Ben Jonson and His Poetry

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Ben Jonson and His Poetry In this we shall discuss about Ben Jonson and his poetry: Ben Jonson (originally Benjamin Jonson c. 11 June 1572 – 6 August 1637) was an enormously talented English playwright, poet, and literary critic of the seventeenth century, whose artistic ability exercised a stable impact upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours. He is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone, or The Foxe (1605), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fayre: A Comedy (1614), and for his lyric poetry; he is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I.[1] Jonson was a classically educated, well-informed, and cultivated man of the English Renaissance with an taste for controversy (personal and political, artistic and intellectual) whose cultural influence was of unequalled breadth upon the playwrights and the poets of the Jacobean era (1603–1625) and of the Caroline era (1625–1642).[2][3] Poetry Jonson's poetry, like his drama, is informed by his classical learning. Some of his better- known poems are close translations of Greek or Roman models; all display the careful attention to form and style that often came naturally to those trained in classics in the humanist manner. Jonson largely avoided the debates about rhyme and meter that had consumed Elizabethan classicists such as Thomas Campion and Gabriel Harvey. Accepting both rhyme and stress, Jonson used them to mimic the classical qualities of simplicity, restraint, and precision. "Epigrams" (published in the 1616 folio) is an entry in a genre that was popular among late- Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, although Jonson was perhaps the only poet of his time to work in its full classical range. The epigrams explore various attitudes, most from the satiric stock of the day: complaints against women, courtiers, and spies abound. The condemnatory poems are short and anonymous; Jonson’s epigrams of praise, including a famous poem to Camden and lines to Lucy Harington, are longer and are mostly addressed to specific individuals. Although it is included among the epigrams, "On My First Sonne" is neither satirical nor very short; the poem, intensely personal and deeply felt, typifies a genre that would come to be called "lyric poetry." It is possible that the spelling of 'son' as 'Sonne' is meant to allude to the sonnet form, with which it shares some features. A few other so-called epigrams share this quality. Jonson's poems of "The Forest" also appeared in the first folio. Most of the fifteen poems are addressed to Jonson's aristocratic supporters, but the most famous are his country-house poem “To Penshurst” and the poem “To Celia” ("Come, my Celia, let us prove") that appears also in Volpone. Underwood, published in the expanded folio of 1640, is a larger and more heterogeneous group of poems. It contains A Celebration of Charis, Jonson's most extended effort at love poetry; various religious pieces; encomiastic poems including the poem to Shakespeare and a sonnet on Mary Wroth; the Execration against Vulcan and others. The 1640 volume also contains three elegies which have often been ascribed to Donne (one of them appeared in Donne's posthumous collected poems). During most of the 17th century Jonson was a towering literary figure, and his influence was enormous for he has been described as 'One of the most vigorous minds that ever added to the strength of English literature'. The best of Jonson's lyrics have remained current since his time; periodically, they experience a brief vogue, as after the publication of Peter Whalley's edition of 1756. Jonson's poetry continues to interest scholars for the light which it sheds on English literary history, such as politics, systems of patronage, and intellectual attitudes. For the general reader, Jonson's reputation rests on a few lyrics that, though brief, are surpassed for grace and precision by very few Renaissance poems: "On My First Sonne"; "To Celia"; "To Penshurst"; and the epitaph on boy player Solomon Pavy. “In his merry humour,” Drummond records of Ben Jonson, “he was wont to name himself The Poet.” Jonson was not the greatest of Elizabethan, or even of Jacobean, poets, and he knew it. He admired Donne the first poet in the world in some things, and his approval of Shakespeare is the most just and generous that we expect from any writer of the time But, as even those who started by abominating his bravado came to understand, Jonson is The Poet, the standard and axis for the measurement of his fellows. He is so standard that, apart from the marvellous lyrics and plays, we do not easily distinguish his greatness; but the magnitude is in almost every line he inscribed. The average line of Jonson, read, gone through, memorized, and breathed with, will evaluate higher and carry better than the more striking lines of easier poets. For him poetry was the analysis of life, and appreciation could be no easy thing for author or for reader: For though the Poet’s matter Nature be, His Art doth give the fashion; and that he, Who casts to write a living line, must sweat, .....................and strike the second heat Upon the Muses’anvil. The reader of the Epigrams, Forest, and Under-wood may be at first repelled by the products of this sweating Titan, who hammered his verses into their definite and glowing felicity; but let him try the quality of the metal and workmanship, and most other men’s poetry is likely to appear trivial. Even when Jonson is writing adulation to the fashionables of the court, he writes with his whole opinionated mind and with proud affirmation of the stateliness of thought; as thus to the Countess of Rutland (Forest,xii): Beauty, I know, is good, and blood is more; Riches thought most: but, Madame, think what store The world hath seen which all these had in trust, And now lie lost in their forgotten dust. It is the Muse alone can raise to heaven, And at her strong arm’s end hold up, and even, The souls she loves; Or thus to the Earl of Dorset: Yet we must more than move still, or go on: We must accomplish. ’Tis the last key-stone That makes the arch. The rest that there were put Are nothing till that comes to bind and shut. Then stands it a triumphal mark! Then men Observe the strength, the height, the why, and when, It was erected; and still walking under Meet some new matter to look up and wonder! Or we can note how Jonson can make his rationale resonate in this discussion of two ways of love, and note how delicately the almost over-sweetness of the melody is restricted by the run-on verses and intermittently in exact rimes: The thing they here call love is blind desire, Arm’d with bow, shafts, and fire; Inconstant like the sea, of whence ’tis born, Rough, swelling, like a storm: With whom sails, rides on a surge of fear, And boils, as if he were In a continual tempest. Now true love No such effects doth prove; That is an essence far more gentle, fine, Pure, perfect, nay divine; It is a golden chain let down from heaven, Whose links are bright and even, That falls like sleep on lovers and combines The soft and sweetest minds. In equal knots. This bears no brands nor darts To murther different hearts, But in a calm and godlike unity Preserves community; Or in this loveliest of description of truth: Truth is the trial of itself And needs no other touch; And purer than the purest gold, Refine it neér so much. It is the life and light of love, That sun that ever shineth, And spirit of that special grace, That faith and love defineth. There is an Augustan refinement in many of Jonson’s smaller poems which none of his contemporaries could equal; for instance, in his verse letters to Donne and Drayton, and to the “one that asked to be sealed of the Tribe of Ben,” in the 101st Epigram, inviting a friend to supper; and particularly in the second and third poems of The Forest, which show how much etiquette had improved in the century since Barclay’s Satires. No one in his period could more caringly articulate true sadness. The epitaph “on my first daughter” (Epigram xxii) is a gracious thing and the lines on his dead son (Epigram xlv) are nobler still: Farewell, thou child of my right hand and joy! ........................................................................ Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here doth lie Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry. It was Jonson who wrote the wonderful stanzas on the dead boy actor, Salathiel (or Solomon) Pavy (Epigram cxx), which perhaps no other writer of the time could or would have written, and the epitaph on the girl, “Elizabeth, L.H.”, which has the lines, Underneath this stone doth lie As much beauty as could die. This, probably, even more than the now better-known lyrist of the song books, was the Jonson whom his juniors accepted as their unapproachable leader. He had a sting, of course, but in his nondramatic works engaged it less often and less efficiently than is supposed. He did not consider himself as a love poet. He had endeavoured, he says in the first poem of The Forest, but the god of love fled him, and again Into my rimes could ne’er be got By any part. Then wonder not That, since, my numbers are so cold, When Love is fled and I grow old.
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