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Contrary to the account of poetry in The Republic, an imitation is far from being a lesser version of an aspect of nature that derives from an ideal source. It is an improvement upon nature, partly because the painter or poet chooses the best from what is around him. And this faculty of discrimination or judgment is also what gives poetry its access to truth, because, through the mimetic objectification of nature, the poet is able to analyze nature by comparing it to the original. Along with Locke and looking forward to Utilitarian philosophy, Dryden’s perspective represents a pure form of humanism. That is, he shows an implicit faith in the human faculties of reason and understanding which are unfailingly drawn to the true and good. In fact, in spite of his rationalism, the poet is perhaps here closer to God than in any other account. For the poet, by imitating nature, purifies it simply by virtue of the purity of his own nature. He improves, therefore, on Creation, which is assumed to be imperfect in some way. But is the “truth” he seeks to understand merely an understanding of reality, the goal of the naturalist or physicist? Or does this truth have a transcendental component? After all, the imitation Dryden describes is different from, and better than, the material world which serves as source material, otherwise there would be no need to compare the two. As a representation of reality, surely this imitation is “ideal,” or at least ideational to some extent.
The world takes on a relationship to the poet like that of private property to man in Locke’s Treatises. Reality is “his,” and is endowed with “truth” only inasmuch as it is “his.” Also similarly to Locke, Dryden, in the manner of Burke, divides the self into its faculties, working from a somewhat mechanical model of man. To the extent that the rationalist philosophy is Conservative and, as noted before, the concern with perfection of form and the ideal of decorum are socially as well as aesthetically relevant ideals, the poetry of this time is political. And in its reduction of poetic process to intellection, it reminds me of nothing so much as the Language Poets, who may have finally accomplished a turn away from Romanticism with their heavily conceptualized, process-based, and self-consciously “political” work.