ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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BEN JONSON AND THE ART OF INCLUSION<br />
Donne, we are continually reminded, wrote for a private audience. Jonson, as<br />
the above poem suggests, wrote from a deliberately social and socializing<br />
perspective: “It is the fair acceptance, sir, creates/The entertainment perfect, not<br />
the cates.”<br />
Seventeenth-century poetry owes much of its character and variety to these<br />
alternative models—the densely metaphoric and the richly metonymic, the<br />
metaphysical and the social—and the kinds of significant extension and<br />
refinement they received from later poets. But it is also dangerous (and the word<br />
is deliberately chosen) to view Jonson in too sharp an opposition to Donne.<br />
Both poets were born in the same decade—within a year of each other, in fact—<br />
and in their choice of genre and idiom, favoring the “newer” urban modes of<br />
satire, epigram, and verse epistle and emphasizing a language of matter over<br />
manner, the concise utterance over the display of copia, both set themselves in<br />
deliberate opposition to their fully Elizabethan predecessors—Spenser and<br />
Sidney—and not to each other. And both were writers of unusual lexical and<br />
imaginative strength. If it is one measure of a poet’s stature to have greatly<br />
influenced others, then Donne and Jonson can lay equal claim to this palm. Both<br />
have been routinely accorded their own schools, Jonson even in his own time.<br />
Donne’s immediate fame as a poet was due in part to his fame as a preacher—<br />
to the institution of the church. Much of Jonson’s reputation as an author came<br />
from the simple fact that no one, not even Spenser, worked harder to establish<br />
it. “A good poet’s made, as well as born,” he observed with august inclusiveness<br />
in his eulogy to Shakespeare, 4 and for Jonson, this meant making as well as<br />
making it on a number of different fronts: in the roguish world of the theater, in<br />
the more refined world of the court, at country estates of the wealthy, at the<br />
university, with the printing press—the principal institutions in the early<br />
seventeenth century by which a resourceful poet, with serious pretensions to<br />
artistry but who survived on the basis of his writings, might gain recognition.<br />
Beginning essentially with Every Man in his Humour, first acted in 1598—I say<br />
“essentially” because Jonson deliberately chose not to remember a number of<br />
other “Elizabethan” productions including the Shakespearean sounding Richard<br />
Crookback—and continuing at least through Bartholomew Fair in 1614, Jonson<br />
put himself at the center of stage history by his continuous attempts to reform<br />
the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater: to purge it of its popular vices (especially<br />
sentimentalizing romantic comedy) as well as its medieval heritage by insisting<br />
on a return to Classical models, Plautine as well as Aristophanic, and not simply<br />
in the interest of serving the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action, but<br />
also in order to recover for the playwright the role of moral judge and lawmaker.<br />
Horace is how he represented himself on stage in Poetaster in 1601. The poet<br />
who was to translate the Ars Poetica not once but twice rarely strayed from that<br />
pose in his later works.<br />
As a partial outgrowth of his success in the theater and with comparable<br />
revisionary gusto, Jonson also became the principal maker of masques under<br />
James, a position he helped to secure with The Masque of Blackness, presented<br />
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