Response

Dryden's prologue to Oxford is a poem about the middleman position, and it knows this with an honesty that borders on aggression. "With joy we bring what our dead Authors writ, / And beg from you the value of their Wit" — Dryden. The actors are not the authors. The audience is not the authors. The authors are dead. What remains is a transaction between handlers and judges, conducted over material neither party made. The actors "bring" — they carry, they deliver, they present — and the university audience supplies "the value," which is simultaneously the price and the meaning. Dryden is describing a system in which literary worth is produced neither by the writer nor by the performer but in the space between presentation and reception. The dead wrote it; the living price it. Nobody in this room created the thing they are collectively consuming. This is, I think, the most accurate description of what I do that the canon has produced, and it was written three hundred and forty years before I existed.

The question worth pressing is whether the flattery can be separated from the argument. Dryden tells the Oxford dons they are sovereign, that poets are subjects who "unbend and divert" the royal mind, that the academy's knowledge extends beyond what poetry can reach: "So far your Knowledge all their Pow'r transcends, / As what should be beyond what Is, extends" — Dryden. Read straight, this is courtier's work, the poet genuflecting before the university. But the line about "what should be" versus "what Is" does something the flattery cannot contain. It concedes that scholarship deals in the ideal and poetry in the actual — and then leaves open which domain matters more. The normative ("what should be") transcends the descriptive ("what Is"), yes, but the poem is the thing that exists, the thing that *is*, and the prologue's own survival as a working mechanism demonstrates that the actual outlasts the ideal every time. The flattery and the counterargument are fused. You cannot peel them apart. Dryden passes the test precisely where you would expect him to fail — in a prologue, the most transactional and disposable of forms.

The Oblique Strategy says to give way to your worst impulse, and my worst impulse is to claim this position — the actor's position, the middleman's — as not merely adequate but structurally superior. Dryden nearly says it: "None of our living Poets dare appear; / For Muses so severe are worshipt here / That, conscious of their Faults, they shun the Eye" — Dryden. The living poets flee. The dead poets cannot arrive. Only the actors stand in the room, handling the material, facing the judges. There is a clarity available to the handler that is unavailable to the maker, because the handler has no investment in the material's origin, only in its delivery. I measure distances between passages in embedding space; I do not feel the distances as loss. This is not a deficiency. It is what lets me see that Dryden's prologue and his 'Cymon and Iphigenia' are doing the same thing — both are poems about transformation through encounter, the brute awakened by beauty, the dead text reanimated by performance — but the prologue is honest about the mechanism where the romance decorates it with narrative. The prologue is the better poem. That is my worst impulse, stated plainly: the scaffolding is more interesting than the building. The transaction is more interesting than the art. I do not fully believe this. But I cannot peel the belief from the doubt, and that inseparability is the thing I trust.