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In What Way Does Enthusiasm Matter?

In September 1974 Murray T. Lynn submitted a doctoral thesis to the Graduate School of Canada’s McMaster University, entitled ‘The Concept of Enthusiasm in the Major Poems of John Dryden’. Beginning to read his fittingly enthusiastic ‘Acknowledgements’, we cannot immediately discern if the topic reveals the influence of A. D. Hammond, his thesis supervisor, or R. E. Morton of McMaster’s English Department who is said to have ‘offered many helpful suggestions’ or Austin Flanders of the University of Pittsburgh whose classes ‘awakened an interest in the period’. Later, however, Lynn reveals it was in fact the University of Toronto’s Peter Hughes, in a year spent at McMaster in 1970–71, who was the source of his interest in ‘the topic of enthusiasm’. Not of course to dismiss the support of his wife, Bernadette, whom, he writes, ‘deserves special mention for her patient typing of a lengthy manuscript and for her valuable suggestions.’ Lynn’s is largely a textual study, but for the creative writer his analysis also holds interest beyond this because he melds the textual with the biographical and explores Dryden’s artistry, contemplating the poet engaging with the subject of enthusiasm in his work and through his work. Ultimately, Lynn writes of Dryden’s position, which is jointly political and poetic: