John Dryden's elegy for his friend Mr. Oldham offers a few glimpses into the real life of the seventeenth-century poet. According to Dryden's poem, Oldham was a satirist, gifted when it came to poetic expression but without a particularly impressive grasp of poetic techniques like rhyme. Dryden describes Oldham as intelligent and skeptical, without much patience for the unintelligent or unkind. Dryden also explains that Oldham's life was unjustly cut short. Finally, Dryden's elegy suggests that the two men knew one another, and were friends. Here we will discuss the real John Oldham: his biography and reputation, his relationship to Dryden, and of course his poetry.
Oldham, the son of a clergyman, was born in 1653. He was well-educated, eventually attending Oxford University. After graduating from Oxford, Oldham took a job as an usher at Whitgift school. While employed at Whitgift, he produced some early poems. These works drew the interest of a number of influential men, including the Earl of Rochester, who came to Whitgift to pay Oldham a visit. Soon after, Oldham left his position. He first took a job as a private tutor while attempting to find patrons who would support his art. He then moved to London, where he became part of a circle that included John Dryden. Oldham did indeed die young—of smallpox, at the age of 30. When he died, though, he had a reputation as a talented and incisive poet, and several more well-received works were published posthumously.
A satirist, Oldham was known specifically as an imitator of classical forbears, especially the Roman satirist Juvenal. He was noted for satirizing topics or ideas, rather than for targeting specific people. His most famous works include the four Satyrs Upon the Jesuits and the Satyr Against Virtue, both of which he produced relatively early in his short career. The mentorship of the Earl of Rochester is widely considered one of the major influences on this early work. Later in his career, however, Oldham shifted gears and wrote more explicit imitations of classical works by writers such as Juvenal and Horace. John Dryden's choice to refer to his friend as "Marcellus," an allusion to classical culture, is simultaneously a reference to Oldham's own interest in Roman literature.
Oldham's work was also considered distinctive for a reason described in Dryden's elegy: a preference for sharpness, drama, and emotional intensity, rather than for subtlety and artistry. Dryden frames this trade-off as a possible effect of his friend's youth, and as a necessary one creating vitality and cleverness within the works at a worthwhile cost. Others, including modern critics and scholars, have largely dismissed Oldham as a technically unskilled writer, with sensationalist tendencies and a lack of artistic control. Still others have argued that his works' melodrama is deliberate and that it displays underappreciated literary mastery, adroitly mimicking Juvenal and other classical writers. At the same time, while readers' responses to Oldham's work have varied, Oldham is now most famous for being the subject of Dryden's elegy.
The close of the seventeenth century and the start of the eighteenth were marked by the flourishing of great English satirists. These included John Dryden himself, perhaps the most famous of the seventeenth-century satirists, as well as Andrew Marvell. A generation later, Alexander Pope became the most admired of all, noted especially for his adeptness and inventiveness in using the heroic couplet structure. Oldham is far from the best-known of these satirical poets, but Dryden's poem reveals the influence of these early satirists on their prominent successors.
