend described a day that sounded awful to me, but which she did not experience as awful.  She told me that when she missed her bus after work, she had to wait for two hours in the rain for the next bus.  But it just so happens, she said, that another guy was waiting too, and he was an ex-ballet dancer.  She'd been a dancer as a child--so the two of them had a really interesting conversation while they waited.  My friend concluded that missing the bus turned out to be a "good thing" because, otherwise, she wouldn't have been able to chat so long with a fellow dancer.

 

That sounds like "delight"-angled storytelling to me.  My friend, I thought, was telling herself a lullaby of sorts--transforming a truly sucky day into a "good thing."  Waiting two hours in the rain is sucky, most people would say.  But this woman had developed the art of telling optimistic stories about her own life: She could accept her fate (waiting for the bus is a piece of fate) by weaving a good story about it.  Here, she formed a story that did not necessarily "instruct" her about truth, or offer life strategies based on past experiences, but did "delight" her by taking her mind off of frustrating stuff.  She had to stand in the rain.  Why dwell on that?  We have brains that can hunt out the good points, put them in a memorable story, and dwell on that.  Thaaaaat's entertainment!

 

Dryden's probably right: We are creatures who tell ourselves stories to "instruct and delight."  The "instructing" stories are ones which recreate reality and teach us.  But the "delighting" stories are also adaptive, or evolutionarily necessary.  They soothe us by offering alternative realities.  All of our stories are adaptive mechanisms: They let us live, and they make life a desirable thing.

 

What do you make of Dryden's line that poems are made to "delight and instruct"?   Are those two different kinds of stories we tell ourselves, or similar beasts?

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by Reader-Moderator Melissa_W on 10-08-2009 02:10 PM
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Dryden was on the required reading list for my Restoration Lit class - The Major Works - and we definitely had to read "Annus Mirabilis" (along with some not-so-fun to read papers).  Dryden follows his own advice, the poem does instruct to some extent (the sea battles with the Low Countries and the Great Fire in 1666) but his descriptions of post-fire London are beautiful.

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