Well hello! Have you ever read or heard about a play before? A play is like a story that actors and actresses act out on stage. Now imagine if the people who wrote those plays were having a big conversation about how to make plays better. That's what "An Essay of Dramatic Poesy" is all about!
This essay was written by a man named John Dryden a long time ago, when people wore fancy clothes and talked a different way than we do now. He wrote this essay to talk about how he thinks plays should be written and performed.
Now, when you read a book, it usually has a narrator who tells the story and explains everything that's happening. In a play, there's no narrator - instead, the characters themselves talk to each other and do things on stage. Dryden thought this was really cool and exciting, because you can see the characters and their emotions and actions up close.
But Dryden also thought that plays could be even better if people wrote them in certain ways. He thought plays should have a good structure, where everything happens in a certain order and builds up to something exciting at the end. He also thought they should have good characters who are believable and who act the way real people would act. And he believed plays should be filled with interesting and clever words that make you think and feel things.
Dryden's essay is a bit like a conversation between different people who all have their own ideas about plays. It's like they're all sitting around a table, talking about which way to write plays is the best. Some of them like plays that are funny, or plays that teach you something. And some of them like plays that make you feel really emotional or make you think about big ideas.
In the end, Dryden and his friends couldn't agree on which type of play was best. But that's okay - everyone has different opinions and likes different things, right? And that's also what makes plays so great - there's a play out there for everyone to enjoy!